February 14, 2023 - Filmmaker Ed Akselrud (KEEP COOL: FORTIFYING BRITISH COLUMBIA)

KEEP COOL: FORTIFYING BRITISH COLUMBIA, 30min.,
Directed by Ed Akselrud
In 2017 and 2018 British Columbia experienced devastating wildfires that reshaped the province. From the ashes, a surprisingly complex “war machine” arose to reforest the scarred land. Keep Cool: Fortifying British Columbia explores this machine, the key players involved, and the significance of government-designated Old Grown Management Areas in the province’s north.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23793080/
https://instagram.com/edakselrud
https://twitter.com/edaxmedia

Get to know the filmmaker:
At the risk of sounding cheesy, it was definitely the people we met and interviewed. The project was originally meant to be a 3-5 minute video, but when we arrived we were taken to so many sites and locations and introduced to so many people involved by our partner Zanzibar that I felt that this needed to be a bigger project. There are so many moving parts in forestry and we got to interact with so many (though not all) of them. So the planned runtime expanded from those 5 minutes, to 12-15, then to 20, and finally somehow landed at 30 minutes. Going in, I had no idea how much there was to this story and how many different people and characters were involved in this herculean effort, so I felt compelled to try and illustrate their work at the scale I thought it deserved.

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