The Occupiers (2016)

On October 15th 2011, artist and filmmaker Chloe Ruthven joined a demonstration in the City of London in solidarity with the global anti-austerity movement. Three weeks later, realizing that something of historic significance was unfolding within the tent city the demonstrators had erected outside St Paul's Cathedral, she brought her camera along and started filming. By the time the camp was evicted in February 2012 she had accumulated hundreds of hours of footage of a contemporary grass-roots political movement in action. Both humorous and provocative, The Occupiers offers an unflinching and ultimately sympathetic insight into the politics, the dramas and the conflicts of life in the protest camp that shook the City. Focusing on everyday life in the camp, the film eschews political polemic in favor of an intense personal examination of the internal dynamics at the heart of an attempt by a random group of individuals to live collectively and establish new ways of organizing themselves. It follows the occupiers' attempts to bring their cause to the attention of the wider public, the internal conflicts that disrupt and threaten to overwhelm their fragile community, and their ultimately unsuccessful battle against eviction.