An estimated 28,000 barrels of crude oil – 4.5 million litres – has spilled from the Rainbow pipeline onto the land of the Lubicon Indians in Northern Alberta. This is another terrible blow for an aboriginal community which was among the first in Canada to suffer the environmental impact of the oil industry.
Almost 30 years ago, in 1985, I covered this story as a television producer for Radio Canada, the French network of the CBC, together with one of my favourite journalist colleagues, Hélène Courchesne. We discovered and reported on a Cree community which had been left out of the treaty process, denied a land claims settlement, and was suffering the consequences of uncontrolled oil exploration and extraction.
ABOVE: Two of Hélène’s photos from 1982 show both traditional life and oil extraction.
Since then, hardly any progress has been made in settling the community’s claims. Instead, the mad rush for oil and gas has continued to impact them negatively. And now they have to deal with this horrendous pollution from the pipeline owned by Plains Midstream Canada – a subsidiary of Plains All American. The community of Little Buffalo is not far from the spill (the figures reported vary from 7 to 30 km) and the residents are complaining of health impacts such as headaches and nausea. The cleanup is underway, and will take many months. And how effective will it be ?
One of the great privileges of working for the CBC and Radio-Canada in those days was to be able to pretty much choose my subjects. For sure, they had to be approved by my superiors, but with a convincing pitch they usually said yes. I was very interested in the situation of aboriginal people and environmental issues, and I did a lot of those kinds of stories– 20-minute stories with a 3-week turnaround. The experience with the Lubicons was one of the most memorable and touching. Their situation was and still is one of Canada’s most shameful.
Here are a few links to organizations supporting the Lubicon or protesting the spill.
France Roland and Maude Laurendeau-Mondoux in 'Sexy béton'.
Last week I went to see a terrific documentary play called SEXY BÉTON, or “sexy concrete”. It was created by Annabel Soutar of the Porte Parole theatre company in Montreal – only the last in a series of documentary theatre performances.
And this truly is a documentary ‘démarche’ – to use this excellent French word which means a way of proceeding, an approach which involves a particular method. It’s an investigation of the cave-in of a concrete overpass that killed five people and seriously injured six others in Laval, just north of Montreal in 2006.
Annabel and her colleagues create a performance which is a hybrid of a documentary film shoot, a journalistic investigation and participatory research. They have a big advantage in that they don’t represent a media organization and they don’t have to bring a camera when they go to meet people. They record audio, and then use excerpts of people’s statements or dialogue to construct their play. People don’t have their guards up the way they would with a more elaborate or more journalistic setup.
What we learn from the play is revealing, shocking and thought-provoking. To sum it all up, this is a tragedy for which no one takes responsibility. The engineers, the construction companies, the sub-contractors, the civil servants working for the Department of Transport – no one wants to fess up to any wrongdoing or negligence.
To Annabel and her co-conspirators this case is a metaphor for the general state of affairs in our society. A lot is going wrong, catastrophically wrong, but no one is responsible. This is an important point.
And, in addition, the play seems incredibly timely in the present Québec context. The action takes place in Laval – Quebec’s second largest city – where municipal corruption is just now the subject of frequent scandals. And it deals with the construction industry, at a moment where a majority of Quebecers would like to see an official inquiry into corruption and wrongdoings in this sector. (Radio-Canada’s excellent investigative show Enquête should be credited with most of the revelations on these subjects.)
In creating this play, Annabel and her colleagues decided to do more than investigate. They attempted to convince the surviving victims to go for a lawsuit. Ignoring the advice from high-profile lawyer Julius Grey not to push the victims, they try hard but fail, and (though one might disagree with what they are doing) this is an important and interesting part of the story.
In watching the excellent crew of actors perform the interaction between the victims and with the documentarians, I felt like I was completely reliving my experience with the innocent victims of organized crime who were the subject of my film Hellbent for Justice (‘Pendant que court l’Assassin’.)
In both cases, the victims were completely unprepared for the complex physical, psychological and legal realities they suddenly had to deal with. And in both cases they have to confront bureaucratic machineries which don’t take their real-life situation into account.
