English & Comparative Literary Studies - Events Calendar

"WIEBO'S WAR tells the story of a Christian Community, at war with the oil and gas industry. Wiebo Ludwig is the prime suspect in a series of pipeline bombings. The bombings echo a campaign of sabotage he waged against the gas industry 10 years ago ... barricading roads, blowing up wells, and culminating in the unsolved death of a 16-year-old girl on his family's farm. The Ludwig family live in northern Alberta, in the heart of Canada's oilpatch. They came 25 years ago, wanting to live more closely according to their Christian beliefs, according to scripture. They built their community in the wilderness with their own hands, not knowing that it lay on top of one of the largest undeveloped fields of natural gas on the continent. Other people take whatever buyout is on offer, and make an accommodation with the oil and gas industry. Wiebo and his family - after years of trying to deal with the industry, politicians and the media - went to war. The community is self-sufficient in food and energy, but isolated. Apart from Wiebo and his wife Mamie, there are 5 married couples, seven unmarried adults, and 38 grandchildren, many entering their teenaged years. They are security conscious, aware that they are being watched, open to the outside world, but guarded. And they believe that those who don't share their beliefs, like filmmaker David York, are living in terrible darkness." The politics of contemporary documentary film-making have never been as urgent as today. The past twenty years – the era that has come to be known as globalization – has witnessed an explosion both in the number of documentaries being made (from short form to feature-length) and the number of festivals at which they are shown. The rise in the number of documentaries has been made possible in part by new digital technologies that have allowed high-quality films to be created relatively inexpensively. Perhaps more significantly, filmmakers are responding to a perceived need to bear witness to all manner of crimes against individuals, groups and the environment that rarely appear as part of regular print or broadcast news. The vast majority of documentaries today understand themselves as offering complex narratives and pointed interventions into a media and political landscape characterized by stasis and a lack of real alternative or positive visions of the future, at a moment when precisely such alternatives are required. A number of these pointedly political documentaries have reached large audiences and have become part of broader debates about the many challenges we collectively face today.