A City in the Forest

by Lev Omelchenko for South Summit 2024: Southern Furturism

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“This struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and our savanas.” -Thomas Sankara

PART ONE

On September 8, 2021, the Atlanta City Council is slated to vote on whether to lease roughly 350 acres of the city’s South River Forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation, a non-profit funded by some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country. The city proposes that APF will clear cut the land and build the Public Safety Training Facility AKA “Cop City,” which if built, would be the largest police training facility in the country.

City Council meets on Zoom — still in pandemic protocol — and must listen to 17 hours of public comment from their constituents. 99% are against Cop City. Activists organize protests at the homes of city councilors who might be swayed to vote “No.” I attended one with my camera on what would become the first shoot day of my feature film.

About a dozen people gather and chant. Eventually the cops show up. After some intimidation, a cop tackles an activist, and all of a sudden cops are handcuffing everyone.

A cop points at me and says, “Get him.”

I say, “I’m media,” but it doesn’t matter. I’m arrested with everyone else.

I spend the night in jail talking with the men in my cell, all Black men except for those arrested with me. The men are all held for petty misdemeanors — riding a bike on the sidewalk, not paying a court fine, not cooperating with a police officer who accused the man of “looking like a drug dealer.”

I get out of jail around 4am in the pouring rain. The next day the city council votes 10–4 to build Cop City.

Perhaps the city thought that the vote would spell the end of the resistance. They were wrong.

On November 20th, 2 bulldozers are torched in the forest and the news spreads like wildfire.

A week later, November 27th I show up in the parking lot of Intrenchment Creek Park, the public park side of the forest that is slated to be demolished.

Chief Chebon Kernell and about four dozen Mvskoke people have come from Oklahoma to perform a ceremonial stomp dance in the forest, and to stand in solidarity with the movement. I’m asked to document the historic event.

The Mvskoke people chant and stomp their people’s songs around a small fire, in a forest renamed by the movement to Weelaunee, a Mvskoke word for “Brown Water.”

On April 20, 2022 — Earth Day — the Mvskoke return to Atlanta, where a forest occupation is now underway. In the shadow of the pandemic, with so many venues and DIY spaces closed, the forest becomes the biggest community space in the city. An incredible infrastructure springs up — kitchens, tree houses, barricades, medical care. The forest is home to raves on the banks of the creek, self defense classes and moonlit adventures between the trees. This is now a full on land defense.

I help record a summit between the Mvskoke folks and local Atlanta environmentalists, faith leaders, and organizers. That morning, before the summit, I accompany Meeko Chebon and a group of school children to the “Mother Tree” — an ancient oak tree that activists have made into a sacred site. Chebon calls the tree “Bosi,” or Grandmother, because she was likely around during the time of his people’s ethnic cleansing. He says, “She probably hasn’t heard my people’s language since that time.”

He asks the children to hold hands around the tree and says a prayer in his language.

I feel that I am witnessing something transcendent in this forest.

That Summer I spend time in the encampment with a 16mm camera. Security protocols are quite intense in the community, so I decide to lean into my limitations and mostly avoid filming people, documenting instead the artifacts of occupation — treehouses, kitchens, medic tents, campfires, sweat lodges, bridges, signs, banners, barricades.

One morning I’m awoken by shouts warning of police presence in the parking lot. I run out and discover an excavator trying to destroy a gazebo. It’s repelled with rocks and donated cans of seltzer water.

A white tow truck is abandoned, and shortly set on fire.

I return to the forest in the Fall and help shoot a story about the occupation for Al Jazeera. This would be the first time a major new outlet publishes video journalism about the struggle.

The burned out truck is still there, now decorated with flowers and plants.

“This is the best art installation in the city” I’m told by one of the Forest Defenders.

PART TWO

In December, over a year since my arrest, I make a short film called “Beneath the Concrete, The Forest,” which takes its name from a zine published anonymously that summer, which collected some of the writings generated by the Forest Defenders.

