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Two Movies, One Message: Filmmakers Hope to Save 'Your Land'
Missoulian, April 14, 2000
by Sherry Jones
This is, after all, the age of technology. So using the camera to help change the world seemed fitting to Joe DeFelice and Doug Hawes-Davis, Missoula filmmakers with environmental axes to grind and merit awards for doing so from the International Wildlife Film Festival.
For Hawes-Davis, 31, the issue is logging on National Forest Service lands, This Land is Your Land, his seventh IWFF film, intersperses provocative footage of clear-cuts, denuded alpine ridges and barren, eroded stream beds with interviews with Congresspeople, academics and environmentalists decrying logging on public lands - and, specifically, the United States Forest Service.
"The main activity of the U.S. Forest Service is to cut it down." "An out-of-control, rogue timber beast," "Addicted to timber." "We're subsidizing the degradation of the national forest system." "Corporate welfare."
Strong words, yes - and with no rebuttals. But objective journalism was not Hawes-Davis' goal. Not this time. He filmed This Land is Your Land on contract for the Sierra Club, which wanted a point-of-view piece building an argument against public lands logging, he says. Build an argument he did, and so effectively that he convinced himself.
"I'd given it a lot of thought in the past, that issue," he says. "I had gone back and forth." After all, he says, he's a strong believer that people should use local, raw materials as much as possible - a philosophy called bio-regionalism - and banning public lands logging seemed at odds with that notion.
After making This Land is Your Land, he says, he realized the region's timber needs can be met with wood from private lands.
"I don't feel public lands are necessary...to support our way of life in the Northern Rockies," he says.
Not only are public lands being logged to death, they're being ridden to death, too. That's the premise of DeFelice's film, Motor, a 38 minute look at off-road motorized vehicle use.
"It's a rights versus responsibility thing," says DeFelice, 30. His film outlines the debate with viewpoints from motorized-use advocates, public lands managers, environmentalists and a plethora of statistics, but lands squarely on the side of conservation.
Any other priority, he says, is misguided.
"I was at a public hearing in the Beaverhead," he says. "You could tell people on both sides really loved the land. Some felt threatened about their 'right' to do something. If they only knew what it's like back East."
DeFelice hails from Connecticut, and he's seen how development and crowding - including the skyrocketing growth in off-road motorized vehicle use - can eat away at pristine forest until it's all gone, he says.
It's happening here too, he says.
"It's only going to get worse. They have to start thinking more about the responsibility of protecting some of these areas. The population's going to keep going up; it's going to get more crowded, and what are they going to do then?"
To make Motor - which also won a film festival Merit Award for Conservation Message - DeFelice traveled the country on a one-month Greyhound Bus pass, alone, with only his camera. He shot footage of Jet-Ski riders in the water; of snowmobilers in West Yellowstone; of all-terrain and off-road vehicle users in the desert, on the beach, in the forests. (Giving lie to claims that motorized recreationists need their vehicles for access to the areas where they play, DeFelice walked, with his camera, to film these scenes.) He interviewed people, wrote his script, and narrated and edited the film.
Motor is, by the way, DeFelice's first film.
"I can't begin to stress the difficulty and challenge of what Joe did," Hawes-Davis says. "He did the whole thing himself. It's more than twice as difficult as what I did." Drury Drury Carr, who works with Hawes-Davis at High Plains Films, helped with many aspects of This Land is Your Land.
They make their films to make a difference. Part of the challenge, the men say, is getting their work seen. Festival-goers will have the chance to screen them, but then what?
The Sierra Club is already distributing VHS copies of This Land is Your Land to member organizations and "anyone who asks for one," Hawes-Davis says. DeFelice has a couple of distributors in mind for Motor.
And then, it's time to move on to the next project. DeFelice has a few ideas brewing - and may be working for High Plains Films soon. Hawes-Davis is set to release his next film, Killing Coyote, and screen it at the New Crystal Theater this spring. A look at the conflicts between wildlife and landowners in the West - this film offers various points of view before coming out on the side of the critters.
"There's no such thing as unbiased journalism," Hawes-Davis says, "Every single article, movie, documentary - it's all biased by your experiences in your life. You can't get away from that."
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