Throughout A City in the Forest, which tracks various forms of opposition to Atlanta's "Cop City" from 2020 to 2023, the filmmakers shout that they are press to ensure that they are not attacked by police who are violently arresting and assaulting protesters.
In two scenes, people being arrested cry out to the filmmakers for help, but they do not engage; remaining as close as they can to capture the cops' violence while doing their best to avoid it themselves.
The inclusion of these moments forces us to consider the many forms combatting state violence (against people and the environment) can take, and either question or affirm the importance of documentation as a form of protest in itself. The choice to include what some on the left may see as a moral or ideological failure doesn't just make A City in the Forest a more interesting film, though. It also makes it a more honest one.
Because there's never any doubt about directors Lev Omelchenko and Nolan Huber's allegiances. The film begins with Super 8 (or mock Super 8) images of the South River (as named by the state) or Weelaunee (as named by the indigenous Mvskoke) Forest as a young person's voicemail to their mother plays in voiceover. When the film switches to the clean digital widescreen look that will make up most of its runtime, a woman walks through the forest to a memorial banner placed there for her child, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita among their fellow "forest defenders," who was shot 57 times by police. It's an entrypoint that clearly marks out the film's perspective.
From this prologue, the film jumps back in time, to the police shooting of Rayshard Brooks. The film doesn't editorialize on the shooting or the response, instead using archival footage to offer a basis for the events that led to the proposal of cop city. There's audio from the 911 call that brought police to the Wendy's where Brooks had fallen asleep in his car, bodycam footage from the attempted arrest and shooting (the film does not include images of the killing), footage from the protests that followed, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms's State of the City address announcing the proposed creation of a "Public Safety training facility," and an audio montage of phone calls from citizens calling on city council to oppose the proposed facility.
It's dense but smoothly edited and functions as the equivalent of a narrative film's expositional worldbuilding for the story to follow. A story that begins, with a late title card drop, when activists break the chains to the forest and set up camp.
Over the next three years, the filmmakers gather footage from multiple fronts. They spend time in the forest with the forest defenders and include several interviews with Tortuguita before their death. They are in the thick of protests that escalate to riots in the wake of the killing. They attend a city council meeting that lasts nearly 15 hours as hundreds of citizens make their case for why their city's money should not go towards creating a training ground for police. When that vote goes through, they are in offices and on the streets with activists who gather signatures for a petition to place the proposed funding on the ballot.
A City in the Forest doesn't become a verite doc, though. The use of archival footage remains throughout and is used creatively; a TikTok of an activist explaining the city council's vote is used as an introduction to that chapter of the film. Most strikingly, images of the forest are drawn into monochrome negative as communiques from the forest defenders are shown in Matrix green plain text as a distorted voiceover reads them. When these communiques end, the images return to color positive.
It's a stylistic choice that makes one of the final shots of the film a formal gut punch: Aerial footage of the now completed (though much smaller than originally proposed and two years behind schedule) cop city in negative never returns to positive. Only more so because rather than cut to black, the image cuts to Tortuguita's mother sitting in the forest, holding an empty tortoise shell in front of a small offering plate.
But the film refuses to end in defeat. The true final image is of Tortuguita and fellow forest defenders in animal costumes dancing around a fire and posing as we hear their words in voiceover: "The abolitionist mission isn't done until every prison is empty and shut down. Until there's no more cops. When there's no more police. When the land has been given back. That's when it's over."
A City in the Forest inspires hope and rage, but could reasonably also inspire despair. It shows the power of collective action and how people putting their bodies on the line can slow and financially damage an environmentally destructive project to further militarize American policing. Yet it ends with the ultimate completion of that project. What makes A City in the Forest stand out among recent similar documentaries, particularly Yintah and WTO/99, is its focus on activists who propose and enact targeted property damage, and its very clear portrayal of the complete disavowal of democracy by the city government (the ballot referendum petition signatures have still not been counted by the city).
I'm sure the filmmakers would never advocate anything like the series of targeted arson attacks used by the forest defenders, they're just press after all. But the reality the film portrays makes the case that's the only way to make a real difference.
The film screens at the 2026 Chicago International Film Festival.