WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY (30 mins)
2015
Clark Ferguson
Clark Ferguson
Western Arctic Motion Pictures
Lyuba Kirkova
Saki Murotani
Shadow of a Giant
Shadow of a Giant is a documentary film / interactive documentary that tells the story of one of Canada’s largest environmental disasters, Yellowknife’s Giant Mine. Buried in collapsing chambers, within the municipal boundary of Yellowknife, and beside the ninth largest lake in the world, sits 237,000 tons of the highly toxic contaminant, arsenic trioxide, a byproduct of the defunct gold mine.
Shadow of a Giant was directed by Clark Ferguson, a Saskatchewan-born artist and filmmaker currently based in Québec.
Interviews with animation
The city of Yellowknife and the surrounding aboriginal communities depend on a remediation plan that will refrigerate the arsenic into place, until a permanent solution can be found. Shadow of a Giant tells the story of Giant through the people who live on top of it and call it home.
From the remediation (clean-up) team, who work to stabilize the arsenic; to the people who live and work in Yellowknife; to those who worked at the mine; to the proponents of the extraction industry in the North; to the Yellowknives Dene First Nations that live within hundreds of metres of the contaminated site, their collective voices tell the story of Giant’s history.
Their ideas of what the Giant Mine site could become reflects a painful history for these communities, but also reveals a brighter future for this toxic legacy.
The ESTIMATED cost of REMEDIATING the GIANT MINE site into a STABLE SOLUTION is $903,535,080.00 with an ESTIMATED 1.9 Million dollars PER YEAR EVERY YEAR there after.