But before I know it I am across the country with Miriam Needoba’s Eyes in the Forest. She focuses on the work of Jim Lawrence, who I must embarrassingly admit I was not familiar with until today. Lucky for me her film reads like a familiar conversation.
“When man tugs at a single thing in nature he finds it is attached to everything else,” Lawrence quotes John Muir at one point. As the reel rolls, I’m amazed at how Needoba manages to illustrate what this line means to him, offering an unguarded portrait of the man in less than 15 minutes.
Their photography - his static and hers in motion - flashes seamlessly across the screen. She’s cut everything together so well it seems like I’m walking with them through the woods on a Sunday afternoon. Except I’ve never seen a bald eagle up close – and at 30 feet across on the Lightbox screen the detail is stunning.
“Look into their eyes and you see they are real characters.” He isn’t hunting these animals with his camera: the river is his coffee shop. Taking inspiration from Karsh, he catches the eyes of his subjects so well I can’t help but anthropomorphize. Looking through these glamour shots of grizzlies, I can’t help but agree with his statement, “trophy hunting should be banned. Period.”
Next is Richard Boyce’s Rainforest: The Limit of Splendour. Kwaxsistalla, a Kwakwaka’wakw clan chief takes over the screen and we follow as he makes his way to an old-growth hemlock. He tells us what his grandfather once told him:
“Respect the forest floor. Be careful when you push aside a huckleberry bush, they have life just like us.”
And as the peacefulness of Kwaxsistalla’s line sinks in, Boyce cuts away: A man in black goggles and orange gear cuts into a tree. The sound of a calm breeze and buzz of black flies explode into the roaring of the chainsaw and one monstrous crack. A tree falls in the forest and this one definitely makes a sound.
Boyce continues with this rhythm and it’s mesmerizing. Ancient rainforests are studied and scarred landscapes are harvested. A doctor is working on a red cedar grove and discovers more than 200 species that can't be found on the ground; that no one has ever seen before; that took hundreds of years to evolve in these near millennium old canopies; that could be knocked down to earth and lost forever.
The word rainforest makes my mind wander to Africa or Southern and Central America. I must admit I rarely consider our own temperate one when it comes to the "save the" slogans. At work we use FSC 100% recycled paper and carry our own reusable coffee mugs. Cellulose pulp as a food additive may be old news, but that we cut down century old trees for it is new for me. How much natural history disappears with my cigarette filters, or was in the burger I ate last night?
The distant problem hits home. My mind wanders to the mature urban trees here in Toronto – if they were harvested for junk food we wouldn’t stand for it. But as the story moves on, it becomes apparent a larger issue is waste, regardless of where the trunks end up. So much habitat is lost, while broken branches and rotting roots are left behind to pollute local water supplies. Seedlings are planted in vast numbers, but it will take centuries for the forest to return - if at all.
Boyce’s subtitle is an inversion of the words painted boldly in BC’s provincial legislative building. SPLENDOR SINE OCCASU: Splendour without limit. At one point it seemed this way. But now after 87 of the 91 of the watersheds been clear cut it is no longer. According to him, if this rate continues all of the rainforest on Vancouver Island – a landmass the size of Belgium - will be lost in less than 15 years.
But in the face of all of this, Boyce is still hopeful. “There are no small victories,” he says after the film. “Every win is huge. The people I know who are doing this type of [advocacy and film making] are doing it from the heart - I was hoping to strike a chord.” Consider it struck.
LEAF co-presented these three films in support of the 10th annual Planet in Focus Film Festival. Did you see a film that moved you at #PIF2012? We want to hear about it below. Share your story below.
UPDATE: LEAF congratulates Richard Boyce on winning the 2012 Mark Haslam Award, Established in honour of the founder of Planet in Focus, for his film Rainforest: The Limit of Splendour.
