Preaching to the Converted

Earth Whisperers/Papatuanuku is a documentary film featuring interviews with ten people who have some connection to the earth and then environment. They range from Māori wanting to set up a commune, ‘wise women’ who make nettle soup and potions and poultices out of herbs and grasses, a bird caller seeking to repopulate the forests with feathered wildlife, to GM crusaders creating seed depositories.

By far and away the best interviewee was Craig Potton. He spoke of his environmental activism to protect forests and other iconic landscapes. His intelligence, patience and commitment were striking.

I was also impressed by Jim O’ Gorman, the organic farmer who talked about tilling and turning the soil until even stuff that had previously been considered practically toxic, could repair itself and produce a fertile base in which to grown fruit and vegetables.

Kay Baxter, a seed saver, might have been inspirational as she fought to know the origins of her food and protect the seeds from artificial hormones. But, at the end when someone asked what the seed hikoi had achieved, as a group of people marched on Parliament, the very bleak and simple answer was returned, ‘nothing’. And there-in lies the problem.

The tag-line to this film is, ‘This is a unique, number-eight wire Kiwi-style approach to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.’ That is just typical Kiwi hyperbole. This film will not rival An Inconvenient Truth because it is already preaching to the converted. There are no urbanites or people who might people who might represent role models to anyone not interested in growing a bushy beard and knitting their own jumpers.

I may well be accused of being shallow but I began to long for an interviewee in a suit; someone who looked like they might actually have a real job and live in a real house in the real world, a little bit more like the majority of us.

It’s all very well for Hugh Wilson, tree farmer, to say we should all abandon our cars and cycle for 5½ hours from Banks Peninsula into Christchurch, but it’s simply not practical and so it began to lose me. If people are meant to be moved enough by this to change their lifestyle, then shouldn’t it be just a little bit more appealing?

Many people who might have been targeted were put off by the excessive spiritualism – I know because they told me. It was book-ended by a Tuhoe healer and a Waitaha kuia. The latter is apparently a tribal woman elder with a ‘vision of healing through community within the ways of Waitaha’, whatever that means – there was a lot of mystic expansion and not a lot of material explanation. As for the healer, I am unlikely to take health advice from someone who is clearly so overweight and unfit that they can’t even open a gate without gasping for breath.

I wasn’t even really taken with the much vaunted photography. The shots of the landscape were nice but the subjects were often out of focus. Perhaps this was deliberate – the main attention should be fixed on the land – but it made it hard to watch. And I would question the soundscape too; running water and birdsong is the sonic backdrop to the bush, not irritating music that makes you feel as though you are trapped in a lift in one of those tacky tourist souvenir shops.

The passion of the director is to be commended. This film project is wholesome and it’s worthy. But it’s not for me. I would rather watch a documentary about the incredible and inspiring Craig Potton. If Kathleen Gallagher makes one of those, I will definitely be watching.