Last Wednesday I watched Marshall Curry’s documentary If a Tree Falls. I went in not knowing anything about the movie and it immediately grabbed my attention. It was very well done and painted a problematic picture of how nature is treated by big corporations only looking to maximize their profit. While I have known in the back of my head for a long time that fighting for nature’s right is hard and complicated, I honestly had no idea just how bad it could be. In the movie, it is shown how policemen torture peaceful demonstrators by spraying pepper spray right into their eyes. The measures that both the police and some of the corporations shown in the movie took were completely out of line, and as I watched I could only imagine the intense frustration that must have built up in people like Daniel McGowan.

But then at the same time, you are constantly reminded of just how extreme the Earth Liberation Front’s response really was. Burning down buildings is illegal for good reason and as a viewer you get a look into the devastation that the owners of one fabric in particular felt. And that is why the movie was so gripping, there was no clear right or wrong in the individual people shown, just people who got stuck on different sides of an argument; and argument about the Earth which is possibly the most important argument we have to think about in these days. Interestingly, toward the end of the movie, both the Earth Liberation Front as well as the police hunting them down concluded that they could understand somewhat why the other side had acted the way they did.

At the end, Marshall Curry held a question and answer session where we learnt more about the process about making the movie. He told us that he is fascinated by contrast, specifically where your imagination doesn’t agree with reality. And that is why he wanted to make this documentary in the first place, because he knew Daniel McGowan and he also knew that his idea of a terrorist was nothing like Daniel. And that was what shocked me as well at the beginning of the documentary, how such a nice man could get caught up in such crimes and labeled a terrorist. But at the end of the movie, I no longer felt as surprised that he acted the way he did, because while it is far from the way I myself would have wanted to act, I could see that he did what he truly thought was right.