Everyday Activist - Hadwin’s Judgement

Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 at 02:00 PM

Hadwin's Judgement

Movie Review by Everyday Activist X CalgaryMovies.com

While I was working on my top documentaries of 2015 list, I had to go to the Banff Centre website and as luck would have it, I read a tweet about one of the films that made my list. Hadwin’s Judgement will be at the Globe Cinema, opening this Friday, January 22, 2016. Given that my last posts were about the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour 2015/16 screenings (Program 1 / Program 2), it fits that I should write about one of the award winners. I’m just so happy I didn’t miss the Calgary screening! I knew about the Banff screening in February, which I can’t attend.

First off I thought the film was great, I’ll probably catch a matinee this weekend; however, in terms of activism, the timing of the film doesn’t do it any favors as it talks about events that happened in 1997. Had it been paired with John Vaillant’s award winning book The Golden Spruce back in 2005, its reception would have been better. Nearly twenty years later, few remember the actual event and ten years after the book release that reminder has dissipated, though the book sales have probably increased. People still debate whether or not Grant Hadwin lives given his body was never recovered.

Like all resource extraction, logging has devastating effects on ecosystems and in British Columbia it still is a sensitive issue. I remember visiting my sister in Vancouver and the sign on a napkin dispenser said, “We support BC logging. Take lots.” Grant Hadwin, a logger turned environmentalist, had an intimate connection to nature and its destruction. On his word thousands of trees fell. Over time he wanted to do things differently, but he didn’t have the support back then that he would have had now, especially with social media. In the late 1990s, to get the attention of the world to what was happening in his forest, he cut down the one tree the world cared about; the Golden Spruce.

His publicity stunt did not quite go how he thought it would. When he had to go to court to answer for his crime of cutting down the tree, he never made it. Later on, a kayak, some tools and his “judgement”, a paper document protected in a plastic bag, washed up onto a northern shore. Experts don’t believe that these landed accidentally. The film talks a lot about Grant Hadwin’s strength, helping the audience buy into a narrative that he could have survived and may now live a solitary life in the wilderness.

The film is definitely worth watching; however, I would read the book too. It gives a slightly different view of Grant Hadwin, which is much easier to do in a book than in a 90 minute movie. When you are tied to the land, watching greed destroy it affects you and John Vaillant, in his brilliant prose, gets into the mental health issues Grant Hadwin suffered as a result. John Vaillant is of course in the movie and looks exactly the same off screen. He was in Banff teaching the Wilderness Writing Workshop during the Mountain Film and Book Festival, as well as promoting his newest book, The Jaguar’s Children, a work of fiction, though just as compelling. I only had enough time to tell him how much I enjoyed his writing.

Calgary Showtimes: Hadwin's Judgement >