FIGHT THE POWER: HOW BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2026) INCL. PANEL TALK

For this edition of Fight The Power: Films of Resistance, we’re screening Daniel Goldhaber’s incendiary 2022 climate thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline on June 25. Eight strangers converge on a stretch of West Texas oil infrastructure with a plan to sabotage it. Adapted from Andreas Malm’s 2021 book of the same name, the film transposes a polemic into a heist, and puts the question the mainstream climate movement has spent decades avoiding squarely on the table.

Screened in a year when the planet has crossed 1.5°C, when youth activists are being sentenced under terrorism statutes for blockading roads, and when “moderate” climate policy keeps locking in catastrophic warming, How to Blow Up a Pipeline forces an uncomfortable confrontation: at what point does property destruction become a legitimate political tool, and at what point does the refusal to consider it become its own form of complicity?

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on what kind of violence is justified, addressing the genealogy of climate sabotage from Earth First! through to Extinction Rebellion, the legal architecture now criminalising direct action across Europe, and the strategic question Malm’s book leaves open: whether nonviolence has done what it can, and what comes after.

About the speakers:

Chihiro Geuzebroek is a decolonial climate justice singer-songwriter and activist. She previously made the climate justice feature documentary Radical Friends (2014) and was active in Code Rood and Fossil Free Culture. She worked at Greenpeace on global campaigns against the oil industry and initiated the chant: Shell Must Fall, which later developed into an international campaign against Shell colonialism and ecocide. Chihiro has provided training to, among others, XR Power & Inclusion and EU Fridays for Futures. Her work promotes anti-racism and Indigenous leadership within the climate movement.

Jelle de Graaf is a strategist, campaigner, and social change trainer. He regularly speaks and writes about activism, the planetary crisis, and democratic ecosocialism. He made his debut in 2025 with the book “Alles staat op het spel.” Jelle rose to national prominence as when he glued himself to the talk show table on Jinek as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion to draw attention to the consequences of the planetary crisis.