Blockade

After making an impressive debut with Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution, Nettie Wild, in her second film, focused her fearlessly honest documentary eye on an at-the-barricades conflict in our own province of British Columbia. In the early 1990s, long-simmering disputes over native land claims and contentious forestry practices boiled over into a tense confrontation in northern B.C. between the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples, on the one hand, and non-natives and loggers, on the other. At the epicentre of the dispute were native blockades of logging roads and a CN Rail line. Wild and crew (including regular cinematographer Kirk Tougas) spent 15 months chronicling the complexities of this ever-escalating conflict; Blockade offers a thoughtful, reflective, multi-sided account of a highly-charged subject. Characteristic of Wild's exemplary work is the generosity (but also warts-and-all honesty) accorded all viewpoints in the dispute; the refusal to shy away from troubling ambiguities and paradoxes; the preference for insight and integrity over easy emotional pay-off or simple black-and-white answers. Alanis Obomsawin’s powerful Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, an account of the blockade at Oka, was released the same year and received more attention; Wild’s film is quieter and less polemical, but its complexity and intelligence made it no less persuasive. Colour, Digibeta video. 90 mins.