I open the film with an iPhone video of a police raid in the woods, recorded by a tree sitter approximately 80 feet up in the air. A distorted voice reads one of the letters included in the zine:

“I’ve become attached to my treehouse, thinking of it almost as an extension of myself.

I found myself questioning this, questioning the connection I feel to a temporary structure.

But I realized that what I was feeling was beyond that.

From my feet high above the canopy to the roots buried deep in the ground, I could feel it.

I wondered if this energy was spiteful, a land so scarred and blood-stained, never given a moment to heal.

Was I here because of spite?

Yes.

But the spite I feel toward the police is also born of love:

love for the land and all of my friends here and beyond.

This forest is not something I am going to give up without a fight.

Every delay opens up more possibilities.

Every contractor that backs away brings us closer to victory.

Each of our moves keeps them guessing.

Whether or not they choose to destroy our homes, I’ll be here keeping up the struggle.

I’ll be here for as long as I can, for as long as it takes.

They can try to evict us, but they will never be able to make us stop fighting.

There’s joy in our fight.

This spirit, this forest, will never be able to be contained.

Everywhere you look, the police are trying to shrink our worlds, shrink our lives.

But we have chosen to say no.

Our fight extends beyond the borders of this forest —

it extends through our expressions of collective and individual joy,

incomprehensible to the narrow imaginations of the police and the ruling class that they protect.

We laugh harder than them, we feel more pleasure even in the midst of their assaults.

Falling in love with these woods has meant falling in love with one another

and with the possibilities of this world —

a love that the police will never understand,

and therefore cannot crush.”

I finish my short film in December 2022, and less than a month later, a Forest Defender named Tortuguita — Little Turtle — is killed in the forest by the Georgia State Patrol during another raid.

I add a title card to the end of the film with the words:

!Viva Viva Tortuguita!

PART THREE

There is much writing about the movement to “Defend the Forest” and “Stop Cop City.”

A good deal, like the zine I used for my short film, comes from within the movement — a coalition of people who see the destruction of a forest, and the construction of the country’s largest police training facility, as a dystopian nightmare.

To read their words is to peer into an alternative vision of life and resistance in the 21st century.

The Forest Defenders are young, old, white, Black, brown, documented, undocumented, indigenous. Newly radicalized by the pandemic and the 2020 uprisings, and veterans of occupations like Standing Rock and Line 3. Mothers, children, queer folks, priests, artists, cooks, organizers, clowns, filmmakers. They believe another world is possible — is necessary — if humanity is to survive the next century.

The writers argue that Cop City is, for many reasons, the newest phase of police militarization and privatization. One that is in line with the history of the “Atlanta Way” of private-public partnerships.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, the non-profit building Cop City, is funded by the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country. Its CEO, former secret service agent for multiple presidential administration, makes half a million dollars a year. Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI work hand in hand with APF and APD to investigate and criminalize the protestors, while the GBI investigates its own killing of Tortuguita. Georgia already has an established program called GILEE that trains police in Israel. These elements, coupled with a seeming capitulation of the local government to the demands of the APF and APD, lead many in the movement to conclude that this facility will play an extremely sinister role in the future.

Policing budgets in this country collectively make American police forces the world’s third-most expensive military organization, right behind US and Chinese militaries. As economic, social, and political issues compound, it seems that the only social service that gets increased funding year to year, is the police. When the pandemic started in 2020, doctors and nurses wore trash bags as PPE. Everyday people sewed masks, redistributed food, built mutual aid networks to fill gaps in a welfare state hollowed out by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the police were geared up like an occupying army in response to the protests that erupted that summer. And even with all their equipment, they were not totally prepared for the mass uprising.

The Atlanta Police Foundation stepped in and offered to build the country’s largest police training facility. This is the same foundation that was recently revealed by the Atlanta Community Press Collective to have pushed for a pilot program that integrated “GPS-enabled digital shackles’’ with “AI-powered real-time video surveillance … to put up to 900 people under constant video, audio, biometric, and GPS surveillance as a condition of pre-trial release.” The pilot, which would surveil people convicted of three or more felonies, would target mostly black men: “Over 93 percent of APF-designated ‘repeat offenders’ are Black, according to a 2022 annual report.”

