Get on your bikes and ride — Jodie Martinson followed a group of cycling activists for her new documentary, To the Tar Sands

To the Tar Sands

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There’s a stereotype in Alberta that, outside a few left-wing communities in Calgary and Edmonton, everyone loves the oil industry. A new documentary about a group of young cyclists from across the country is set to prove this notion wrong.

“We met people in Alberta who had oil in their backyard,” says Jodie Martinson, the filmmaker behind To the Tar Sands, which will show at the Calgary International Film Festival. In one case, a woman they met near Fort Saskatchewan complained of having her farm surrounded by oil processing plants. “It meant so much to the people we were meeting to have the attention of the cyclists.”

The film was shot cinema-vérité-style, from the back of Martinson’s bike. It followed a group of young environmentalists on a trek taken last summer from Waterton National Park to the oilsands north of Fort McMurray.

Martinson, who previously made a short recycling documentary at McGill University during her student days in Montreal, initially came on board to document the trip in short clips for the cyclists’ website. When the trip was finished, however, she realized she had enough material to make a full documentary. “My interest is in using journalism as a tool for social change,” she says. “This seemed like a nuanced way to tell the story.”

The ordinary people the cyclists met along the way were part of this nuance: average Albertans who had never been environmental activists but were forced to take action when the industry came into their backyards. The cyclists themselves were the other part of the nuance.

“At the end of the day, even cyclists with greasy chains have oil on their hands,” Martinson says. “They struggle a lot in the film with how to deal with this utopic vision.”

In Fort McMurray, for instance, the cyclists stayed in one of the city’s sprawling new suburbs, with a family that worked in the oilsands. The experience added further to the film’s theme that, despite the oilsands’ problems, the province depends heavily on them. “We kept meeting people who said ‘we need to slow down [on oilsands development].’ Most Albertans want a slowdown,” she says, “[but], in an economy that can’t imagine any other kind of economic base, it’s scary to hear the word ‘moratorium.’ That fear is really understandable.”

Despite the serious political overtones of the film, it’s not all doom and gloom. On the contrary, Martinson’s goal was to get away from stuffy documentary filmmaking and concentrate on the more human side of the debate over the oilsands.

“It’s also a really humorous film. They were bumbling across the country,” she says. “Whenever we see images of the tar sands, it’s so grey and drab. These are people whose voices have never been heard.”