Screening times:
Monday, October 27, 6:30 PM - filmmakers attending!
Jen Muranetz | Canada | 2024 | 78m
English with English subtitles
This screening is part of the film's Nova Scotia theatrical tour! It will be attended by director Jen Muranetz and executive producer Neal Livingston, who will be available for a post-screening Q&A.
The Fairy Creek (Ada’itsx) valley sprawls across Pacheedaht First Nation territory on southwestern Vancouver Island and its old growth forest ecosystem thrives with lush foliage, ancient tree trunks, and a variety of wildlife. However, the decimating chainsaws and tractor machinery of the Teal Jones lumber corporation disrupt this equilibrium as they demolish an environmental haven for their road-building project. Amidst the tumult, Jen Muranetz’s Fairy Creek captures the vast collective protests against this destructive logging operation: a movement which has spawned both the largest demonstration of civil disobedience in Canadian history and the mass arrests of 1200 people.
The film offers visceral front-line footage of activists faced with an RCMP-enforced injunction, protesting from ground to sky as blockaders form barriers with their bodies and tree-sitters’ forest canopies are assailed by officers deployed from helicopters. Fairy Creek is an urgent portrait of resistance, documenting an assembly of protestors organizing together despite varying backgrounds, ideologies, and tactics. Muranetz highlights the rapture of a united eco-activist community, coinhabiting the earth, dancing together, and cherishing biodiversity. At the same time, this breathtaking documentary tremors with the challenges of political consciousness in an age of rampant extractive capitalism, where industries working with governments eviscerate everything in their path, including the last pristine ecosystems. Fairy Creek depicts a historic struggle to defend Canadian old growth forests as an experience of absolute devotion, thrust between whiplashes of triumph and heartbreak.
Jen Muranetz (Director, Producer) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker living on unceded Coast Salish territories in the place now known as Vancouver, BC. She is a director, producer, editor and former video journalist. Her films are character-driven and impact-focused, centered around environmental justice and human resilience. Her previous works have screened in festivals such as DOXA, DOK Leipzig and Planet in Focus. Her credits include Lost Nation Road and What About Our Future? which was a finalist at the Social Impact Media Awards and won the Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming at DOXA 2021.
Neal Livingston (Executive Producer) lives in the Mabou Inverness area on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Livingston is a well known Nova Scotian documentary filmmaker and artist, has businesses in renewable energy, and film production. He has a commercial maple syrup farm and is an active woodlot owner. Livingston is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker, two of his films were shown in the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad as part of the Olympic celebrations.
Tickets $12 ($11.40 cash at the door if available)
