With the holiday season now officially upon us, it would be easy to overlook H2Oil for more festive cinematic fare. This startling investigation of the far-reaching impact of the Alberta Oil Sands project is likely to leave you feeling decidedly less-than-jolly … but it couldn’t have come at a more vital time.

As elected officials gather at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, director Shannon Walsh shares her take on why the Oil Sands are such a poor investment in our future.

About ten minutes into the movie, I found myself wondering: “Why aren’t we smarter than this?” Why do you think the government is continuing to support such an unsustainable project? Is it really all about demand and profit?

After screening the film in Norway someone asked me very pointedly: “What’s wrong with Canada?” We are witnessing a total separation between the market’s abstract logic, and the real environments in which we live. This disconnection is critically important right now when we are facing a triple crisis of peak oil, climate change, and a crisis of fresh water, which will affect the basic fundamentals of life for most the planet’s population. And what is worse is that we are locked into this absurd situation through the trade agreements we have made with the US under NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership. I think it is time to wake up and really take stock of how we got here. There is a ceiling to growth.

How would you describe the impact of seeing the tailing ponds (where the water used in the processing of oil is left) in person?

Honestly, when I’m up in the oil sands I feel an ongoing nausea. It’s really shocking to see the land carved up, the lakes of toxic chemicals, the billowing smoke stacks. And also to see everyone just going on with it, as though there is no way for us to stop this terrible, sick addiction. It’s like a heroin addict plunging in the needle again and again, scarring his body and ripping it apart. And then so close by, in Fort Chip, the magnificence of the land, the northern lights shining in the sky, the vastness of the deltas, the islands, the forests and the river systems. It takes your breath away. I feel blessed to have been able to go there and I understand why people are willing to fight to the end to protect it. It gives me courage.

To what extent do you feel race relations played a role in the government turning a blind eye to the illness plaguing the citizens of Fort Chipewyan?

I think it’s pretty fair to say that if the Athabasca River flowed south into Calgary or Edmonton, we would see a pretty different reaction from the government.

Gravity of the subject matter aside, the film itself is filled with stunning aerial photography and clever animated sequences. How did you, animators James Braithwaite, Dale Hayward and Sylvie Trouve and cinematographer Alan Kohl, approach the film on an aesthetic level?

It was amazing working with such talented people who really understood what I wanted to do and brought so much creative energy and input to it. In terms of the images, I was interested in referencing some films I felt reflected what was going on in the tar sands. We looked at images from films like Five Easy Pieces, Antonioni’s Red Desert (especially for the sound design), Manufactured Landscapes, Working Man’s Death as well as some of the classics from Quebec director Pierre Pierrault, and built from there.

You close out your credits by encouraging audiences to visit your website (h2oildoc.com) and learn more about the subject. How do you believe the public can bring about change in this situation, given the seemingly endless demand for cheap oil?

I think it is critical that we all get involved both at the local level, and by holding our governments and big businesses accountable. We really don’t have a lot of time left.

The first step is to try to reach out and get involved with people near where you live. Enbridge is proposing to reverse a pipeline called the Trailbreaker to bring tar sands bitumen into Montreal East to be refined. This will have serious consequences right in our backyard. The oil being refined here will be shipped from Montreal straight to Maine through the Eastern Townships village of Dunham. The community in Dunham are totally opposed to this project, as it means creating a pumping station on their surrounding farmland and running oil in dangerously old pipelines through the Sutton mountains. These pipelines have already broken before. The mayor in Dunham was elected on a platform to oppose this development, and people here in Montreal have already started to back the community there.

We need to make each of our communities Tar Sands Free Zones! If they can’t find places to refine the tar sands in our communities, they can’t keep ripping it out of the soil in Alberta.

To learn more about the secretive Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) between Canada and the U.S., and the plan for the “deep integration” of North America, check out www.canadians.org/integratethis/. To learn more about the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the patterns of environmentally destructive projects occurring in indigenous territories, visit www.ienearth.org.

H2Oil is currently screening at Excentris.

Tagged as: Free Trade, Indigenous Envrionmental Network, Oil Sands, Tar Sands