Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands | |
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Directed by | Peter Mettler |
Produced by | Sandy Hunter Laura Severinac |
Cinematography | Peter Mettler |
Edited by | Roland Schlimme |
Music by | Vincent Hänni Gabriel Scotti |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Mongrel Media |
Release date |
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Running time | 43 minutes |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands is a Canadian short documentary film, directed by Peter Mettler and released in 2009. [1] The film provides an aerial view of the environmental destruction wrought by the Alberta oil sands project. [2]
The first film ever produced by Greenpeace Canada, [3] it premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, [4] before having a limited theatrical run in January 2010. [1] It was released on DVD in April 2010. [5]
The film was a Genie Award nominee for Best Short Documentary at the 30th Genie Awards in 2010. [6]
Oil sands, tar sands, crude bitumen, or bituminous sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. Oil sands are either loose sands or partially consolidated sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay, and water, soaked with bitumen, a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum.
The Athabasca oil sands, also known as the Athabasca tar sands, are large deposits of bitumen or extremely heavy crude oil that constitute unconventional resources, located in northeastern Alberta, Canada – roughly centred on the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands, hosted primarily in the McMurray Formation, consist of a mixture of crude bitumen, silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest known reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of three major oil sands deposits in Alberta, along with the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits.
Peter Lynch is a Canadian filmmaker, most noted as the director and writer of the documentary films Project Grizzly, The Herd and Cyberman.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television presents an annual award for Best Motion Picture to the best Canadian film of the year.
The Canadian Screen Award for Best Live Action Short Drama is awarded by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to the best Canadian live action short film. Formerly part of the Genie Awards, since 2012 it has been presented as part of the Canadian Screen Awards.
Peter Mettler is a Swiss-Canadian film director and cinematographer. He is best known for his unique, intuitive approach to documentary, evinced by such films as Picture of Light (1994), Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), and The End of Time (2012). "His peripatetic lens is ever gravitating toward outsiders in search of ecstatic states," writes José Teodoro in Brick, "strange spectacles that defy straightforward documentation, and sacred places that promise some metaphysical deliverance. There are precedents for his methodologies—the films of Chris Marker and Werner Herzog come to mind—but Mettler’s gifts as an open and unobtrusive interviewer and his capacity to discover shared sensibilities between people of vastly diverse cultures and creeds feels singular."
Clement Willis Bowman was a Canadian chemical engineer, the founding chairperson of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority. He was a Member of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Global Energy Prize.
Project Oilsand, also known as Project Oilsands, and originally known as Project Cauldron, was a 1958 proposal to exploit the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta via the underground detonation of up to 100 nuclear explosives; hypothetically, the heat and pressure created by an underground detonation would boil the bitumen deposits, reducing their viscosity to the point that standard oilfield techniques could be used.
Petropolis may refer to:
Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands is a book written by Canadian lawyer, talk-show host and political activist Ezra Levant, which makes a case for exploiting the Athabasca oil sands and its sister projects in Alberta. Published in 2010 by McClelland & Stewart in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the book became a non-fiction best seller and won the National Business Book Award for 2011.
Tzeporah Berman is a Canadian environmental activist, campaigner and writer. She is known for her role as one of the organizers of the logging blockades in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia in 1992–93.
David Christensen is an Alberta film director and producer who since October 2007 has been an executive producer with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) at its Northwest Centre, based in Edmonton.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television presents an annual award for Best Feature Length Documentary. First presented in 1968 as part of the Canadian Film Awards, it became part of the Genie Awards in 1980 and the contemporary Canadian Screen Awards in 2013.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Award for Best Short Documentary is an annual Canadian film award, presented to a film judged to be the year's best short documentary film. Prior to 2012 the award was presented as part of the Genie Awards program; since 2012 it has been presented as part of the expanded Canadian Screen Awards.
The Champagne Safari is a 1995 Canadian documentary film directed by George Ungar. A portrait of industrialist Charles Bedaux, it focuses primarily on his controversial Bedaux expedition through northern Alberta and British Columbia in 1934, including Floyd Crosby's original footage of the expedition that had long been believed lost until being found in Paris in the 1980s.
In the Gutter and Other Good Places is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Cristine Richey and released in 1993. The film profiles three homeless men in Calgary, Alberta who support themselves dumpster diving and bottle picking for recyclable items.
Francis Damberger is a Canadian film and television director, producer and screenwriter. He is most noted for his 1991 film Solitaire, for which he was a Genie Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay at the 13th Genie Awards, and as a producer of Passchendaele, which won the Genie for Best Picture at the 29th Genie Awards.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo is a climate justice and Indigenous rights advocate from the Lubicon Cree community of Little Buffalo in northern Alberta, Canada. Growing up with firsthand experience of the effects of oil and gas drilling on local communities, she began advocating for an end to resource extraction in Indigenous territories but shifted focus to supporting a renewable energy transition after a ruptured pipeline spilled approximately 4.5 million litres of oil near Little Buffalo in 2011.
Passages is a Canadian short documentary film, directed by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre and released in 2008. Using animation, the film retells the story of the difficult birth of her own daughter Fiona, and the medical complications that potentially threatened her own life.
Roland Schlimme is a Canadian film editor known in particular for his work with filmmakers Peter Mettler and Jennifer Baichwal. He's also worked on several projects with artists Phillip Barker and Laura Taler as well as filmmakers Alison Murray and Cliff Caines.