HALIFAX — Passions ran high at Halifax’s film festival as Ellen Page and co-director Ian Daniel issued an urgent call to action for Nova Scotia’s leaders with their newest documentary There’s Something in the Water.

The film, based on a book by the same name from Dalhousie University professor Ingrid Waldron, presents a 70-minute, unflinching gaze at the untold stories of environmental racism in Nova Scotia, centred around the women at the forefront of their community’s fights for environmental justice.

“What the government has done to keep this hidden has been extremely horrific and problematic,” Page said in an interview alongside Daniel before the screening at FIN: Atlantic International Film Festival on Saturday night.

“As I was learning more about these issues and I got Ingrid Waldron’s book, it just blew my mind and moved me profoundly — and what felt so crucial was amplifying her work and the voices of the women on the front lines of these issues.”

There’s Something in the Water offers audiences an intimate portrayal of three predominantly Black or Indigenous rural Nova Scotian communities suffering the multi-generational consequences of environmental damage inflicted on their marginalized areas.

“There’s still people out there that don’t believe there’s such a thing as environmental racism,” said Shelburne resident and activist Louise Delisle during a question and answer period following the screening.

“We have to talk about it. We have to make them understand what it is.”

The film follows Page from the Black community in the south end of Shelburne suffering high cancer rates due to pollution from a dump placed in the middle of their neighbourhood during the 1940s, to Boat Harbour where the Pictou Landing First Nation have endured decades of polluted water caused by effluent from a nearby paper mill. Finally they go to the Shubenacadie River, where Mi’kmaq grandmothers have been fighting to protect their water from an oil and gas company which plans to pump excess brine from salt caverns into the river water.

There’s Something in the Water, which made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) earlier this month, carries a particularly timely relevance in Canada as voters prepare to bring their convictions to the polls in the upcoming federal election.

For Page, the timing offers an opportunity to put pressure on political leaders to heed the warnings offered in the film, and take action on climate issues, particularly those facing the nation’s most marginalized populations.

“If you’re not implementing the policies that are recognizing that marginalized communities are suffering the most and dealing with the most, then we’re not achieving what needs to be achieved,” said Page.

“On top of putting the pressure on the government to show up in terms of this climate crisis, it’s also about, on many levels, decolonizing our consciousness … in terms of no longer normalizing the devastation and degradation of our environment and then criminalizing people like the grassroots grandmothers.”

Several of these grandmothers took the stage during Saturday night’s Q&A period to shed further light on the issues impacting the Shubenacadie River, and to issue calls-to-action to the province’s leaders.

“They should be standing beside us and fighting for us too,” said Sipekne’katik First Nation water protector Dorene Bernard.

“If they’re not then they’re against us — this is a revolution. This is about protecting your future for your children and your grandchildren.”

Page said she hopes the film will help educate Canadians about the instances of environmental injustice in the country, and inspire voters to urge their own governments to act.

“I hope that people put a lot of pressure on our government because right now they seem to be favouring corporate interests over human beings and our environment and that needs to change,” said Page.

Raised with an idyllic view of Nova Scotia and its natural wonders, Page said she was shocked to learn of the pressing injustices facing communities in her own home province, and was inspired to act quickly to use her platform to bring a spotlight to the issue.

“We talked to Ingrid and the grassroots grandmothers, and headed up to Nova Scotia with two 5Ds, small cameras, because we felt like it was crucial and absolutely urgent to amplify Ingrid’s work and all the incredible women that you’ll see in this film,” Page told audiences before the screening.

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Page said the two filmmakers shot the documentary themselves, spending long days working with and learning from the activists and communities they featured.

“You learn about the real history of the things that they’ve been battling and fighting for so long, and the inherited trauma and inherited issues that they face,” Daniel said.

“I think at the end of the day, after you’ve really understood the issues at hand, you just see their perseverance and the ways that they are — I mean sadly they have to be — fighting these fights.”

Page has been outspoken on many of these environmental justice cases over the past several months.

In December, she took to Twitter to speak out against the Northern Pulp Mill’s plan to shift its effluent dumping from Boat Harbour to the Northumberland Strait after the 2015 Boat Harbour Act legislated Jan. 31, 2020 as the deadline for Northern Pulp to cease operations at the Boat Harbour effluent treatment facility.

In late January, Page appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and again spoke out about the Northern Pulp Mill and other instances of environmental racism in Nova Scotia.

“Whether it’s the disproportionate amount of landfills that are placed next to communities of people of colour in Nova Scotia, or whether it’s about a pulp mill in Pictou, Nova Scotia, that’s been there forever and has destroyed the environment and the land of First Nations people,” Page said in the viral interview, which also made an appearance in the documentary.

“This is something that’s happening. It’s happening to the most marginalized people, and we need to be talking about it.”

This past spring Page used her platform to encourage her followers to donate to the GoFundMe for the grassroots grandmothers’ legal fees, as they took their fight against Alton Gas to Nova Scotia’s Supreme Court.

For both Page and Daniel, it is these women at the centre of each environmental justice movement that bring passion, inspiration and heart to the film.

“We all feel like a family really, trying to get the voices out,” said Daniel.

“They couldn’t be more amazing people and such lights on this world, so obviously that inspires all the work that we do, it’s really driven the work of making the film.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a Halifax-based journalist and a freelance contributor for Star Halifax. Follow her on Twitter: @jsrutgers

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