BY STEVE MARTINDALE
For Salt Spring Film Festival Society
The Salt Spring Film Festival’s Best of the Fests series at ArtSpring wraps up on Wednesday, Feb. 19 with Fairy Creek, a new documentary chronicling the Ada’itsx Valley anti-logging blockades, presented by attending filmmakers Jen Muranetz and Sepehr Samimi.
Visceral frontline footage of environmentalists facing off with loggers and the RCMP makes up the core of this engaging documentary, which captures the action from ground to sky as protestors form barriers with their bodies at road level, while activists dangling amidst forest canopies are removed by police officers dropping from helicopters hovering above the trees.
The largest civil disobedience action in Canadian history — attracting tens of thousands of protestors and leading to nearly 1,200 arrests — the Fairy Creek protests ultimately resulted in a provincial injunction protecting the pristine Vancouver Island valley from being logged. Minister of Forests Ravi Parmar announced just last week that temporary protections in the Fairy Creek watershed have now been extended through September 2026.
This gripping immersion into the conflict features a number of Salt Spring residents on the frontlines and will be of particular interest to anyone who participated in the protests.
“Many Salt Spring Island residents spent a lot of time and energy at the Fairy Creek blockade,” said Muranetz, “so we are looking forward to bringing this film to a community that cares deeply about this story.”
With an array of likable and articulate characters representing a range of perspectives, Fairy Creek is an urgent and timely portrait of collective resistance that simultaneously explores the internal conflicts in a mass movement of civil disobedience.
Depicting the last-ditch efforts to defend one of Canada’s last remaining old-growth forests as a panoply of voices and opinions, where impassioned disagreements characterize a growing movement, Muranetz deftly documents differences in priorities, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous protestors debate the implications of true Indigenous land sovereignty.
Fairy Creek also illuminates stark disagreements within the Pacheedaht First Nation, challenging the perception of a monolithic Indigenous perspective. Some memorably uncomfortable scenes of conflict among Indigenous people spill over from the forest frontlines to urban street protests.
Muranetz produced the 2020 film What About Our Future?, which won the Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming at Vancouver’s DOXA festival. Samimi was assistant producer and additional cinematographer on Jennifer Abbott’s award-winning The Magnitude of All Things, which screened at Fulford Hall in 2021. Following two mid-February screenings at the Victoria Film Festival, Muranetz and Samimi will be here to present Fairy Creek on Feb. 19 at ArtSpring.
Tickets are $14 each and available online at artspring.ca; in advance by phone (250-537-2102); or in person, Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.