The selection of the proposed site for Cop City was no coincidence. The land is technically part of unincorporated Dekalb County, but is under the jurisdiction of Atlanta City Council, meaning that the predominantly low-income, Black residents who live around the forest have no voting power over what happens to the land next to their homes. They are already neighbored by multiple operational prisons, water sewage treatment and asphalt plants, and an eyesore aptly dubbed “Trash Mountain.”

In the eyes of the police and the APF, the site wasn’t a forest; its trees, plants, and animals did not constitute an ecosystem. It was cheap land that could be developed without much opposition. The city leased the 350 acres to APF for just $10 a year for 50 years .

They miscalculated.

Had they chosen a large slab of concrete, some abandoned parking lot or failing mall, I doubt there would have been a movement quite as powerful as what we see in Atlanta today. But they decided to target a forest, an expanse of 350 acres home to both old and new-growth trees. Originally the land was stewarded by the Mvskoke people, who were ethnically cleansed and relocated to Oklahoma. The colonized land was turned into a slave plantation. It’s worth noting here that in the South, the police initially played the role of slave catchers, surveilling and hunting down human beings who dared escape bondage.

After the Civil War, the plantation became a prison farm, where mostly Black prisoners worked the land to feed Georgia’s prison population. The prison was abandoned in 1990; since then, nature reclaimed the blood-soaked land, which is likely dotted with countless unmarked graves.

In 2017, the forest was described by the Atlanta city government as one of the “four Lungs of Atlanta”, and there was hope that it would be cleaned up for locals to enjoy. But instead, it became, once again, the target for the prison-industrial complex.

And when the forest was attacked, it gave out a call that people could hear.

Fight for me, fight for yourself.

My fate is your fate.

The Forest Defenders who answered the call see the backers of the Cop City project as villains, capitalists, with billions of dollars, mainstream media, and state violence at their disposal.

Cop City’s backers see the Defenders as domestic terrorists and organized criminals. And they work hard to project that image across the city and the country.

My work as a documentary filmmaker who has followed this movement since its inception, is to offer a different perspective of the struggle. One that is true to the spirit of the forest and the land.

PART FOUR

After I finished my short film, I return to the forest and spend December holidays with a small group of determined Forest Defenders. It’s 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

There have been multiple raids, including the one I featured in my short film. People have been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. The parking lot and several trees, including an oak tree that was at least a century old, have been torn up by bulldozers.

A Defender named Panda gives me an interview, telling me that while the cops call them domestic terrorists, the only violence has come from the police. Less than a month later he’s arrested in the same raid that kills Tortuguita.

2023 is a blur.

Winter

I’m at a vigil for Tortuguita. One of the concrete slabs in the parking lot has been turned into an altar for Tort, and for all martyrs of the Weelaunee Forest.

It’s gut-wrenching. People are devastated by Tort’s murder.

My co-director Nolan and I break down in tears.

The city rages and more are arrested for domestic terrorism.

There is no body camera footage from the Georgia state troopers who killed Tort, but there is footage from APD officers nearby in which an ungodly barrage of bullets is heard, followed by an officer wondering aloud if the police shot themselves by accident.

Spring

The forest is reoccupied for the first time since winter.

A music festival is organized and the first night culminates in hundreds of people dancing to Zach Fox amongst the trees. The next day a group of about 200 people target the Cop City construction site and do several million dollars’ worth of damage. The cops respond by raiding the music festival, and I film the police tackling concertgoers indiscriminately.

Tortuguita’s mother, Belkis, arrives in the forest. She comes to a poetry reading and tell the people “I’ve lost one child, but gained a thousand more in this struggle.” I’m filming with her as she tearfully reveals that the autopsy implies that Tort was sitting cross-legged and with their hands up. 57 bullet wounds in their body.

