- On the Line (Canada, 2011, Director: Frank Wolf). World premiere at Vancouver International Film Festival, Thursday, Oct. 6.
RARE is the human who can cross two mountain ranges on foot. Rarer still is the one who can prove he did it.
Frank Wolf, a North Vancouver-based adventure and environmental filmmaker who lives at the base of Mount Seymour, can do just that. Last summer he and friend Todd McGowan trekked 2,400 kilometres of rough terrain from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, B.C. as they traced the route of the proposed Northern Gateway project.
The project, if constructed, will ship bitumen from the oil sands to B.C.'s west coast, where it will be transported across the Pacific to Chinese markets.
Wolf documented the entire journey on film and the resulting film, On the Line, is primed for its world premiere October 6 at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
A documentary filmmaker whose previous film Mammalian screened at the 2010 festival, Wolf was first turned on to the subject of the pipeline after attending a talk featuring environmental authors Ian McAllister and Andrew Nikiforuk about the Northern Gateway, a project that they warned could damage ecosystems if it were to spill oil along its 1,200-kilometre route.
He later had dinner with them both and proposed to them the idea of journeying along the pipeline's route. They urged him on to it and it was off to the races.
"It's something I did completely on my own," Wolf says of the journey. "Basically the trip is myself, my friend, we carry all the camera gear with us, there's no crew with us, none of the interviews were set up. These were all people we met along the way."
The journey began with a cycling lap of the oil sands, a major industrial project in northern Alberta that, while a large provider of jobs, also produces greenhouse gas emissions on a scale that has environmentalists calling them "tar sands" and "Saudi Alberta."
They followed a similar tactic throughout their journey and had little trouble getting people talking to them.
"You just start talking to people," Wolf says. "Just two guys, you're hiking and padding across B.C. and Alberta, people kind of welcome you into their home. You're not a big, intimidating camera crew, you have a conversation, get into the nitty gritty."
They met one of their most notable characters in Grande Prairie, Alberta, before they crossed over the Rockies into British Columbia.
There they met a man whose job it is to clean up oil spills into rivers. He explained to them that once oil gets into a river, it's impossible to clean it up completely. You can perhaps keep it from floating but it isn't hard for the chemical to seep into the riverbed and stay there.
But it was travelling over the mountains from Alberta into British Columbia that perhaps proved the most illuminating. In Alberta they met characters who were more ambivalent about the project and in British Columbia, where most of the pipelines will be built, attitudes to the pipeline were far more heated.
"It's kind of a tale of two provinces," Wolf says. "Once you cross the Rockies into B.C., it's more like wild water, wild fish country, not oil and gas country. That's where the change happens."
One thing that struck the filmmaker throughout the trek was the perilous terrain that both he and, eventually, the pipeline would have to cross to get to B.C.'s west coast. At one point the two were crossing the Coast Mountains and the rain and the wind turned them away before they could reach a summit of the range.
"It poured for days and days," Wolf says. "In a way it was good for the film because it shows you, this is mountain weather, it's pouring rain. If anything happened to a pipeline, you're not going to get a helicopter there.
"It just shows you how you can't control the weather, you can't control geology. These are things Enbridge can't control."
On the Line screens at the film festival Oct. 6 and 11 at Empire Granville 7 cinemas. Tickets are available at www.viff.org.
