Slow Violence
Slow Violence was filmed in and around the Hambach lignite mine in Germany, 88 kilometres from Maastricht. It begins with serene and then hallucinatory images of the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest, of which only 10% remains today. A drone shot segues from the forest to the encroaching open-cast mine, Europe’s largest, where the continent’s biggest machine devours the landscape. The focus then shifts to the polluting smoke of nearby lignite-burning power stations. From this aerial perspective, both the machine and power stations acquire a strange aesthetic appeal, even as they provoke revulsion for the destruction and pollution they cause.
The drone then proceeds to what was once a nearby village, where a demolition claw dismantles the church, the emblem of the village and community that has now been forcibly displaced. The concluding sequence shows a bird’s-eye view of a large group of demonstrators being surrounded by riot police in the green fields bordering the mine. The environmental activists appear small and vulnerable on the mine’s fringe, powerless to stop the machines from destroying the last stretch of forest and remaining few villages around the site.