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September 27, 2019 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Scapegoat: The Cormorants of East Sand Island film screening at Portland EcoFilm Festival
Bird Alliance of Oregon’s short film Scapegoat: The Cormorants of East Sand Island by Trip Jennings has been accepted into the Portland EcoFilm Festival at the Hollywood Theater on September 27. It will be paired with Dammed to Extinction, a film about the Snake River Dams.
Following the screening, Conservation Director Bob Sallinger and filmmaker Trip Jennings will be on a panel along with several other folks to talk about Columbia River issues.
The night before (Thursday September 26) there are also a series of short films “featuring a diversity of ways a diversity of people connect to nature” to benefit the Nature For All Greenspaces Bond Measure.
Get tickets and learn more about the Portland EcoFilm Festival.
Get your tickets to the Portland EcoFilm festival and check out the weekend schedule in its entirety.
Learn MoreDammed to Extinction
US, 51 mins, Oregon film premiere, PNW filmmaker
For eons, a one-of-a-kind population of killer whales has hunted Chinook salmon along the Pacific Coast of the United States. For the last 40 years, renowned whale scientist Ken Balcomb has closely observed them. He’s familiar with a deadly pattern – as salmon numbers plummet, orcas starve. The solution, says Balcomb, is getting rid of four fish-killing dams 500 miles away on the largest tributary to what once was the largest Chinook producing river on earth. Studying whales is science. Removing dams is politics. Defiantly mixing the two, says Balcomb, has become the most important work of his storied career. Meanwhile, the race to extinction for salmon and orcas speeds up, nipping at the heels of the plodding, clumsy pace of political change in the Pacific Northwest, where dams and hydropower are king.
Scapegoat: The Cormorants of East Sand Island
Directed by Balance Media and Bird Alliance of Oregon. US, 9 mins, PNW filmmakers
This film documents the US Government’s reckless and relentless killings of Double-crested Cormorants on East Sand Island at the mouth of the Columbia River. This colony was once the largest cormorant nesting colony in the world. The justification for killing cormorants was to prevent them from eating federally listed salmon, however the killings caused the collapse of the colony and moved many cormorants upriver where they now eat more salmon than before the killings took place.