Growth seems to be the answer to all the challenges our society faces – if you believe the politicians that govern us. As if a book bearing the warning title “The Limits of Growth” hadn’t been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and become a bestseller as far back as 40 years ago. A group of international scientists, united in the “Club of Rome”, had plainly pointed out the dangers of climate change, outlining what had to be done. The authors of the book were young and optimistic, even amazingly naive from today’s point of view. We meet them again 40 years later.
Various crises and shocks could not make mankind switch from short-term to long-term thinking. What are the lessons of history? Are we resistant to learning? Is there still a chance, a “last call”? The former founders of the Club seem to have developed different theories. But one thing seems certain: the options that still existed 40 years ago are no longer available. This film follows the creation, reception and defence of a legendary book that should have changed the world. The extensive archive material is always referred back to the present day. And following the traces of the “Club of Rome” yields a number of stimulating brainteasers along the way.

Lars Meyer

On 31 May 2008, a quiet and sunny Sunday, the staff of a heavy metal assembly plant in Milan-Lambrate met for a picnic. They had hardly unwrapped their sandwiches when a short message from the then current owner, who had bought the plant only in 2006, reached them: “We have decided to cease all activity as of 31 May 2008.”
Luca Bellino’s and Silvia Luzi’s film sheds light on the 50 workers’ long struggle, which started with the occupation of the facility on the same day, led to continued production under a worker’s management and, after the factory was cleared by the police for the first time, resulted in an open-ended strike in front of the factory gates to prevent the secret removal of the machinery. Finally, on 2 August 2009, a large number of police attacked the strikers in a civil war-like operation, upon which five of them seized an industrial crane on the grounds and occupied it for several weeks. The activists’ determination triggered a broad wave of international support and attracted a lot of media attention, which finally contributed to a long-term resolution of this conflict. Bellino and Luzi manage to create a complex cinematic investigation of an intense, real-life example of anarcho-syndicalist theory and practice in Italy, supremely balanced between hot agitation and cold analysis.

Ralph Eue

You have to do everything yourself as a local journalist and patron: talk to the people in the factories and on the streets, research names, write commentaries, hop on the “News Chair” to read the (two-hour!) news, snub the staff, take samples of the polluted river for analysis, report the 105th birthday of a local, repair the channel’s transmitter mast with a small screwdriver, keep your wife happy with a kiss and the whole operation going. The lean, moustached, and hectic chain-smoker Pino Maniaci is an institution in Partinico, a town in the Sicilian province of Palermo. He and his whole family run the local TV channel, waging an embittered war of ruthless exposure against the Mafia, who frequently strike back just as ruthlessly. All the hopes of the long-suffering population rest on him. But the law to digitise television is threatening to bring the small channel to its financial knees …
Caterina Monzani and Sergio Vega Borrego tell this tale of a modern-day Don Quixote fighting against the windmills of corruption and capitalism in the turbulent style of the Italian comedy. Above all, they show that the disappearance of independent local journalism is an irrecoverable loss for democracy.

Grit Lemke