We call them "alter" in Europe, freeters in Japan, eco warriors in the United States ... Their common points: living on the fringes of the system and questioning our consumption patterns. Investigation of a youth who reinvents disobedience.
The insurgents of the earth
Tuesday February 8 2011 to 20: 40
repeats:
10.02.2011 to 10: 35
15.02.2011 to 02: 50
The insurgents of the earth
(France, 2010, 54mn)
Director: Philippe Borrel
To protect the planet, some young environmental activists are ready for anything. But their radical actions serve as a pretext for states to criminalize civil disobedience.
They camped in the redwood canopy of northern California or Oregon. In break with the American way of life, they decided to give their time, and for some their life, to the protection of nature. Their inspirers are poets and philosophers like Henri David Thoreau (the author of Civil Disobedience). They have angelic airs, are well-founded but most often sound utopian. Elsewhere, these new guerrillas rush Japanese whalers into Antarctica or cling over railroad tracks to block nuclear waste trains in Germany. Sometimes, to defend what they believe in, some people turn to illegality, attack foresters or loggers, sabotage vivisection labs or burn 4x4. They are then forced to go underground or go underground.
For the FBI, they are terrorists. The federal agency has officially designated them as the second threat to US homeland security after al-Qaida. It puts on these green militants a fierce and unprecedented repression. The Animal and enterprise terrorism act, a special feature of American Patriot Acts adopted under the pressure of industrial lobbies, now gives the authorities the opportunity to suppress any form of protest. Advocates of civil liberties and NGOs like Greenpeace denounce this drift in the United States as in Europe.
Tokyo Freeters
Tuesday February 8 2011 to 21: 35
repeats:
10.02.2011 to 11: 25
15.02.2011 to 03: 45
Tokyo Freeters
(France, 2010, 48mn)
Director: Marc Petitjean
Japan today has more than two million freeters: poor, precarious young people who can not settle.
Appeared in the second half of the 1980s, the term freeter first referred to young Japanese who wanted to break free from the traditional model of dedication to the company. Since then, the positive image conveyed by this wind of freedom has been replaced by the more painful reality of precariousness. Victims of the economic gloom, the new freeters accumulate jobs and take refuge in cybercafés when they have no roof. In a society where competition is learned from an early age, many feel guilty. And if some try to revolt by organizing demonstrations, most of them choose to remain alone with their suffering. Marc Petitjean gives the floor to these "disposable workers after use", who look at their situation both lucid and desperate, and to former freeters who have been retrained in the fight against exclusion. Embellished with magnificent black and white photo portraits of the speakers, this effective documentary highlights the gap of misunderstanding that separates this generation in distress from the rest of Japanese society.
Probably available on Arte + 7 from tomorrow!