New in the cinema and well worth seeing: ‘Petra Kelly – Act now’

Insults, sexist remarks and death threats: What women (and men) experience on social media today is nothing new. In the film “Petra Kelly – Act now”, it becomes clear how the activist was already exposed to constant verbal abuse in the 1980s, before the internet existed. This is one of many parallels to today’s generation of activists.

The new film shows a committed woman who couldn’t help but be committed. She was a good networker, thought globally and did politics “with her heart”. The co-founder of the Green Party could and can be THE role model for today’s climate activists – and yet so few people know her. After all, Luisa Neubauer is one of the interviewees in the film.

These few sentences already show how multi-layered Petra Kelly is as a person and how big her influence on German society was. We were able to touch on some of this when director Doris Metz, producer Birgit Schulz, current Greenpeace project manager Nina Noelle and I discussed her work at the preview screening in Hamburg’s Abaton cinema. How can it be that a woman who has achieved so much is so little known among today’s young activists? And when young people are made aware of her, they realize what a courageous woman she was on the political stage in the 1980s and that she is for sure a role model.

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS AGAINST NUCLEAR ROCKETS ON THE STREETS

This strange forgetting may have something to do with her death. But the film expressly does not want to place the background to her murder and the suicide of her partner Gert Bastian at the center of the research. Rather, it is about how Petra Kelly was shaped in her youth in America, where she campaigned for Robert Kennedy. It is about her activist years, when she brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets to protest against the stationing of nuclear missiles on West German soil. About her role in the Green Party, which she saw as a means to an end in order to change things in politics. About the fact that she never assimilated, that she always remained suspicious of the political establishment. And ultimately about the power that all this takes away and how Petra Kelly came through time as a woman and a person. She only lived to be 44 years old.

I experienced Petra Kelly exactly as the movie portrays her. I was with her at the World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg shortly before her death. The meeting dealt with uranium mining among the Lakota and in Australia, which is also featured in the film. Claus Biegert organized the hearing. I was subsequently associated with him for many years through the Nuclear Free Future Award.

Petra Kelly recognized the complexity of challenges, worked internationally and networked activists. What an achievement in times without messenger services and the internet. At the “Alternative Nobel Prize”, where I have been involved for decades, we already honored this in 1982.

FILM CAN CREATE AWARENESS ACROSS GENERATIONS

I hope that many young people will see the film. After decades of commitment I sometimes think: “Why do you always have to start from scratch?”. But young people can draw strength from Petra Kelly as a role model in their commitment against climate change and for justice and peace in the world. This film should give her the recognition across generations that she deserves. And the intensive research work of the film team can thus be rewarded.

You can find the trailer on YouTube here (in German)