This is one you certainly won’t want to miss! Join us for an evening of forestry film on March 14th at the Confluence Climbing gym.
Doors open at 7pm, the film will start at 7.30. Admission is by donation ($5-10).
Check out the trailer here
A Red Cedar can live for over a millennium, sustaining multiple life systems and human cultures. But a rapacious chainsaw can decimate the same tree in a few short hours. And in the economy of commercial logging the tree only has value once it’s been cut down and transformed into a commodity.
At a time when the planet’s old growth forests are threatened as never before, Jean-Philippe Marquis has crafted a dazzling and unsettling film essay on contemporary forestry practices in the Pacific Northwest — home to the world’s oldest and most majestic woodland.
Drawing on his own working experience in forestry, Marquis ventures into remote locations and worksites to encounter people whose livelihood and labour is connected in various — and often contradictory — ways to the forest economy and related cultures.
While a Haida forager roams old growth woodland, identifying evidence of a culture that used cedar trees to make everything from baby papooses to canoes, workers at an industrial nursery form an assembly line, producing over 300 million seedlings every year for monoculture timber plantations. Meanwhile commercial loggers clear-cut an entire hillside with devastating speed, leaving a solitary tree planter to scramble over the ‘green trampoline’ of waste they’ve left in their wake.
Juxtaposing sublime aerial imagery with vérité workplace footage, Marquis tempers his critique of neoliberal forestry practices with an up-close understanding for people who labour within the system.
Distributed by Cinema Politica