Forest City

Filmmaker’s Statement –
“A Silent Witness”

“OMG!!! OMG!!! They are cutting down the forest! Where’s the video camera? Get the camera quick!”

Sometimes fate puts the right person in the right place at the right time. That’s what happened to me in the fall of 2015.

I was looking out from living room on the 12th floor of my apartment condo in the northwest corner of London, Ontario when I saw a guy with a chainsaw in the gorgeous forest below. It was clear he was searching for a tree to cut.

Over the next few months, I watched, and filmed, the loveliest of forests be razed to build 60-plus detached single-family homes. It was all entirely legal. By the time it was done, only a  mere slice of forest remained.

Like it or not, I had a hawk’s eye view of a growing urban challenge.

It wasn’t lost on me that the very building where I perched was itself the result of recent urban development: a 14-storey luxury condo built on land once upon a time sustainably lived on and cared for by generations of Indigenous people.

Like so many, I thought “deforestation” was a problem happening somewhere else — someplace far away from the city.

But as more of us choose to live in cities, the pressure on our urban boundaries intensifies. So much so that the “disappearing” of valuable urban woodlands for new development in our own backyards is a daily occurrence in North America cities and beyond. 

The more I watched, the deeper I questioned what we routinely accept to be a necessary action – the elimination of entire forests and long-standing trees – to accommodate our voracious appetite for urban growth.

Watching hundreds of trees be ripped up by the roots, knocked down by excavators and chipped into non-existence, I considered sharing my experience through social media, but feared this would lead to very little systemic change. 

Instead, I made a conscious decision to be a silent witness to the death of this one forest; to stay present with my senses and camera-lens wide open – no easy task – documenting its demise, tree by tree. 

In this “slow media” way, I could use the deforest footage to create something more meaningful. If others could just see what I saw, they too might be inspired to do more to conserve and protect the urban woodlands we have left. 

This experience also became a launch pad to a larger quest to better understand the system which enabled this to happen, and the lengths gone to both change and protect the status quo. 

In the end, it was the residents of what I like to call “my forest” — the Red-Tailed Hawks — that seem to guide me deeper within to receive a deep-rooted message from my ancestors.

While this documentary film was inspired by what I saw in the Forest City, this is a story for Every City and Every Town.

We must revive a sense of reverence and respect for remaining and future urban trees and forests for our collective well-being. 

— Caroline Nolan, Sept. 2019