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Published: 10 June, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

A MESSAGE to anyone who owns shares or works for oil companies: you unprincipled, disgusting, murdering scoundrels – how do you sleep at night? 

Forget the mess you have made in the Gulf of Mexico. This latest film from Camden-based film company Dogwoof focuses on how they extract oil from tar sands in Canada. It is a horrible process, turning areas the size of Florida into lunar landscapes, poisoning rivers, spewing toxins into the atmosphere – all to provide costly oil to the US so they can rev their engines and in turn pump our atmosphere with more poison. Nice.

H2oil explores the pollution caused by extracting oil from the sands, and how this has become seriously big business. America gets most of its oil from Canada. It is dug out from beneath the country’s forests, and is hugely costly: it takes four barrels of fresh spring water to get one barrel of oil, for starters. The used water is then dumped into giant, toxic ponds the size of Lake Ontario, full of arsenic, that seeps at an alarming rate into the local areas, water courses and rivers, poisoning all. 

This is a heavy subject to tackle, and it gave me the serious heebie-jeebies after the credits had rolled. 

Highlights include the ridiculous double-speak offered by oil companies to justify what is essentially corporate manslaughter. We watch a representative of oil firm Suncorp speak at a public meeting in a village hall downstream from one of their gigantic plants. 

The town is riddled with health problems, young people getting cancer, fish dying, and water undrinkable. To hear the shiny-suited PR execs trying to wriggle out of the bare-faced facts that their company is responsible for this would be hilarious if it wasn’t people’s lives and the future of the planet they were mucking around with. 

One of the execs expresses in perfect psycho-babble that she is getting bad vibes from a room full of people who have seen neighbours, family members, and communities suffer from cancer clusters caused by her company, and she has the front to say that the people there are not talking the same language as she is, and they need to re-think how they communicate for the meeting to be constructive. 

A similar film was released in March this year, called Dirty Oil – it even has interviews with the same doctor who was castigated by the authorities for pointing out that his patients were dying of apparently rare cancers, except everyone in his riverside town, downstream from the tar sands is suffering from these horrible diseases.

But the fact this film covers the same ground is not a problem – this is an issue that should not go away, and if that means making film after film after film until public pressure puts a stop to this disgrace, so be it. It still has the power to shock. Hats off to Dog Woof, down Leather Lane way, who keep such brilliant documentaries coming to our cinema screens.