[van-announce] Locked Horns: Documentary on Big Oil in the North

[resist admin]

From: Tania Willard <Tania at redwiremag.com>
To: redwire at lists.resist.ca
Subject: [Redwire] FWD: Locking Horns
Date: 16 May 2003 21:38:22 -0600


"LOCKED HORNS: The Fate of Old Crow",
PREMIERING ACROSS CANADA ON CBC
"WITNESS",
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2003 AT 8:00 P.M.

Andrew Gregg's Hour-Long Documentary,
Produced by Toronto's 90th Parallel Film and
Television Productions Ltd.,
Tells the Story of Old Crow, a Yukon Community
Imperiled by Big Oil Interests in America




(Toronto) LOCKED HORNS: The Fate of Old
Crow , a new, hour-long documentary film by
Andrew Gregg about a people, their Yukon
community, and a millennia-old way of life that
could be wiped out by a threat from the United
States: the search for oil in Alaska. LOCKED
HORNS : The Fate of old Crow will be broadcast
across Canada on CBC Television's 'Witness',
airing Wednesday, June 4, 2003 at 8:00 P.M.

LOCKED HORNS , written, directed and
produced by Andrew Gregg for award-winning,
Toronto-based 90th Parallel Film and Television
Productions Ltd., has also been invited for a
special premiere screening at the prestigious
25th Annual MOUNTAINFILM Festival in
Telluride, Colorado, May 23-26, 2003.
MOUNTAINFILM showcases films that reflect
the power of geography in shaping our view of
the world. Last year, another Andrew Gregg/90th
Parallel collaboration, Wade Davis: Explorer,
won the 'Best Biography' award at
MOUNTAINFILM. This year, along with LOCKED
HORNS , yet another collaboration between
Gregg and 90th Parallel, The Cold Embrace,
has also been invited to the festival.

LOCKED HORNS tells the story of the Vuntut
Gwitchin aboriginal community Old Crow, the
only town in the Yukon not connected to the
world by a road, and the only town in the
Territory above the Arctic Circle.

As the film reveals, local hunter Stephen Frost
has only known one commute in his life: from
Old Crow to his hunting camp 25 miles down
the Porcupine River, halfway to the border with
Alaska. Like pretty well everyone else in Old
Crow, Frost makes the trip because his life
revolves around the 120,000-strong Porcupine
Caribou herd. The animals, the source of the
community's winter meat, migrate past Old
Crow twice a year - once on the way to calve on
the North Slope of Alaska and one more time on
their way back to winter on the Mackenzie Delta.
As far as archeologists can tell this dependence
of man on beast has continued for here for
more than 10,000 years.

Old Crow is a proud community: proud of their
traditional way of life, happy in their relative
isolation, and determined to see their aboriginal
culture survive.

But for Stephen and the other hunters of Old
Crow there is a problem: there is oil under the
calving grounds on the other side of the border
and the U.S. government, currently led by an
oil-state President, wants to drill. It will likely
mean the end of the caribou, the end of the
migrations, the end of Old Crow and the end of
Stephen Frost.

The Gulf War, America's increasing
dependence on foreign oil, Iraq and Iran, a
Republican Whitehouse, national security and
September 11, have all pushed the United
States to target domestic oil and gas resources
for development. President Bush himself has
said again and again that Alaskan oil will be
good for the USA, and millions of American
consumers seem eager to agree.

The only problem is that the needs of the United
States could destroy Stephen Frost and this
Canadian community, unless he and the people
of Old Crow can figure out a way to stop the oil
from flowing.

Like the locked horns of the caribou in combat,
the film LOCKED HORNS reveals a variety of
ongoing conflicts: Indians vs. whites,
environment vs. business, small culture vs.
mono-culture, U.S. vs. Canada, Republican vs.
Democrats, indigenous vs. global. But, most
importantly, perhaps, this story challenges us to
face one question: how important is cultural
survival to us?

LOCKED HORNS: The Fate of Old Crow is, at its
centre, a portrait of a people, their village, and a
way of life that stands in the path of the
juggernaut of American progress.

Filmmaker Andrew Gregg is very much at home
in the Yukon. At the beginning of his career he
was a general reporter and photographer at the
Whitehouse Star, and later worked for two years
at Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon - Nedaa,
producing segments and short documentaries
for the first two season of that Yukon Indian
current affairs program. Gregg's film credits
include six hour-long documentary portrait films
for CBC Television's 'Life and Times' series,
including Wade Davis: Explorer; Susan
Aglukark: Polarities; Robert Bateman;
Christopher and Mary Pratt; Studio: Alex Colville;
and Sit Down, Shut Up, Don Messer's On, as
well as a wide variety of other documentary
specials, including the premiere episode of
Canada: A People's History, for CBC. His next
project is They Built the Railway, a four-hour
mini-series telling the true-life stories of the
people who built Canada's historic Canadian
Pacific Railway.

Executive producer of LOCKED HORNS is
Gordon Henderson of 90th Parallel Productions
Ltd. Sandra Laronde narrates the film. Hilary
Armstrong is senior producer of CBC Witness .
Marie Natanson is executive producer of
independent documentaries for CBC Television.


LOCKED HORNS: The Fate of Old Crow is
produced by 90th Parallel Film and Television
Productions Ltd. in association with the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and with
the participation of the Canadian Television
Fund created by the Government of Canada and
the Canadian cable industry, Telefilm Canada:
Equity Investment Program, LFP: License Fee
Program, the Government of Canada -
Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit
Program, and the Ontario Media Development
Corporation - Tax Credit Program.



90th Parallel Film and Television Productions
Ltd. is a Toronto-based production company
founded and owned by Gordon Henderson. The
company produces high-end documentaries,
including the Gemini Award-winning Ronnie
Hawkins: Tall Tales from the Long Corner. As
an independent producer, Gordon Henderson
acted as Series Senior Producer on the Gemini
Award-winning CBC series, Canada: A People's
History. Recent productions include the feature
documentary, The Cold Embrace, for CTV and
Discovery Channel Canada, Wade Davis, for
CBC TV's 'Life and Times' series, The Season,
an hour-long documentary for CBC TV's
"Witness' series, and At The Post, an eight-part
documentary series for Life Network.



-30-


Support Photography for LOCKED HORNS is
available at:
www.cbc.ca/imagegallery

For more information, preview cassettes,
interview requests, audio/video clips, etc.:



Jeremy Katz
Publicist
90th Parallel Films
Tel: 416-656-6970
E-Mail: jeremyk at sympatico.ca

	OR
Wendy Forbes
Publicist
CBC Television
416-205-2734
wendy_forbes at cbc.ca



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