Pipeline documentary drills deep
Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival has strong environmental bent
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Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival When: Feb. 9-17 Where: Various venues Tickets and info: vimff.org
About six years ago Zack Embree decided that he needed to lend his voice to the discussion of climate change, so he picked up a camera and went about making his first movie.
The result of that decision is the 75-minute documentary Directly Affected looking at the impact of pipelines on communities across the country.
His quest for knowledge began in Burnaby with the oil spill of 2007 and Kinder Morgan’s $7.4-billion Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, and the film has its world première here at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.
“When I learned about climate change, I realized it wasn’t an issue we could keep punting off into the future,” said Embree, who moved to Vancouver from Hamilton, Ont., 10 years ago.
“It was around the same time I learned about the Kinder Morgan pipeline. I made the connection between these two ... and I really wanted to answer the question how is it we can continue to expand our reliance on oil for our economy and for the ways we power our lives, and also make meaningful progress when it comes to reducing our carbon omissions and our impact on the climate?”
While Embree sets out facts and poses questions about the future, the heart of this film is a desire to give a voice to the little guy; to stand up and say a corporation’s bottom line should not outweigh the well-being of the environment.
“What it appeared to me was local communities were being bullied by a federal government and an industry that was really hell bent on making sure this project went through,” said Em bree, who owns the video production company New Energy Media.
“The grievances that I heard, and the ways in which people’s concerns were being sidelined made me feel like I needed to do something.
“When I saw my city, my region, local First Nations, being steamrolled by a project I thought ‘well I can do something. I can use the power of media and storytelling to contribute to this conversation,’ ” added Embree.
Embree, who co-directed the film with Devyn Brugge, said the seriousness of the subject matter made for a very intense filmmaking experience.
“It’s been a huge challenge in my life — not only learning how to make film, but to document and to portray a really complex issue. It’s definitely pushed me to my edge on all fronts,” said Embree.
Produced for around $100,000 (funded by Storyhive grants and crowd funding), the film will be touring B.C. and Ontario in the spring.
“I want people to continue to have this conversation,” said Embree. “We cannot continue with business as usual.”
There are two opportunities to see Directly Affected at VIMFF — at the Uniting the Salish Sea Program (Centennial Theatre, Feb. 11, 7.30 p.m.), which includes speaker David Suzuki, or at The Change I Want to See program (Feb. 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Cinematheque), which also includes a talk with 14-year-old humanitarian Lilliana Libecki.
While Directly Affected isn’t set in the mountains or on some large body of water, it does fulfil an unofficial mandate of VIMFF.
“A lot of people who come to this festival have a relationship with the outdoors,” says VIMFF programmer Tom Wright.
“They are out there skiing or hiking or whatever they do outdoors. They have a relationship with nature, and I think that makes them want to protect it more. There’s definitely an overlap in interest with our core consumer groups and environmental programming. It’s not something we concentrate on to a great extent. But this year we have some really great environmental programming lined up.”
The film is one of 83 showing this year, the 21st for the festival.
“I think Vancouver, with its proximity to the mountains, it only makes sense that we would have one of the world’s biggest mountain film festivals and mountain sports and culture festivals here,” said Wright.
“These sports activities, lifestyles, whatever you want to call them, they are only getting more popular. That has made an impact in helping the festival grow.”
In 2018 the program was curated from 300 submissions. That large pool of content is a direct result of the massive improvements in filmmaking equipment, from cameras to editing software.
“When I started this we were getting close to 100 submissions now, less than 10 years later, it has almost tripled,” said Wright, who has been with the festival for eight years.
While film and guest speakers are front and centre at VIMFF, the festival has widened its purview and included a trip planning workshop, and an adventure filmmaking workshop.
“It’s one thing we have been trying to work on in a big way in the last few years,” said Wright about the workshops.
“Film festivals a lot of the time they can inspire their audiences with the content they put on the screen and the stages. But we’ve been trying to also give back in a more tangible fashion the last couple of years.”
That began with grant programs that led to the production of a couple of this year’s films making world premières — Ephemera, from Penticton’s Dave Mai who was 2017’s winner of the Arc’teryx Adventure Film Grant; and Beyond Trails: Atacama, from MEC Adventure Grant co-winners Lorraine Blancher and Robin Munshaw.
“We are getting it dialed here,” said Wright. “The festival gets better and better every year.”