‘Fairy Creek’ Film Review
Camilo Ruiz
This review is being written after a second viewing, of a slightly different edit of the film. The changes are minor and I won't be reacting to anything from the first version.
The Fairy Creek blockade started in fall of 2020, preventing the logging of one of the last intact watersheds in B.C, on traditional unceded Pacheedaht territory. It became the largest social movement in Canadian history, by measure of the number of arrests and was the largest RCMP operation to date, according to court documents from 2021.
The aptly titled 'Fairy Creek' by Jen Muranetz, is the penultimate film about the blockade. There have been a handful of documentaries released in the past few years, each with a narrower focus.
Filming ancient trees is surprisingly difficult. They are too big to capture, in forests often too dense to frame your shot the way you imagined while sitting at a desk, weeks before. Jen and her producer Sepehr Samimi pulled it off. The theatre is the right venue to see a film about trees older than colonization. The first thing that stands out is the sound. The grandeur on display, with the whir of chainsaws in the distance is a familiar contrast . For many at the blockade, you sat at the foot of a giant, or slept in its canopy watching the forest fall, helpless. To be at the blockade, you held space between the borders of ancient life and the desolation of a clear cut. They capture that well.
The blockade had very humble beginnings, setting up 'Ridge' camp in fall of 2020. Ridge camp stopped road building into the Fairy Creek headwaters. Winter was very quiet, in spring new blockades started popping up, all building to the BC Supreme Court granting an injunction to Teal-Jones, who owned the logging rights, in April 2021.
I suspect there are two viewers of this film: those among the thousands who were present and people who couldn't be there, but believed in the cause and viewed the blockade for nearly a year, through their screens. I belong to the former.
Spring/summer 2021. Camilo Ruiz.
The early focus is on the tree sitters. Their work was important, undoubtedly, but to the uninformed viewer they would never know that the tree sits were the least effective, and shortest lived facet of the blockade. All the tree sitters in the film are from 'Caycuse' camp. Caycuse is so far away from the rest of the blockades that it doesn't even feature in the map shown on screen. This distance made Caycuse different. It was special. I arrived at Caycuse three days after the injunction was served and barely left until enforcement began. I never even visited the other camps until it fell.
No media was allowed into Caycuse while the tree sitters were being extracted, despite RCMP lying and saying they were present. The footage in the film is shot by the sitters themselves and the only public record of what happened. There is a point where one of the sitters says, while watching neighbouring trees fall, "Yeah this is way faster than I thought it would be."
This quote signified a vital shift in the blockade. Tree sits were labour intensive and the RCMP were rapidly extracting people, dangerously, without any media present. Tactics shifted to tripods, dragons, trenches, and blobs, all of which are shown. The tree sits lasted a week, the other methods held the mountain for months.
There were four major conflicts happening at the blockade at any given time. Between each other internally, with the RCMP, with the Pacheedaht and with the loggers. There were a handful of violent logger interactions, two of which are shown on screen, and the infamous pepper spray incident with the RCMP—I promise you, the worst of it wasn't included in the film.
The conflict with the Pacheedaht is deep, personal, involved the provincial government, and Hereditary Chiefs. A Wet'suwet'en leader who was at camp said to a few of us, "when this is all over, the Pacheedaht will be left with the scars. You'll all go back to your homes and this community will still have to heal." I don't know if reopening those wounds in the film would have served any purpose.
The internal conflict, in general, was about the official media accounts and representation. Watching the film a second time, I was taken aback. It was a jarring transition. I haven't thought about it in years. It doesn't seem pivotal now. Upon a few days reflection, I realized it's actually difficult to understate how much of a conflict this was at camp. Countless hours of every single day, for months, spent on discourse that solved nothing. Some people even blamed lack of participants and the fall of the camp on poor messaging.
Most of the blockade was viewed through social media and the official Instagram account. Mainstream media stopped paying attention after the first week of enforcement. The Instagram account did a poor job representing what was actually happening on the ground and that became clear to me within days of arriving at camp. Frankly, the account came up almost every time I met someone in the city and told them I had just returned from the blockade. There are other internal conflicts shown from the blockade—whether they are critical or not to telling the story of Fairy Creek is up to each viewer.
'DJ Raven' appears in the later half of the film and I'm glad we see some interesting interactions with them and some RCMP. Not to show the officer's lighthearted side but to show the absurdity of life at the blockade. The familiarity with the police, the shift from day to night, people becoming nocturnal, building trenches till sunrise. It was a ludicrous song and dance that went on for an entire summer.
'Fairy Creek' tells the story in general terms and does it well. It touches on all the keystones of the movement yet doesn't dwell too long or dig deeply into any of them. This is not a criticism of the film, but the nature of the medium. 90 minutes was never going to be long enough to show the determination, ingenuity and tenacity of the blockade.
The film closes with a return to the tree sits. They are gone. Today, the Fairy Creek watershed logging deferrals have been renewed. It only protects 12 square kilometres. It doesn't feel like a victory. This was never about one watershed. The goal was to save all that remained.
If this fight mattered to you, take the opportunity to see it in theatres.
The film will be screening at Sudbury Indie Cinema, in Ontario, July 10 and 22. If you want to host a community screening of you can reach out to understorydocs@gmail.com, or visit their website.
May 18, 2021.
The day enforcement began, and Caycuse fell.