Rich Felgate didn't make this film from the outside looking in. His girlfriend Indigo Rumbelow is an activist, which means the camera is inside the shared house, inside the arrests, inside the jail sentences — not on the pavement with a telephoto lens. That proximity is both the film's greatest asset and its most obvious liability. What it captures, immediately and without editorializing, is the sheer ferocity of public contempt. People punch, kick, drag, pour water one by one down a line of protesters. A van appears to be driven at them. The abuse is not occasional; it is sustained, physical, and visceral. Whatever you think of Just Stop Oil's tactics, the violence of the response is its own data point — one the film is smart enough to let sit without commentary. The tactical argument hangs over the whole film like unresolved weather. Just Stop Oil's strategy is disruption for disruption's sake: stay in the news, force a response, make the status quo uncomfortable. Felgate captures their spokespeople absorbing increasingly hostile television interviews, Piers Morgan et al insisting the message is lost in the tactics. The film doesn't pretend this isn't a real problem. By targeting road infrastructure that hits ordinary commuters rather than oil company headquarters, the group burns through goodwill faster than it earns it. Still, the film's most striking material is judicial, not tactical. Activists are handed the longest prison sentences in English history for nonviolent protest. A vicar with Parkinson's takes his medication on the pavement before being handcuffed. The gap between the offence — sitting in a road — and the punishment is where the film does its most serious work. The closing question — who the real vandals are — lands harder for having been earned rather than stated upfront. The suffragette and Gandhi books on the shelves at home are not subtle. Felgate is not pretending to be neutral. But the film is disciplined enough not to need to be — it trusts the footage, and the footage trusts the viewer to work out what they're seeing. That restraint is what separates this from agitprop.
