Keyword Oil Sands

Moving between a local microcosm and the global oil crisis, H2Oil weaves together a collection of compelling stories of people who are at the front lines of the biggest industrial project in human history: Canada's tar sands. H2Oil is a feature-length documentary that traces the wavering balance between the urgent need to protect and preserve fresh water resources and the mad clamoring to fill the global demand for oil. It is a film that asks: what is more important, water or oil? Will the quest for profit overshadow efforts to protect public health and the environment in Canada's richest province?

To The Tar Sands follows a group of nineteen young environmentalists as they cycle over 1,300 kilometres northbound across Alberta to witness the impacts of Alberta’s tar sands boom firsthand. They talk to farmers, moms and dads, an urban planner, oil industry workers, the chief of a First Nations community and others along the way asking “How has the tar sands boom affected you?” As the kilometres click away, they excavate into their own complicity with Alberta’s rush to develop the tar sands.

The International League of Conservation Photographers and the Gitga'at first nation people of British Columbia in their search for the illusive spirit bear. Their mission is to create images of this rare bear and the ecosystem that it relies on before a proposed oil pipeline from the Alberta tar sands threatens to SPOIL it. The spirit bear, globally rarer than the panda, only lives on the north coast of British Columbia and gives and inspiring look at the interconnectedness of this coastal ecosystem existing in symbiosis with the indigenous communities there for thousands of years.