NECESSITY: Oil, Water and Climate Resistance
"This is a damning portrait of the bankers and builders who crisscross the country with fossil fuel pipelines — and yet it sings with courage and hope. “NECESSITY: Oil, Water and Climate Resistance” offers an intimate look at what happens when people of conscience disobey the law, but stand up for Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and our future."
- Bill Bigelow, Curriculum Editor, Rethinking Schools, Co-Director Zinn Education Project
Please join us—a group of Portland-based activist filmmakers--as we continue to tell the powerful story of “NECESSITY: Oil, Water and Climate Resistance.”
A better world is not only possible, it’s necessary. Please contribute at whatever level you can during this giving season! Our goal is to raise $10,000 to take us through production.
Don’t miss your chance to play a role in keeping this project going during a critical juncture in the climate movement. This is a story of hope for hard times. Lead subjects in the film take viewers into the challenging terrain of the movement where activists decide how to use the law or confront the law in building a movement and forms of allyship in the fight to save the planet.
We have completed NECESSITY Part I--now screening in film festivals and in classrooms around the country. We are currently working on NECESSITY Part II. Both films ask an urgent question: In a climate emergency, is civil disobedience a necessity? Further, they ask: What are the lessons to take forward from Indigenous knowledge and insights from the front lines of the climate movement and how do groups build forms of allyship? What vision of change are activists calling for?
- Cathy Sampson-Kruse, Retired social worker, activist, Wallulapum member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla
The NECESSITY team developed out of intergenerational mentoring relationships (from filmmakers in their 20s and 30s to the director in her 70s) and is grounded in academic and activist commitments as well as practices of documentary filmmaking. Director Jan Haaken trained Co-Director Sam Praus in participatory action methods—an approach that includes working closely with film subjects throughout the process of pre-production research, filming and editing.
The team has developed partnerships and working relationships with the subjects and featured organizations in the series, including Native/Indigenous organizations and advisors. As crew and directors, producers and editors, we are mostly cis-female. Some members are Latinx, bi-racial, Native Hawaiian, and queer.
WHERE WE ARE AT:
NECESSITY Part I is completed and being used in classrooms around the country and at community organizing events and is screening in film festivals, including the Eugene Environmental Film Festival in October 2020. Part II—currently in production—is set in Oregon and is expected to be the next episode in a multi-part series on legal tactics and allyship in the climate movement. This second documentary in the series shows how the lethal web of the fossil fuel industry in Oregon confronts a network of resistance---part of the larger “thin green line” spanning the Pacific Northwest.
This story of climate resistance along the rivers of Oregon enters a historical landscape to show how Native communities and tribal alliances play a leading role resisting oil trains and trucks carrying these highly inflammable products through treaty lands.
WHAT WE NEED:
We work with a small local production crew, limiting our carbon footprint throughout production and filming in compliance with Oregon State guidelines for production during the COVID pandemic. With your help in reaching our goal of $10,000, we can continue filming and begin working on work samples of this feature-length NECESSITY Part II with the goal of completion in 2021.
Our approach to filmmaking draws on participatory action methods—an approach that emphasizes the participation of subjects and frontline communities in the shaping of the stories and the aesthetics of the film, producing short videos from the footage for use by activist groups throughout the editing process, and enlisting supporters and partners in feedback sessions before completion of the film.
With deepest gratitude and humility, we thank you for your support!!
- The NECESSITY Team
Jan, Sam, Frann, Haunani, Jasmine, Sarah, and Laura
