Point Holmes Sensitive Natural Areas

Sat 12:45 pm Theatre 1

12 min. 2011

Filmmaker: Kerry Dawson

Point Holmes, near the quiet seaside community of Comox on eastern Vancouver Island, is home to two unique but threatened sensitive natural areas. A rare Krummholz Garry Oak ecosystem of stunted and twisted oak trees is found along the shoreline, where powerful wind and wave systems shape the landscape.  Further inland, an ancient series of undulating sand dunes covered with a blanket of pine, fir, and salal is one of only two assemblages of this type known to exist in BC. The video looks at the threats facing the area and examines the question of appropriate land use decision-making.

Waking the Green Tiger

Sat 1:15 pm Theatre 5

78 min. 2011

Director: Gary Marcuse

Seen through the eyes of activists, farmers, and journalists, Waking the Green Tiger follows an extraordinary campaign to stop a huge dam project on the upper Yangtze River in southwestern China. Featuring astonishing archival footage never seen outside China, and interviews with a government insider and witnesses, the documentary also examines Chairman Mao’s campaigns to conquer nature in the name of progress.

A World Without Water

Sat 1:15 pm Theatre 1

90 min. 2006

Director: Brian Woods

Within our lifetime over half of the world’s population will be living without access to safe water and sanitation. Eight-year-old Vanessa and her parents walk almost a mile down the cliffs of El Alto in Bolivia to collect water from an unreliable well every day. Yet they live just a few hundred metres from their city’s main water treatment plant and can see millions of gallons just beyond the barbed wire fence. They are victims of increasing water commodification. The struggle for this precious resource is explored through compelling stories of families living in Bolivia, Detroit, Dar Es Salaam and Rajasthan.

The Carbon Connection

Sunday 12:15 pm Theatre 4

41 minutes 2007

Green Planet Films

In Scotland, oil and chemical companies have polluted a town since the 1940s. In Brazil, destructive monoculture eucalyptus tree plantations are swallowing up water and land. Both places now share a new threat, carbon trading. As part of the deal to reduce greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, major polluters can now buy carbon credits to reduce emissions elsewhere instead of cutting their own. For those living next to the oil industry in Scotland this means continued pollution by their toxic neighbours. In Brazil, the carbon credit market gives an injection of cash for more planting of damaging eucalyptus trees.

Clean Bin Project

Sunday 1:15 pm Theatre 4

75 minutes 2010

Director: Grant Baldwin

Is it possible to live completely waste free? Partners Jen and Grant go head to head in a competition to see who can swear off consumerism and produce the least landfill garbage in an entire year. Their light-hearted competition is set against an examination of the sobering problem of waste in North American society. Even as Grant and Jen start to garner interest in their project, they struggle to find meaning in their seemingly minuscule influence on the large-scale environmental impacts of our “throw-away society.”

Rainforest

Sunday 3:30 pm Theatre 4

52 minutes 2011

Director: Richard Boyce

Inspired by his relationship with a Kwaxkwaka’wakw elder, Richard Boyce embarks upon a cinematic journey contrasting the tree farms that dominate the landscape surrounding his home with an ancient rainforest on the Pacific Coast. Guided by passion and a determination to honour reality, Boyce travels to the most remote corner of Vancouver Island, through some of the most intensive logging on the planet, into a wilderness that is on the brink of extinction. The trees, ranging from seedlings to massive 1,200-year old colossi, thrive along the banks of an ancient river flood plain, which provides for diverse life forms in the temperate rainforest.

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