I spent my childhood and adolescence in Northern Ontario, in a small community about an hour outside of Sudbury. My neighbours were miners, and many of my classmates have now become miners. I grew up going to labour strikes in support of the workers, and there was a clear understanding that the tremendous wealth excavated from the lands where we lived, were not being invested into our community but rather were heading somewhere else, an ambiguous South that was Toronto, or Ottawa or the US, while the pollution from the largest smoke stack in the country, proudly in our city, was heading North, another ambitious somewhere else. The landscape was bare and grey. This reality, created cognitive dissonance not just within me. These dynamics felt like we were living a unique situation, but as Richard Desjardins brilliantly explores in Trou Story, are actually replicated in mining communities across the vast territory colonized and known as Canada. With a lucid understanding and sensitivity to the conflicting driving forces at play when ecology/environment, collective and individual health, and market driven economy are interposed within a resource based community, Trou Story remains a must view documentary and essential resource on the subject.

Amy Miller
Filmmaker and producer