The Film: #WorthFightingFor: environmental short films Hunting Giants and Water Warriors
A thrill-seeking explorer wants to find and climb the biggest tree in Canada outside a logging community on the brink of collapse. Set in the formerly prosperous town of Port Renfrew, Hunting Giants is told through the point-of-view of the residents, the local indigenous community, and a group of big tree climbers. Hunting Giants is a cinematic adventure into the old-growth rainforests of British Columbia that asks a question faced by resource communities around the world: extract profit until nothing remains or risk everything in pursuit of a more sustainable future? Water Warriors is the story of a community’s successful fight to protect their water from the oil and natural gas industry. In 2013, Texas-based SWN Resources arrived in New Brunswick, Canada to explore for natural gas. The region is known for its forestry, farming and fishing industries, which are both commercial and small-scale subsistence operations that rural communities depend on. In response, a multicultural group of unlikely warriors–including members of the Mi’kmaq Elsipogtog First Nation, French-speaking Acadians and white, English-speaking families–set up a series of road blockades, preventing exploration. After months of resistance, their efforts not only halted drilling; they elected a new government and won an indefinite moratorium on fracking in the province. Water Warriors invites audiences to contemplate and re-imagine their own possibilities for resistance. Over the last decade, an oil boom in North Dakota has seen the state’s population double with primarily male workers flocking to the region. With this dramatic increase, has come an influx of drugs, crime and sexual violence. On the Fort Berthold Indian reservation alone, rates of sexual violence have increased 168%, with Indigenous women most affected. Juxtaposing the ravaged yet starkly beautiful landscape with personal testimony from young Indigenous women living on the reservation, Nuuca is an evocative mediation revealing the connections between the rape of the earth and the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls. Screening followed by a Q&A with filmmakers and environmental activists.
