CLEARCUT
Dir. Ryszard Bugajski, 1991
Canada. 100 min
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 5 PM
Peter Maguire (Ron Lea) is a white lawyer from Toronto, representing an unspecified indigenous tribe in rural Canada against an encroaching paper mill’s thirst for profit. Maguire is unsuccessful in keeping the company from building a road and clear-cutting their way through the tribe’s land, but his frustrations only manifest as platitudes and fantasies of revenge. That is, until the arrival of Arthur (Graham Greene), a mysterious native, who kidnaps the mill’s owner and drags both him and Maguire into the forest to enact the lawyer’s once empty threats. As the Wisakedjak—a trickster of indigenous folklore—Arthur’s unrelenting violence is doled out with a sardonic stoicism. His actions upon the mill’s owner mimicking the treatment of the trees and land by the loggers and paper mill.
With a screenplay based on the novel A Dream Like Mine by M.T. Kelly, Bugajski’s film places white liberal pacifism in the cross hairs, and questions if violence is necessary and moral in the face of capitalism, the state, and environmental destruction. The answers, and the difference between right and wrong, may not be so… CLEARCUT.