H2Oil film screening at World Education Forum via Cinema Politica & Tadamon!

Friday October 29th
Ramallah Palestine, room T101
screening 19h-20h30
World Education Forum
download conference program

also feat. ‘A Day In Palestine’ by filmmaker Mary Ellen Davis
& The Ballad of Crowfoot by songwriter/filmmaker Willie Dunn

To celebrate the World Education Forum in Palestine Cinema Politica in collaboration with Tadamon! will present the feature length documentary H2Oil in Ramallah, Palestine. A film by Shannon Walsh that critically examines the oil sands of Alberta, this powerful exposé brings to light the key global issue of dependence on oil and the subsequent impacts on the land, environment and people around the world. Specifically H2Oil addresses the struggle of indigenous nations in Alberta who are directly impacted by the oil sands mega-project, as well as the poisoned waters and wildlife that are increasingly common place in areas impacted by the oil sands, an extraction enterprise widely recognized as the largest industrial development project for oil in world history.

This event will specifically highlight indigenous struggles in Canada as movements linked in solidarity with the struggles of the indigenous people of Palestine. The screening connects Palestinian resistance against Israeli colonization and the struggle of indigenous peoples of North America against the colonial genocide that defined the original relations between First Nations people and the Canadian state. Cinema Politica presents these films in Palestine as part of an ongoing collaboration to highlight key struggles for social justice and education via cinema.

H2Oil
directed by Shannon Walsh / Canada / 2009 / 72 min

Ever wonder where America gets most of its oil? If you thought it was Saudi Arabia or Iraq you are wrong. America’s biggest oil supplier has quickly become Canada’s oil sands. Located under Alberta’s pristine boreal forests, the process of oil sands extraction uses up to 4 barrels of fresh water to produce only one barrel of crude oil.

It goes without saying that water — its depletion, exploitation, privatization and contamination — has become the most important issue to face humanity in this century. At the same time, the war for oil is well underway across the globe. A struggle is increasingly being fought between water and oil, not only over them.

Alberta’s oil sands are at the centre of this tension. As the province rushes towards a large-scale extraction, the social, ecological and human impacts are hitting a crisis point. In only a few short years the continent will be a crisscross of pipelines, reaching from the arctic all the way to the southern US, leaving toxic water basins the size of Lake Ontario, and surface-mines as large as Florida.

H2Oil follows a voyage of discovery, heartbreak and politicization in the stories of those attempting to defend water in Alberta against tar sands expansion. Unlikely alliances are built and lives are changed as they come up against the largest industrial project in human history.

Ultimately we ask what is more important, oil or water? And what will be our response?

With hope and courage H2Oil tells the story of one of the most significant, and destructive projects of our time. h2oildoc.com

A Day in Palestine
Mary Ellen Davis /2007 / Canada / 6 minutes

Deceptively beautiful, this Super-8 Kodachrome collection of vignettes of everyday life for Palestinians under occupation has a dreamlike quality, but the reality is anything but. A man picks olives against an azure sky. Grandmothers plead with expressionless soldiers as excavators wait on the hills behind them. Children and the elderly struggle to climb the brutal concrete wall that divides their homes, schools, mosques and workplaces as the film builds to a powerful indictment against oppression.

The Ballad of Crowfoot
Willie Dunn / 1968 / Canada / 10 min

This short film examines the situation of Aboriginal people in North America through the figure of Crowfoot, the legendary 19th-century Blackfoot leader of the Plains. A rapid montage of archival photos, etchings and contemporary newspaper clippings is married to the words and music of an impassioned ballad written by Micmac singer and songwriter Willie Dunn.

Cinema Politica is a Montreal-based media arts, non-profit network of community and campus locals that screen independent political film and video by Canadian and international artists throughout Canada and abroad. www.cinemapolitica.org

Tadamon! (Arabic for “solidarity”), is a Montreal-based collective which works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality and justice in the ‘Middle East’ and in diaspora communities in Montreal and beyond. tadamon.ca