The Kermode bear is a rare subspecies of the American black bear. Photo from the film 'Spoil.'
One Sunday last November, while 10,000 people encircled the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, judges at the Banff Mountain Film Festival were giving an award to a powerful documentary about a less well-known pipeline.
The Northern Gateway project would pump bitumen from Alberta’s massive tar sands development more than 700 miles to the coast of northwestern British Columbia, where it would be put on supertankers destined for China. The film Spoil, winner of Banff’s Best Environmental Film award, takes place in the Great Bear Rainforest, which lies in the Northern Gateway’s path. The film screens Saturday, Feb. 25 at the Rio as part of the traveling Banff Film Festival.
The Great Bear, one of the wildest pieces of land on earth, is home of the Gitga’at First Nation, as well as the Kermode bear—an extremely rare, all-white creature also known as the spirit bear.
Trip Jennings, who directed and edited the film, says the existence of the spirit bear was a secret that the Gitga’at rarely spoke of, even among themselves. “They knew what the trappers had done for centuries,” Jennings said in an interview with the Weekly. “So it became a taboo passed down from the elders—if they happened to see a spirit bear they kept it to themselves.”
As Giga’at leader and guide Marvin Robinson explains in Spoil, the prospect of supertankers plying their narrow intercoastal waterways moved his community to allow the mysterious, charismatic animal to become “the icon for the whole pipeline issue.”
Spoil documents a Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition (RAVE), a unique artistic intervention developed by the International League of Conservation Photographers. In a RAVE, a dozen or so top-shelf wildlife shooters quickly assemble a visual chronicle of a special place that is in peril.
The ultimate photographic target of the Great Bear RAVE was, of course, the spirit bear. And the hunt for the elusive creature creates a narrative that culminates with a riveting bit of screen magic involving Marvin Robinson and the Canadian photographer Paul Nicklen.
Over the course of its 44 minutes, Spoil shows footage of the tar sands strip mines—a complex frequently described as the most destructive industrial project on earth. This is contrasted with the Great Bear—salmon leaping up waterfalls, moose wandering through 1,000-year-old red cedar forests, time-lapse footage of subarctic starfields set to a soundtrack of a howling wolf pack. But the stars of the film are definitely Robinson and the spirit bear he has known since it was a cub—an animal he describes as “my friend.”
SPOIL (NR; 44 min.) screens Saturday at the Rio.