The mise en scène (designed by Sophie Vajda and André Perrier) is great, the actors are fantastic, and completely bilingual. Watching this play is a truly Montreal experience of the best kind.
The play is still on until Feb 26. I am asking Annabel Soutar a few questions and will publish them in the coming weeks.
Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.
It is a year since the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and just about every generalist television network has been broadcasting special programming. I found most of it to be competently done and well-meaning, but extremely predictable and pretty superficial.
This is the curse of television. Just wait till the 10th anniversary of September 11th later this year. Millions of dollars will be spent on reporters and television crews lining up to broadcast from Ground Zero, and I could tell you already what they will say. Meanwhile, how much coverage is there of the millions of people who have perished in Congo over the last five years?
Fortunately, for this earthquake anniversary, there were a few exceptions from the run-of-the-mill. Radio-Canada’s news channel RDI broadcast a documentary by Réal Barnabé and Dominique Morisette who had gone back to meet the people and places featured in Radio-Canada’s first ever reportage from Haiti (done by the grand dame of Quebec télévision journalism, Judith Jasmin). Pourquoi Haiti? became Pourquoi pas Haiti? (Why Not Haiti?) and it was interesting to see that some of today’s key players on the country’s political scene were already active back then.
Frontline (PBS) showed an interesting look at the policing situation in Port-au-Prince, where the criminals who escaped the crumbling prisons in the aftermath of the quake have taken refuge in the emergency tent camps where they are rebuilding their gangs and taking control.
Butthe best programs are broadcast on TVO: the series Inside Disaster, directed by Nadine Pequenza and produced by Andrea Nemtin and Ian Dunbar at PTV productions in Toronto. I already congratulated them on their sense of initiative a year ago and I am very happy to see that they have really delivered. The authors of the series have also wisely decided to look beyond the disaster towards the long-term challenges of reconstruction – we haven’t seen that part yet.
Shooting 'Inside Disaster'Dir. Nadine Pequenza
This is terrific documentary work, not just news reporting. We are truly inside the biggest humanitarian relief effort ever, focusing on the Red Cross and some really great characters – Jean-Pierre Taschereau who leads the huge team is just one of them – as they struggle against overwhelming odds to get water, food and medical help to the victims of the quake. You are really there with them, experiencing their challenges, difficulties and emotions.
The shooting and editing are excellent, and the website that accompanies the project is exemplary, giving you information about the earthquake, about ‘humanitarianism’ and emergency relief efforts, and about the film. The companion blog Haiti-today goes in depth into the reconstruction effort, and there is also an interactive component to the site, where you can play the role of a victim, a journalist or a relief worker. I asked Tobi Elliott who helps me with this blog to try it out. Her comments in a few days.
“I know them well,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have cared if they had shown the film first. I just want them to give me an answer.” He then introduced the directors of the opening film of this year’s Focus Québec-Canada section, my friends Patricio Henriquez and Luc Côté.
Omar Khadr at age 15 (above) and 21.
The film is about the shocking case of the young Omar Khadr, the 24-year old accused of terrorism and killing an American soldier, who has been imprisoned for seven years, most of that time in Guantanamo. I will not summarize the case and describe this moving and incisive film in any detail, because I would not do as good a job as Cinema Politica’s Ezra Winton – read his article on the Art Threat blog.
Suffice it to say that the film is a deconstruction and analysis of the surveillance camera video of the seven-hour, truly revolting –Orwellian more than Kafkaesque– interrogation of Khadr by representatives of CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Ezra is right in pointing out that we all have a share of responsibility for what the Canadian government is doing to this young man, a child soldier at the time of the events. You can only leave this film with a sense that something has to be done, even though Khadr’s lawyer explained at the launch that he is stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Indeed, it seems – in the bargaining going on right now – that he will have to choose between pleading guilty to a crime he didn’t commit and continue serving time in prison, or rot in his cell in Guantanamo (the facility Obama promised to close!) forever. Amnesty petition here.
