Mark gets arrested - photo credit - Vlad Morozov

EVERYTHING IS FINE follows an unlikely alliance of concerned citizens, including a vicar, a student and an ex-oil and gas worker, risking their lives and liberty to halt plans for over 130 new oil and gas projects in the UK. As their protest tactics become increasingly controversial, Just Stop Oil are vilified by many, but seen as heroes by others. As a crackdown on protest unfolds and the climate collapses, how far will ordinary people go to stop new fossil extraction and how far will the government go to stop them?

The film is directed by Rich Felgate, award-winning director of FINITE, who was one of several journalists unlawfully arrested whilst covering Just Stop Oil’s protests on the M25 in November 2022. Felgate was also wrongfully arrested whilst filming Just Stop Oil protesters holding banners during the King’s coronation, and was previously targeted for arrest the day after filming Just Stop Oil’s infamous soup throwing protest at the National Gallery and the footage going viral.

Phoebe throwing soup - photo credit - Rich Felgate

Felgate says:

“The corporate media has failed to effectively communicate the climate crisis. Instead of the powerful elites who are ravaging our planet being demonised, it’s the ordinary people making a stand against our collective catastrophe who are slated in the media and criminalised by the government. This film is an intervention to tell the truth about who the eco-mob really are. The eco-zealots you have been told to be afraid of are grandmothers,

vicars, doctors, students and care workers, acting out of moral conviction to resist the expansion of oil and gas, when we are crystal clear on the knowledge that new fossils will kill, and push us to the brink of civilisational collapse.”

The film follows Mark Coleman, a vicar from Rochdale living with Parkinson's disease, who has twice been imprisoned for taking part in climate protests, including after not being allowed by Judge Silas Reid to talk about the climate crisis in court or tell the jury his motivations for taking action.

Arrest - photo credit - Vlad Morozov

Director Rich Felgate says:

“Swathes of people are fed up with being bullshitted by politicians and the media. People want the truth to be told, but we can’t rely on corporate media to do it, so we are calling on people to support our crowdfunding campaign so this film can be made and speak truth to power. This is the only way the true story of Just Stop Oil can be told.”

EVERYTHING IS FINE follows Just Stop Oil since their first protest in March 2022, with the authoritarian turn against protest and the increasing notoriety of Just Stop Oil unfolding uniquely on Felgate’s camera.

“When I started filming Just Stop Oil they were sitting in front of oil tankers and generally being ignored, now everyone has heard of them and they are being imprisoned for simply walking in the road.”

says Felgate, who is behind the footage of many of Just Stop Oil’s most iconic protests, like soup being thrown over Van Gogh’s sunflowers and protesters climbing on gantries over the M25.

“EVERYTHING IS FINE will lay bare how the state, media and oil industry are more concerned about protecting business as usual than protecting life, and have thus run a concerted campaign to demonise and criminalise climate protesters in order to delegitimise their demand of stopping

new oil and gas production, as recommended by the IPCC, UN and the IEA, who are institutions not known for their radicalism.”

“This film is the real life version of Don’t Look Up. We see the trivial nature of how much of the mainstream media reports on the climate. They are more concerned with sensationalising traffic jams and stoking culture wars than asking questions like: how are we going to feed ourselves in a 2 degrees warmer world? What is the government doing about this?”

Another participant in EVERYTHING IS FINE is Phoebe Plummer. The film follows their steps into climate activism and reluctantly into the limelight after the infamous viral soup-throwing protest, before spending their first term at university in prison, as one of over 100 climate protesters imprisoned in the UK in the last few years.

Phoebe locked on - photo credit - Rich Felgate

Phoebe says:

“A lot gets said about us that we never get a chance to reply to. If this crowdfunding campaign is successful, this film will be the chance to see the real stories of people in Just Stop Oil that you will never read in The Daily Mail or watch on GB News. We’re a campaign of ordinary people, whose lives have taken extraordinary turns, purely by the circumstance of being alive in this age of climate collapse and the will to face up to it.”

EVERYTHING IS FINE is the follow up to Felgate’s award-winning debut film FINITE, for which he spent a year and a half living in protest camps in the UK and North East England with communities opposing opencast coal mining.

EVERYTHING IS FINE is crowdfunding now on Indiegogo.