49 Megawatts Highlights Independent Power Project Problems

In October, I was in Toronto for a screening of my film You Never Bike Alone at the Planet in Focus Film Festival. One of the films that I managed to catch there by another BC filmmaker was 49 Megawatts.

Bryan Smith is a kayaker who discovered that the provincial government was going to allow a dam to be built on one of his favourite paddling places, the Ashlu River, near Squamish. His response, after initial incredulousness that anybody would want to industrialize such a beautiful natural setting, was to make a film. In his 30-minute documentary 49 Megawatts, completed earlier this year, he shows just how easy it to convert a healthy, attractive ecosystem into a gravel pit.

Regular readers of this magazine will know about the trouble at the Ashlu River. The Independent Power Project (IPP) is one of potentially hundreds that the BC Liberals are pushing to introduce on rivers across the province. With a brazenness that's become a hallmark of the province's dealings with local communities, when local government voted against Ledcor's IPP application for the Ashlu the province introduced Bill 30 to override its decision. Adding insult to injury, the IPP has a green energy label slapped on it.

Smith brings together a commendable range of voices – industry experts and professionals, mayors from Whistler and Squamish, university professors, energy specialists, and locals to grapple with the issues. The film points out that the project, which involves boring a large tunnel through a mountain, is clearly not a small project - defined as under 50 Megawatts - and thus should have undergone a more rigorous public planning process.

Conspicuously absent are spokespersons from Ledcor, the provincial government, and the Squamish Nation, who after initially opposing the project came out in support of it. Smith says they all declined on-camera interviews. The 30-minute Quicktime movie can be downloaded for free from www.Ashlu.info.

If you are very quick you can catch Jia Zhang-Ke’s moody Still Life (Sanxia haoren), a drama set against the construction of Three Gorges megadam project. The film, which won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, captures the surreal emptiness of the rapidly transforming landscape and its displaced townspeople with an artful eye and a dry humour. The film is at Vancity Theatre on 1st December.

Doris Dorrie's How To Cook Your Life (out now) is a celebrity chef show with a difference. It follows Edward Espe Brown a Bay Area chef and Zen priest who, for decades, has been teaching about the importance of putting spirituality into food. Ever since he wrote the popular The Tassajara Bread Book, published in 1970, he has been sharing some of the wisdom passed on from his master Zen priest Suzuki Roshi, such as “When you wash the rice, wash the rice. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. When you stir the soup, stir the soup.”

Brown was filmed at Buddhist centres in Austria and California, including Carmel Valley’s Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, where he first learned how to bake in his late teens 40 years ago, serving up his bite-sized zen lessons. While the director is highly respectful of her subject she is not afraid to show us his human shortcomings, such as an angry outburst when he can't get the cap off of a bottle of oil. In interview, the robed, talks about his successes and personal struggles, seasoning stories with self-deprecating humour and regret.

We can all benefit from becoming more connected with the food that we eat from field to plate, wasting less, and taking more time for a deeper appreciation of cooking. Food, Brown suggests, should be treated as essentially as eyesight instead of “just fuel for the human machine.” The points are good, although the film would have benefited from being shorter due to unnecessary repetition.

After a ten-year absence, Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) returns behind the camera with Youth Without Youth, a World War Two era fantasy that crosses ideas about the transmigration of souls with philosophy, spirituality, love and the cruelty of time. Tim Roth plays a 70-year-old professor who is struck by lighting and miraculously finds he has returned to his former youthful self. As he flees the nazis across Europe, the film explores in a series of episodes, the metaphysical themes of Romanian author Mircea Eliade’s novella on which the film is based. It has to be said that the early reviews have not been favourable, but this is Coppola so you can be sure that it will be well-crafted and you will take something away from the film.

Two of the best Amerian actors around Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play fortysomething siblings who find themselves caring for their dementia-struck father in The Savages (due out on the 26th). The film, which is directed by Tamara Jenkins (The Slums of Beverly Hills), has been praised for its intimate slice-of-life portrait and smart writing. There's humour and optimism even in life's darkest moments.