Hadwin’s Judgement: dir Sasha Snow (2015)

A compelling hybrid of drama and documentary, this film covers the events that led up to the infamous destruction of an extraordinary 300-year-old tree held sacred by the Indigenous Haida Nation of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. Inspired by John Vaillant’s award-winning book The Golden Spruce, the film explores the complex character of Grant Hadwin, a logging engineer and survivalist who lived and worked happily for many years in the region’s ancient forests. Witnessing the devastation wrought by clear-cutting, Hadwin was finally driven to commit what some would say was an extraordinary and perverse act, one that ran contrary to all he had come to value …

Interweaving speculation, myth and reality, the film charts Hadwin’s emotional crusade against the destruction of the world’s last great temperate rainforest and explores the possible motives for his unprecedented crime.

The film screens in the NAAS programme under the umbrella title Green Reel: Films for a Sustainable Future, featuring independent films from around the world that focus on the environment and sustainability. NAAS is a collaboration between a number of cultural institutions in the UAE: the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region, the Embassies of France in the United Arab Emirates, the Embassy of Canada to the United Arab Emirates, the Italian Cultural Institute of Abu Dhabi, the Embassy of Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Bahrain, and Alliance Française Dubai.

The final film in the programme is Daniel Roby’s Dans la brume | Just a Breath Away, screening on 26 November.