New Urbanism Film Festival - Accidental Parkland
Toronto is blessed with a bounty of natural spaces within its urban footprint. Yet they are poorly understood and widely under appreciated. Our future depends on changing our relationship with them.
Interview with Writer, Director and Producer: Dan Berman
Watch Accidental Parkland on Vimeo on demand
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
I wanted to make a piece that was local and that celebrates Toronto. The ravines and the green spaces in Toronto are often overlooked by locals and visitors alike. They are literally overlooked, because they lie below the built spaces of the city and have been hidden by 50 years of civil engineering. As the greater Toronto area is adding 100,000 or more new residents per year, and because there's a Greenbelt around the urban region containing sprawl, the intensification of our cities is making these green resources ever more valuable to maintain our quality of life. I set out to make a film that could change the way people here understand these unique features of our geography, and would inspire them to get out and explore them.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
The subject is very local to Toronto. I think, however, that this film challenges everyone to re-think our understanding of nature within cities. Until clean water technology was implemented at the turn of the last century, cities were squalid and unhealthy environments for many residents. Nature was seen as something that needed to be conquered. It's understandable. Typhus, typhoid and cholera were constantly threatening these populations. For cities with rivers within them, flooding was often also a threat.
Now, however, with 100+ years of modern water sanitation and hydrological engineering behind us, most first world urban dwellers take clean water totally for granted. This doc sets out to establish a different concept of nature in the city as something other than an enemy in need of conquest.
Between city and wilderness, as polar extremes, there's a spectrum of natural spaces that need our attention and investment to ensure that urban populations can be healthy and our cities can be resilient in the face of natural forces.
Everyone should be interested in this subject, especially city dwellers, because Toronto is unusually blessed by these natural resources but many other places need to reclaim or restore theirs. Urban nature is not exactly wilderness, nor is it always an Olmsted inspired Parkland, so it needs our curation to help make our cities healthier places with a higher quality of life for more of their residents.
'Accidental Parkland' is about how lucky Toronto is to have this natural resource (44,000 acres of ravines alone) within the city, and people need to be more conscious of them and more involved with them. Without that connection, it's impossible to imagine our communities putting the necessary resources into improving and sustaining them for long term public benefit.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
The gap in most environmental issues lies between the problems created by ignorance or misuse and the Public's perception of what is required to change the current scenario.
At a universal level, all city dwellers should want their environment to be healthy to live in, and to provide them with natural spaces that give us widely accessible alternatives to the hard surfaces of the built environment. Scientific studies have proven that just seeing trees from the window of a hospital room and from apartment blocks actually improves the outcomes of patients and of kids. Knowing what we know now about nature and urban life, we should all want cities to be the best environments we can possibly manage.
The interesting thing, however, is that many people feel powerless when it comes to shaping their city's physical environment. Many others feel no connection at all, especially to the natural resources of their community.
In part then, the personal theme for me within this doc is about helping other people find a personal and emotional connection with these special spaces within Toronto (or their own city). By exploring them, using them to commute by foot or bike, participating in recreation or some community initiatives within them, people will develop personal relationships with them. That's a key element in gaining a sense of ownership, investing people in the outcomes and in closing the gap between the environmental issues and our community's potential for dealing with them.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development and production?
We initially embarked on a six half hour episodes, one about each of the six most central waterways in Toronto. So we shot a lot of nature footage, and a lot of interviews. In the end, however, we felt this format might not achieve our goal -- reaching a broad local audience and opening their eyes to what's In our 44,000 aces of ravines and what's at stake in their maintenance. We decided a single hour had more potential to reach that broadest local audience. Our final ratio was about 70:1, so it made the writing and cutting that much more challenging as we had to distill the story down to something compact.
In that transition, we lost the historical depth possible from local archives, and a hyper-locality that would have been really interesting to explore. We also felt that shape of the doc shouldn't be issue or problem driven, even though most broadcasters and festivals would have found that more palatable for their programming. Environmental stories in particular can feel relentlessly despairing in their effort to explain the problems and lack of commitment to dealing with them. Our goal was to introduce some of these issues without making them the point of the piece. Instead, we also wanted to demonstrate a few things that had been addressed and had some positive outcomes. We particularly wanted to show people that they could participate in the broader struggle just by getting involved with using the ravines responsibly within the context of their existing day to day.
In the end, we want people to reimagine the concept of nature within the city. Above all, we want them to feel inspired to explore and observe and engage with these spaces. The bigger struggle to manage these natural resources will improve and the prospects of succeeding from those deepening relationships.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
We haven't shown it that widely yet. We have received our most praise from educators who seem eager to employ the piece in their curriculum.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
Not really. As a producer, I hope that we will find a few more commercial avenues for this doc, but that educational spin is a positive sign to me that we managed to bring a lot of bigger concepts into a broadly accessible form.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
The message of healthy nature in the cities needs all the support and promotion it can find.
More directly, it would be great for a bit of press outside the local realm and a few new connections to venues for this doc.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
I need it all. We crowdfunded and worked with a community access network to make this piece. I have very little left at this point to promote or distribute it. It's the classic tale of the independent filmmaker.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
I would like this film to find a place in the broader stream of docs coming out to explore how we can improve city life and our respect for natural systems in that context in the 21st century.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
How can we offer access to the benefits of natural spaces to the majority of city dwellers?
This is a question that will only grow in its broad relevance as cities everywhere look to contain sprawl, intensify population density to gain efficiencies in servicing residents and build resilience to natural forces.
What are the key creatives developing or working on now?
Shawn, on camera host, is a busy weekly columnist on local life and is publishing a new book this year. I am working on a range of TV and film projects that I hope will be fruitful soon.
Interview: October 2016
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We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series and music video. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
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Accidental Parkland
Toronto is blessed with a bounty of natural spaces within its urban footprint. Yet they are poorly understood and widely under appreciated. Our future depends on changing our relationship with them.
Length:
About the writer, director and producer:
Dan Berman
Dan has experience working in public and private agencies financing and producing film, TV and interactive media. This is his first documentary work.
Key cast: Shawn Micallef
Looking for (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists):
Yes please
Funders:
Indiegogo and Bell TV1 and self financed
Made in association with:
Bell TV1
Release date:
2016