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iN VIDEO: Documentary on illegal dumping in Okanagan backcountry airing in new year
A documentary film on illegal dumping and encampments in the Okanagan backcountry will be released early in the new year to show the problems often hidden from the general public.
What Lies Behind the Trees follows members of the Okanagan Task Force, a growing team of volunteers dedicated to cleaning up backcountry dumpsites, as they traverse remote areas in the Okanagan Valley.
“A lot of people sitting in offices looking out their windows or driving through the valley look out at the mountains and it’s so pretty, but we can show you places that are not,” founding member Kane Blake told iNFOnews.ca.
The doc is a compilation of footage taken over the past decade, and more recent footage gathered over the last year-and-a-half. While Blake captured the drone footage, Kelowna-based videographer Eli Coburn shot footage on the ground and put in countless hours of editing.
Safety was a priority during the project, as it is common for conflicts to arise when confronting people living in the bush.
“We’ve taken Eli into some very uncomfortable situations where he has to stay in the truck because I don’t know how things will end, which is the unfortunate truth of what is happening,” Blake said. “You have people living in the backcountry with mental health issues where there is no help available.”
Coburn has been doing automotive videography and photography through Coburn Media and is pushing into documentary filming. He and Blake had a similar vision for What Lies Behind the Trees and collaborated.
“We were all over the place at encampments where there were some interactions that got scary and could have gone a few ways,” Coburn told iNFOnews.ca. “It was eye opening to see just how much garbage is out there.”
The goal of the film is to inform the general public on how severe the issue is in an effort to create conversations and enact some change.
Blake said promoting safety is also a key theme and suggests members of the public do not attempt to confront backcountry dwellers.
“I’ve been doing this for almost ten years and have slowly figured out what works and honed in on how to get things done safely, in an appropriate manner,” he said. “Not everyone out there is happy to see us.”
An app on the Okanagan Task Force website allows all backcountry users to participate in the initiative by reporting dumpsites in the Okanagan region, which show up as red pins on the website map.
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