Forest Echoes

Inspired by my experiences as a legal observer and environmental activist, and workshopped through ImagineNATIVE’s screenwriting shorts lab, Forest Echoes is an Indigi-queer love story set against the backdrop of the climate crisis and the opioid epidemic. From 2021 - 2022, on the West Coast of British Columbia, over one thousand Land Defenders were arrested while protesting the logging of Canada’s last old growth forests. As a part of this camp, I witnessed wanton and unnecessary violence and a disregard for safety on the part of police, which shocked and disturbed me. Police deployed pepper spray on peaceful protestors at close range, sometimes holding people’s legs open to spray them in the genital area. Protestors cut from tree-sits and tripods sustained bodily injuries, concussions, lacerations and miscarriages. I saw officers (many of whom had taped over their badge numbers to prevent identification and were sporting “Thin Blue Line” patches) pull women across the ground by their braids, push a disabled woman backwards to the ground, step on hands and feet, and, most egregiously, use chainsaws and other power tools to cut out “locked-in” protestors. Besides these immediate and long-term traumas, we have all known people who have passed away in the months that followed, due to suicide or as a result of the opioid poisoning epidemic sweeping the globe. Amid all this tragedy, Forest Echoes wonders: when the police leave, and the camera crews, and the medics, and the weekend warriors... What’s left? Who’s left? In the age of social media activism, images of BIPOC people being brutalized by police carry a certain currency, but what about the lives that are irrevocably altered by this violence? This short film tells the story of two Land Defenders in the aftermath, choosing love in the face of loss, finding strength in the eternal power of the Land, and telling our stories of resistance, which will one day be as old as the ancient forests themselves.