Materia Prima

In the Bolivian Andes, the global race for lithium reveals an old story in new language: extraction, resistance and the question of who pays for the green transition.

Beneath the Bolivian Andes lie some of the world’s most coveted lithium deposits: the raw material promised as essential to Europe’s green transition. In Materia Prima, director Jens Schanze follows the contemporary scramble for this “new gold”, from diplomatic meetings and industrial ambitions to the highland communities asked to live with its consequences.

The film is alert to the seductive language of progress — opportunity, development, sustainability — while keeping its gaze on those who recognise an older story. In rural Bolivia, women-led movements challenge a model of extraction that echoes five centuries of colonial dispossession. Threaded through the film is a 16th-century chronicle, held in a Danish royal library, which brings the past into unsettling conversation with the present.

Expansive, rigorous and politically charged, Materia Prima asks one of the defining questions of the climate era: what happens when the future still depends on taking from someone else’s land?

materiaprimafilm.net

Materia Prima photo: Börres Weiffenbach

Film Details

Screened at LandxSea