In Rebellion, Elena Sánchez Bellot and co-director Maia Kenworthy make shared work and disagreement absorbing to watch. We are less convinced when these close encounters are asked to explain a whole movement.
Fi1m perspective
In Rebellion (2023), people who share a cause still have to work out how to work with one another. Elena Sánchez Bellot and Maia Kenworthy let their disagreements occupy the screen, rather than tidying them away. Direct action gives the documentary something concrete to follow, while personal accounts make the people involved worth following. It is an absorbing, selective film, strongest when it stays close to those individuals.
Sánchez Bellot made short films and commissions before this first feature-length documentary. She also worked on Rebellion as a writer and cinematographer, with filming beginning in 2018. Working in a small team, the filmmakers followed events as they unfolded rather than imposing a fixed agenda. Her interest in the complicated ways people behave together suits that method, particularly the differences in age and authority within a group. It helps explain why the film gives disagreement room without making agreement with the campaigners a condition of finding them interesting.
We were absorbed by the personal accounts, because they made the effort of continuing to work together feel immediate. The close footage lets us see friction among people with a shared purpose. The difficulty comes when those encounters are asked to explain the movement beyond them. We cannot tell how much depends on the people the directors have chosen to follow. That is a substantial limitation for a documentary whose access is so valuable: meeting its subjects does not mean we understand how representative they are.
The achievement belongs to a partnership, and we cannot divide the directing decisions between Sánchez Bellot and Kenworthy. We would need more than one feature to describe a settled personal style with confidence. What we can ask of another is that it keep this patience with people while being clearer about what their stories can explain. See Rebellion for the practical difficulties of acting together, with reservations about its account of the wider movement.
Biography
Elena Sánchez Bellot is a Spanish filmmaker based in London. She works as a self-shooting director and editor, and has made short films and other projects for clients including the National Housing Federation, Arts Council England, the NBA, MTV and NBC.
She co-directed the feature documentary Rebellion (2021) with Maia Kenworthy. The film follows the early years of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion. Sánchez Bellot and Kenworthy met while studying on a film MA in 2014. She teaches on the Documentary Film MA at University College London and runs workshops for filmmakers. This was her first feature film as director.
