Graduation project
License to Forget
Valentine Scherer
An investigation into the Garzweiler coal mine in Germany is presented from the perspective of the lake that will be built to cover the excavation.
License to Forget is a short film exploring the complex realities of the contested Garzweiler coal mine in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia region. Challenging whether energy giant RWE has obtained a social license to operate, it questions explicitly whether the community has given implicit consent to strip this mine for brown coal. While media coverage often simplifies the narrative as a battle between anti-coal and pro-coal forces, the film conjugates research on media perspectives with fictional speculation, bringing a more nuanced lens to these intersecting issues. Focusing on RWE’s plans to transform the mine into a lake over time, embodying an act of ‘submerging’ or ‘forgetting’, the film interrogates whether this lake can heal the scars left on the region.