By Ken Stern 

Friday Harbor Film Festival worth the trip

 

October 31, 2018



From oyster farming in Australia to wild horse racing in Mongolia and from pursing microscopic viruses in San Francisco to creating biochar in Hawaii, the Friday Harbor Film Festival’s 47 feature length and short documentaries offered enlightenment, entertainment and inspiration for everyone last weekend. The 1,200 people who filled five theaters over three days certainly found films that challenged them.

Showings started 10 a.m. Friday. “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World” first of two screenings was 1 p.m. It presented the shaping influences Native Americans have had in blues, jazz and rock and roll from each’s start.

Charley Patton, a guitarist, was called seminal to the blues in interviews with musicians, historians and filmmakers. This pattern was repeated in reviewing Link Wray’s career. And so it went, through Jimi Hendrix, with a clip from Woodstock, to Taboo.

Native American music has its own beat, sensibilities, cultures and history. Music is inseparable from its people. The critical disruption started with “contact,” ran through the Wounded Knee massacre, which ended the Ghost Dance, and continues to the encampment at Standing Rock. Chants, drumbeats and songs occur wherever people gather.

“A River’s Last Chance” tells the story of California’s Eel River, the third greatest salmon river on the West coast. Fishing, both commercial and recreational, logging, farming and dams and water diversion drastically changed the landscape and the river over the past 165 years. Then add the water needs of grape and marijuana growing. Can the river, and salmon, be saved? Pending fifty-year renewal of dam permits offers the possibility of removing them. The complex solution lies in collaboration.

That point also ran through “Wilder than Wild,” a film on wildfires in California four years in the making. After the catastrophic Rim Fire in 2012, people with vastly different positions on suppressing wildfires started meeting to create shared solutions, reforestation and fire prevention projects on which they could work together

One festival theme could be seen as linking Indians and the environment to the country’s past and future. California tribes shaped the landscape with fire. After contact, they were killed or removed, thus prevented from setting fires.

Catastrophic wildfires are a result of climate change. Drought and warmer temperatures brought bark beetle infestations. Add population growth in the wild lands urban interface and the U.S. Forest Service’s 20th century campaign to prevent and stop forest fires, and the nation confronts perfect fire storm conditions annually.

“Dirt Rich” is characteristic of many of the films: an original, passionate, important work highlighting a critical environmental issue. Along with its theme, it offered great cinematography and an original, well integrated score. The film opens in Hawaii, but travels across five continents, from Iceland to Indonesia to California to Costa Rica. “The only chance we have to halt the effects of runaway global warming is to quickly draw carbon back down into the soils,” whether that is with biochar, beavers or bison, the film says.

Closer to home, the short “Plane Truths” examined the Navy’s planned expansion of Growler aircraft at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. Interviews with Coupeville’s mayor, nearby farmers, health professionals, the base commander and environmentalists, including staff at Olympic National Park, provided views primarily on noise, but also on contaminated groundwater from historic use of fire retardant chemicals and pressures on orcas from the use of sonar.

Paul Watson was honored Friday night with the Andrew V. McLaglen Lifetime Achievement Award for his 40-plus year historic career as a co-founder of first Greenpeace then the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in the 1970s.

The award “honors a person who has made outstanding contributions to raising awareness, and his or her professional excellence in the field of filmmaking and activism. It is presented in memory of McLaglen, an award-winning film director and long-time resident of San Juan Island

Opening night gala attendees then saw the film “Chasing the Thunder,” about two Sea Shepherd ships’ epic 110-day pursuit of the Thunder, a fish poaching vessel. It is filmed on both ships as they followed the Thunder across four oceans at the bottom of the world. The chase ends when the pirate captain sinks his own vessel, hoping to have the evidence disappear.

The festival ended Sunday evening with more awards and free showings of audience choices for best of show films. “The Bleeding Edge” was voted the most popular feature. “The 100 Year Old Whale” won best short. Winners were poicked fo explorers and adventures, things to consider and tales from the heart.

The festival tagline: “Stories of the Pacific Rim & Beyond” is accurate. Its website: http://www.fhff.

 

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