Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Adapted loosely from Andreas Malm's nonfiction book of the same name, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023) turns an argument about climate tactics into a tightly wound heist thriller.
What is How To Blow Up A Pipeline about?
A small group of young people, each carrying a different personal grievance tied to environmental damage or industrial harm, converges in a remote stretch of Texas with a shared plan: disable a section of oil pipeline using homemade explosives. The film cuts between the tense hours of planning and executing the operation and flashback scenes that fill in why each member joined, from a diagnosis linked to pollution to land lost to industrial expansion. Rather than framing its characters as either heroes or villains, the film stays close to procedure, tracking how the group sources materials, rehearses the plan, and manages the mounting risk of exposure as the operation nears its point of no return. Director Daniel Goldhaber structures the film like a classic ensemble heist, with tight editing and a pulsing score standing in for the moral debate the source book makes explicitly.
Cast & crew
Ariela Barer, who also co-wrote the screenplay, anchors the group as Xochitl, one of the plan's chief organizers. Kristine Frøseth, Lukas Gage, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, and Jake Weary round out the ensemble, each carrying a distinct backstory that the film reveals piece by piece.
Context & significance
Running 104 minutes, the film adapts the structure of a heist thriller to a real-world debate around energy infrastructure and environmental activism, drawing festival attention for its refusal to moralize directly and for its ensemble, flashback-driven storytelling. It arrived in theaters and on streaming in 2023 following a festival run the previous year.
Where & how to watch
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, and it includes a Persian dub and Persian subtitles for viewers who prefer Farsi. This page can be browsed without signing in.