Since the film premiered, Patricio and Luc have been caught up in a whirlwind of activities, including a repeat screening of the film at the 700-seat Imperial Cinema where it premiered, and an upcoming screening on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. They nonetheless took the time to answer a couple of questions:
When we watch the film, the concept comes across so clearly and the structure seems so simple, so obvious. But during your process of creation…?
PATRICIO: The chronology in the shooting of a documentary doesn’t always provide an interesting dramatic structure. Often in the editing room you need to betray this chronology to give meaning to the images. Of course, in this case, we weren’t the ones who filmed the interrogation of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo by the Canadian secret police. Nevertheless, the seven hours of video recorded over four days in February 2003 (accessible to the public thanks to a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2008) had a progression that we kept in our film.
Luc, our editor, Andrea and I, we watched these seven hours – of very poor technical quality – several times. We quickly discovered that each day had its own specific, separate nature. So we decided to identify each day as a journey: Day 1: Hope. Day 2: Fallout. Day 3: Blackmail, Day 4: Failure. Also, we understood we would need some context for these four days. So we directed our research toward eyewitnesses, people who had seen Omar, experts (scientific and legal), objective observers such as the Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard, and politicians. All these people had to help us better understand what played out during this four-day interrogation.
Andrea first edited together the interrogation in this order, and then we showed all the participants the passages they could appropriately illuminate for us in interviews. Then, we inserted these new elements into the structure of the interrogation. And voila, it wasn’t a very complex creative device.
Patricio Henriquez
Having followed this story for several years, how do you evaluate the media’s coverage of Khadr’s case?
PATRICIO: In Quebec, the coverage was particularly lacking. To my knowledge, the first print media to send a journalist to Guantanamo was Rue Frontenac, the website of the locked-out journalists of the Journal de Montreal. That’s totally to their credit.
Elsewhere, they trafficked in misinformation. One example: in a report aired Nov. 13, 2009, a Téléjournal correspondent in Washington said this of Omar Khadr: “He has already spent over seven years in Guantanamo, waiting for his trial for the murder of an American MILITARY DOCTOR.”
There are two grave errors in this communication. The 1st Class Sergeant Christopher Speer, in whose death Omar Khadr is allegedly implicated, had never been a military doctor. At the start of the proceedings against Khadr, the Pentagon stated (perhaps not innocently) that the victim had been a medic (‘un infirmier’ or ‘un brancardier’ in French.) The Radio-Canada reporter translated badly, calling him a “doctor.”
But even worse: Omar Khadr’s lawyers have proven since 2004 that the Pentagon has held back the fact that, in reality, Sergeant Speer was in Afghanistan as a member of the special forces known as Delta Force. And although he had been trained at one point as a medic, his primary role in Afghanistan was not to heal, but to kill.
This difference is doubly loaded with consequences for Khadr, because, according to the laws of war, killing a duly identified nurse or medic is a war crime. Therefore, probably more by negligence than in bad faith, Téléjournal reinforced all the same this idea that Omar had committed a war crime in killing a medical doctor. It’s not a shock then that public opinion, having fallen victim to similar misinformation, is still largely indifferent to the fate of Omar Khadr.
Then, we realized that practically every media in Quebec and in Canada has been content to merely reproduce the most emotional part of these seven hours of recorded video, the moment where, yielding to the psychological pressure of the Canadian secret agents, Omar cracks and falls into a depressed state, crying uncontrollably. No one seems to have taken pains to listen to the tapes in their entirety.
We do understand that journalists, working constantly under pressure, haven’t had the time to decode the material. This is where, sometimes, the documentary can be useful in supplementing, more calmly and later on, the picture of a certain reality.
How did you manage to finance the film?
Luc Cote
LUC: Financing this film hasn’t been very easy. After being refused by broadcasters and public institutions, we went to Jean-Pierre Laurendeau and Sylvie de Bellefeuille at Canal D. Without hesitation they agreed to give us a license. With this license, we had access to tax credits. But there still remained an immense hole in the budget of 50 per cent. One of my best friends, Kevin Kraus, who closely follows our work, offered to lend us money. So we went ahead by investing our salaries, our equipment, etc. For lack of resources, all of the filming – camera, sound and interviews – was done by Patricio and myself alone.
Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.
The normal progression for a budding filmmaker has generally been from student films and shorty shorts towards longer shorts, and then medium-length films and finally feature length ones. Working on the short films, he or she would learn the ropes, learn how to use equipment and tell a story. Later on, with more resources, would come a bigger crew and competent technicians or co-creators.
Not so in my case. When I started making audiovisual stories for television, I already had many years of storytelling behind me as a radio producer. And as a television ‘producer’ (meaning actually director) at CBC and Radio-Canada television, I didn’t have the right to touch the equipment. I remember the editors saying to me, “You can screen the cut again while I’m on my break, but close the door and don’t tell anyone.” It was a co-conspiracy by the bosses and the union.
Things have changed a lot since then! Now, in the digital world, many television journalists and directors do their own shooting and editing.
And for my part, I am looking after the beginnings I never had as a filmmaker. Over the last couple of years, I have made my first short films. And they will be screening at the Park Cinema in Montreal, before my film Super-Grannies (subtitled version of ‘Les Super-Mémés’) from Oct. 18th to 22nd.
Here is a brief description of the three films – with apologies for the PR language!
In a touching visual letter to his adoptive daughter Béthièle on her 10th birthday, Montreal filmmaker Magnus Isacsson reflects on her roots in Haiti and his own in Sweden, drawing some surprising conclusions.
Sonny Joe & the casino.(22 min.2004)
Sonny Joe Cross collects used clothes from the residents of the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake. He sells some in his store and gives the rest to the homeless and poor in nearby Montreal. A former hard-drinking gambler, Sonny Joe leads a suspense-filled campaign against a casino promoted by the band council.
Decked out in gaudy shawls and outrageous hats brimming with a cacophony of colours, «Raging Grannies» defy the invisibility so often experienced by older women. They are a colourful presence at most demonstrations and grassroots meetings promoting peace, social justice and environment.
On the surface, they are amusing, even hilarious. But underneath that humorous veneer, they are deadly serious. The film does more than portray of the movement and its members. It raises universal issues very seldom addressed by the current media, such as the role of senior citizens in our society. “With this documentary film, I wanted to accomplish myself what these exceptional women do so well: entertain while forcing us to reflection,” says the filmmaker.
The film, Se Souvenir des Cendres (“Remembering the Ashes”), is the ‘making of’Denis Villeneuve‘s film Incendies, a fiction film based on Wajdi Moawad’s stage play of the same name. Produced by Micro-Scope for Radio-Canada, Se Souvenir follows the shooting of Villeneuve’s film in Jordan. Villeneuve and his crew worked with actual survivors of the conflicts as extras, from notably Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, and these people become the mainstay of Anaïs’s making of film: they compare what they see on set to what they lived through in real life, and the effect is striking.
Also, Anaïs – who does her own camerawork – has a real eye for the children. There are many moving moments with children remembering war and expertly discussing arms, survival strategies, fears and hopes.
Anaïs - Photo Credit: André Turpin
Children are also at the heart of Anaïs’s first novelJe voudrais qu’on m’efface (“I Would Like to be Erased”), based on the lives of children in the Montreal East End Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood where she shot some of her previous films.
The launch took place at the Usine C performance space, simultaneous with the première of a photo exhibition by cinematographer André Turpin, featuring very creative pictures of children growing up in a context marked by poverty, absent parents and various forms of addiction. All proceeds from the sale of large prints of the photos go to Dr. Gilles Julien, who is internationally renowned for his work with children, mainly in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.
Anaïs tells me that she used to see me as an inspiration. Well, the tables have been turned, now it’s the other way around. Chapeau Anaïs!
NOTE: Se Souvenir des Cendres: Regard sur Incendies will be re-broadcast on ARTV Tuesday, Sept 21 at 4 pm, and again on Sunday at 2:30 pm and 7 pm. The film will also be presented at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in October.
Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.