A few days later she spreads Tort’s ashes under pouring rain — a blessing, she says, because the helicopters can’t hover above our heads. My lavalier mic doesn’t work very well; it turns out Belkis keeps magnets in her pockets which block the microphone’s wireless signal. She says “it’s protection.”

A few days later the police raid the forest and lock it down for good.

Within a matter of days, 85 acres are clearcut. We fly a drone to assess the damage. It looks like a mass execution of trees. After the trees are removed, the land looks like the surface of Mars.

ACPC reports that the city lied about the public cost of Cop City — it will cost the taxpayers twice the estimate. A week later a SWAT team raids the home of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, charging three with domestic terrorism.

Warrants against the organizers cite reimbursements as evidence of money laundering. The reimbursements listed are for “expenses such as gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, covid rapid tests and yard signs.”

Summer

City Hall is flooded with a historic turnout. Hundreds are turned away, and many of those who make it inside are unable to sign up in time to speak. People give 3-minute speeches until 5am, practically all of them against Cop City.

Eventually city council votes 10–4 in support of Cop City, and police flood the chambers.

A few days later a referendum campaign is launched to get Cop City on the ballot.

I accompany a number of people as they canvas the city. We watch the number of signatures climb through the summer, reaching 116,000 — double the necessary amount.

It seems that victory is imminent.

And then a federal judge claims the process is unconstitutional according to Georgia law.

Fall

The petition is delivered and the city puts it in a closet. Instead of counting the signatures, the city publishes the names of everyone who signed.

The state charges 61 people with an additional RICO charge. The indictment reads:

“Defend the Atlanta Forest is a self-identified coalition and enterprise of militant anarchists, eco-activists, and community organizers…Indeed, an anarchist belief relies on the notion that once government is abolished, individuals will rely on mutual aid to exist. In doing so, anarchists believe that individuals will work together and voluntarily contribute their own resources to insure that each individual has its own needs met.”

Undeterred by the sweeping criminalization of political ideology, priests and faith leaders chain themselves to construction equipment on the construction site as a form of protest.

Winter

As we cross the 1 year anniversary of Tort’s death, Atlanta locals continue to disrupt Brassfield & Gorrie construction sites through Non-Violent Direct Actions.

Every few weeks more bulldozers get torched.

The police offer $200,000 for any information on the arsonists. In February the cops raid a few homes in the Lakewood neighborhood, arresting Jack on suspicion of arson.

The fires continue.

The lockdowns continue.

The chants continue, here and around the country, where now 69 cop cities are being planned and developed:

“Cop City Will Never Be Built”

“If You Build It We Will Burn It”

“Viva Viva Tortuguita”

PART FIVE

Cop City was supposed to be completed over a year ago, and there are still no buildings.

In my time with the Forest Defenders, I’ve learned that participating in resistance, while not always glamorous, is joyful. Whether they are making banners with school children, cooking massive meals, carrying gallons of water, singing songs, resolving interpersonal conflict, life is dynamic, its roots extending deep and wide. It’s a life that resists alienation and fear; a life that seeks the wisdom of nature and the ancestors who once made their home among it. It is a life of ingenuity, care and passion.

Forest Defenders argue that attempts to destroy the movement only reveal the real threat it poses to those in power: a threat to their profits, to their ability to exploit the land and the people, and to their sense of self. Perhaps the money and the power that the ruling class has accumulated is worthless in comparison to the love the people have for the land and each other.

The Forest Defenders are the latest in a long line of warriors standing up to American imperialism. Every battle keeps a flame alive and continues the legacy of resistance.

With their struggle they pay respect to the ancestors who fought for the land, and atone for the ancestors who fought for the Empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lev Omelchenko is an Emmy Award Winning ATL and NYC based director. Born in Kramatorsk, Ukraine he immigrated with his family to Brooklyn, NY at age 9. As a filmmaker, he is driven by collaborations with cultural and community laborers whose practice is outside the traditional film industry. Lev is currently in production on a documentary feature film “A City in the Forest” about the protest movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, GA.

This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2024. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council New Orleans.