The efficiently titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline weaves a fictional story of eco-sabotage out of Marxist academic Andreas Malm’s book on climate activism. It’s also self-critical when it comes to cinema’s role within the movement.
One of the film’s central activists, Dwayne (Jake Weary), a Texan farmer whose land has been forcibly seized by the government for the construction of a pipeline, is interviewed on camera by a crew of documentarians. They’re keen to “put a human face on this crisis” in order to “raise awareness”. But all they’re really doing is demanding that Dwayne recount his pain for their own purposes. Will they contribute to his legal expenses? Will they stick around to fight his cause once the cameras have stopped rolling? We all know that they won’t. Filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber, who applied a similar sense of moral clarity to his debut, the sex work horror Cam, has here crafted a film that feels radical almost purely through its lack of self-satisfaction.
