CANNABIS Film highlights Puffragettes
APiper Courtenay
merican documentary director and producer Windy Borman says it was the rising number of women in the cannabis space that drove her to shine a light on these largely ignored success stories.
After moving to Denver, Colorado, in 2014, and having never smoked weed, the award-winning filmmaker initially laughed off the teasing remarks from friends about the number of dispensaries she would see in her new city. Coincidentally, she moved to the Green Mile on Broadway—also known as Broadsterdam—a tourist flytrap for weed. The southern stretch of the street earned its name for having a pot shop on almost every corner.
With a heightened awareness of weed culture, she stumbled on a statistic in a 2015 Marijuana Business Daily study showing women made up 36 percent of senior-leadership positions across the cannabis industry nationwide. At the time, the national average across all sectors was 22 percent.
Armed only with a foggy understanding of the substance, she set about interviewing more than 100 men and women from within the weed space to try to better understand her new cause.
“Clearly something about cannabis was attracting more female leadership, and I wanted to figure out why,” Borman says.
As a result, in February 2016 she began filming a documentary depicting the stories of the “puffragettes”; in 2017, the film, Mary Janes: The Women of Weed, aired in the United States.
Puffragettes is a smoky adaptation of the late-19th- and early-20thcentury term for women who fought for the right to vote—except instead of “deeds not words” these women believe in “weed not words”. The film follows the stories of 40 industry disrupters and fierce advocates from the modern-day cannabis industry.
“It’s a film about gender parity, sustainability, and diversity,” she says of Mary Janes over the phone.
“Those three core values have been in all my other films, so I figured I had an opportunity to help elevate the stories of these women leaders because I had an access point.”
Known for critically acclaimed documentaries like The Eyes of Thailand and The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia, Borman says she wanted to represent the industry through a hard lens of diversity. She wanted every woman to see herself in the puffragettes.
“We had women from 10 different states; some of them were medically legalized states while some were adultuse states, so we could see different phases of legalization,” Borman says.
“We wanted to show a really broad cross-section of the type of women involved in cannabis and their challenges working in different political and social climates.”
Borman, who consumed cannabis for the first time on-screen in the film, says her true goal with the film was to embolden women who didn’t see themselves represented by mainstream media. If she could portray women of colour, in a spectrum of ages, and from a blend of socioeconomic backgrounds, she hoped it would empower others to be bold in their strides into the rapidly evolving industry.
“There’s this great saying, ‘if I can see it, I can be it’ and I really took that to heart,” Borman says, quoting actor Geena Davis.
“Instead of having to play the game where they get stuck at the glass ceiling and see all of their male counterparts promoted past them, women should know they can go start their own company, be the CEO, and hire other women and people of colour to create a corporate culture they want to work for.”
On October 24, the Georgia Straight will host the first Canadian screening of the documentary, at SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street). Borman hopes to do many more screenings now that Canada has legalized adult-use cannabis. Beyond that, she says, she’s working to build on the documentary’s timeliness and momentum.
“Our ultimate goal is to turn the film into a docu-series focusing on women in the U.S., Canada, and abroad, because women are leading in cannabis everywhere,” she says.
“Let’s just keep telling their stories.”
To health fanatics, completing the Grouse Grind is a local rite of passage. To others, the hike is a gruelling vertical crawl to the promise of a cold beer waiting at the top. But for one entrepreneur, the 2.9-kilometre trail up the side of Grouse Mountain was the motivation behind his latest venture: a cannabis-infused energy bar, aptly named the Grind Bar.
“I originally made it for myself as a bar I wanted to fuel me when I was hiking in the mountains,” says Dave Weale, founder of Grounded CBD, a Vancouver-based line of edible cannabis products.
In 2015, Weale, a former junior freeskiing world champion, broke his neck while biking on Blackcomb Mountain. He credits the injury, and past struggles with anxiety, with his personal discovery of the therapeutic benefits of cannabidiol (CBD)—A nonpsychoactive compound found in cannabis.
“I’ve tried my hand at the whole entrepreneurial thing before but often fell short because of anxiety…cbd was what really helped me overcome that,” says Weale during a phone interview with the Georgia Straight.
“I wanted to help fuel others to stay on their own entrepreneurial grind.”
The bar—a superfood-rich mélange of hemp hearts, cacao butter, and finely ground coffee beans—is now one of six featured in the CBD product line. Weale says every Grounded CBD edible aims to complement an active lifestyle, sticking to nutritional ingredients and natural sources of protein.
The company also offers the Greatest bar, a peanut-butter and beet-root energy booster, and the Green Rush bar, which boasts natural antioxidants like matcha and moringa.
Each bar has 10 milligrams of full-spectrum CBD, a relatively common dose for edible cannabis products currently on the market.
“A big part of our mission is to change the way people think about nutrition and CBD. We focus on general performance and helping people create a healthy lifestyle…keto is a big part of that,” Weale says when asked about the choice to expand his product line to include high-fat, lowcarbohydrate ketogenic versions of the original three bars.
After some experimentation, Weale replaced sugary ingredients in the original recipes—like dates and maple syrup—with natural plantbased sweeteners like yacon root and lucuma powder.
Grounded CBD will temporarily halt production of the bars until Health Canada updates the regulations to include edible products next year. Until then, Weale is teaming up with Zenabis, a federally licensed producer, to invest in product development.