Description

Would you vacation on an island paradise if you knew local families were forced off their land to build it?

The Human Rights Research Network, Green Office, Conflict Research Group, Rural Radicalism Research Cluster, and INSPIRA warmly invite you to a film screening of “Wash Out”.  

Wash Out tells the story of a group of landless farmers in Sicogon Island, located in the Philippines, coming together and standing up against a corporate behemoth. The film follows how these farmers came so close to victory - and how they were betrayed, and continue to be betrayed, by a government that claims to be on their side. Sicogon was turned into a luxury tourist paradise for wealthy foreigners, pushing many local residents off their land so the island could cater to visitors from the Global North. 

Their struggle echoes the quieter but no less violent forms of dispossession unfolding elsewhere—from the gentrifying neighborhoods of Brussels where working‑class residents are priced out, to Belgian farmlands seized for logistics hubs and industrial expansion, to communities around the world displaced to make way for green energy transitions and energy‑hungry data centers that serve the digital elite.

Following three women whose lives became intertwined in the course of this long struggle, the documentary reveals the lengths that the rich and mighty would go to in order to undermine reforms and prevent wealth redistribution from taking place. It sheds light on the role played by the state in land grabbing. And it exposes the more sophisticated tactics corporations now use to break resistance to dispossession. Yet these local patterns also reveal a global counter‑current: from tenant unions in Brussels to farmers’ organizations in Belgium to anti–data‑center coalitions across Europe and Asia, people continue to resist the erasure of their homes, their land, and their futures. But more than just a story of how the powerful always get their way, the documentary is also a story of how, against all odds, the disempowered fight back.

PROGRAM

12h30 – 13h30              Networking lunch (lunch will be provided)

13h30 – 13h40              Welcome and introduction

13h40 – 14h50              Film screening

14h50-15h20                 Group discussions

15h20 –16h00               Plenary discussion with Dr. Herbert Docena

The event will bring together academic staff, activists, students, and NGO practitioners into a transdisciplinary global South and North dialogue.

About the filmmaker

Herbert Docena is an educator, researcher, and organizer. A sociologist who received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, he is currently a Professorial Lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and he also helps run The Workers’ School, an educational project for working people and other marginalized groups. A recipient of various grants and fellowships, his projects have tackled militarism and colonialism; gender and migration; and dispossession and development aggression.