on the trilogy BRAND(Fire) director’s statement

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„If intelligent capitalism recognizes all this, we may be sure that it is not in order to prepare for its own suicide. Rather, it is in order to prepare itself to fight on new fronts, with new weapons and new economic goals.“

André Gorz, Ecology as Politics, 1980. First published as Écologie et Politique, 1975

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It took me several years to complete the trilogy. It wouldn‘t be enough for me to document the social and ecological destruction and struggles in the Coal Country Rhineland without understanding the underlying relationships, as well as conveying them in the film.

The potential of following up on the relationships between people’s lives, land grabbing, resource extraction and the fossil power industry in this area, as well as their reciprocal impacts, was evident from my first visit, after first driving through the roads of this land. The power of a corporation is palpable here, like smoky air. In the area of the gigantic power stations that surmount everything around them as well as on the edges of the mines and in the villages. The decade-long, domineering seizure of land has deeply marked the character of the region. Everything appears violated or remains in tragic expectation. The coming destruction of what lies restfully is equally omnipresent in the still inhabited villages. The already uninhabited villages have been abandoned by people, while birds accompany the wild growth in gardens and parks with their song. The count-less, ancient high trees that dress the old localities will be removed first of all when demolition starts.

For me, in the Rhenish Lignite Area the interlocking issue complex of the ecological crisis focalises - visibly and invisibly. Even though the word ‘crisis’ may appear too benign for many in the face of worldwide, catastrophic floods, tsunamis and droughts.

How is the question on property – of land and resources, phrased in this extensive, ‘excavated’ country where, for hundreds of years, a distinct cultural landscape developed on the basis of the highly fertile loess soils? What do the inhabitants say?

What does ‘utilising nature’ mean? What’s behind the call for climate justice? Why don’t the climate agreements achieve the demanded reductions? Why does fossil fuel energy exploration expand? How is resistance organised and what does the struggle between corporation, the state and forest and mine occupiers express?

If I choose to comprehend the term crisis as an ‘era constituting the zenith and turning point of a dangerous development’ (Duden, source: Wikipedia), the term does come close to ecological destruction. As long as competition and profit mongering are the driving impetus in the production of our goods, ecological destruction will increase proportionally to industrial growth. Then we’ve got a problem when we want to produce less, extract less lignite than planned, or to even develop a fundamentally different under-standing of metabolisms in the organic and anorganic spheres, between humans, fauna, flora, rock, metals..., as an understanding not dictated by capitalism.
The ecologically inevitable turning point, marked by the term ‘crisis’, would lie just where the foundation pillars of capitalism are moored. Economists realised this early on; a realisation which was enshrined in core texts that can be counted among the literature on political ecology, from the 1940’s onwards.

„The Great Transformation“ by Karl Polanyi 1944, „The Social Costs of Private Enterprise" by Karl William Kapp 1950, "The Closing Circle" by Barry Commoner 1971, are just a few of the many writings on the described inevitable destruction of the environment by competition and growth economy, that were already released before the MIT-report “The Limits To Growth” by Dennis L. Meadows, published in 1972 by the Club of Rome.

To make a contribution in this respect was my concern with the film trilogy BRAND. The numerous screenings at home and abroad have confirmed that this may have been successful.