A group of intrepid filmmakers from the Ottawa Valley have spent the past two years creating a comprehensive documentary that traces the history of North America’s oil industry to the communities of Petrolia and Oil Springs.
But to put their film onto the big screen, the producers are seeking financial assistance through a Kickstarter campaign.
Members of the Elytra Collective, a filmmaking team comprised of Anthony Leroy, Tys Burger and Josh Murphy, have spent many hours in Lambton County over the past several years interviewing key figures in Petrolia and surrounding communities, taking panoramic shots, digging deep and researching the role that Petrolia drillers – also known as Hard Oilers – had in developing the modern oil industry.
After gathering information and interviewing a variety of residents, historians, climate scientists, Indigenous representatives and public figures across Canada, the crew are now back at home, piecing together a final product during the post-production phase of the project.
Burger, who along with Leroy and Murphy recently put out a well-received documentary about their home called The Heart of The Valley, said the idea behind the Petrolia documentary came from a conversation several years ago with a family friend.
“As we were wrapping up with The Heart of The Valley and thinking about what we were going to do next, we realized that we have this particular fascination with small-town Ontario,” he said. “We grew up in small-town Ontario, so we knew that we liked sharing stories of people from small towns … they’re always interesting, always different, always unique.
The subject of Petrolia came up while speaking with a family friend.
The more the trio learned about Petrolia and its history, the more they were convinced it would be the perfect subject for a feature-length documentary.
“I started to look into it and the more I learned the more fascinating the story became,” said Burger. “I learned about foreign drillers who went around the world … and I saw a really unique opportunity in Petrolia to examine the Canadian identity, essentially, with a case study of one town. It seemed like a pretty good metaphor for the early pioneers here who were developing new technologies and settling the land, relations with Indigenous people and their relations to the land through the extraction process and also the relationship to the broader world through the foreign drillers who went out and established wells all over the world.”
The process began in earnest a few years ago, Burger said. People were receptive to the filmmakers, more than willing to share their feelings and their memories of the development of the region’s oil industry.
“Josh and I started making trips to Petrolia over the course of the past few years, interviewing anybody who had a personal attachment to the area’s oil industry. That led us to Oil Springs and then Sarnia and Chemical Valley as well as Aamjiwnaang First Nation. We just built a pretty well-ranged roster of interview subjects that we’re going to construct a film out of,” he said.
“And we really felt comfortable there. I’m from the Ottawa Valley but to be honest it felt very familiar being in Petrolia. Josh and I remarked to ourselves several times that it easily could have been our hometowns. The industry where I grew up (near Pembroke) was lumber, so it’s an industry town like Petrolia.”
A story began to emerge from the vast amounts of material that the Elytra Collective gathered from all those interviews and all that research, Burger said.
“We started out wanting to make an historical documentary about the early days of the oil industry and Canada and what the birth of oil looked like. And then we found out that a lot of Canada’s petrochemical industry lives 30 kilometers away from the birthplace of oil, and that historical narrative can be traced between the area of Sarnia, Petrolia and Oil Springs,” he said. “That’s the timeline of the documentary and we’re going to move it to the present day as well and talk about where it all led us.”
The filmmaking team have given themselves a year to work on post-production but are in need of funds to put the final touches on the film, Burger said. After doing almost everything as a three-man crew, they now need money to have outsiders provide their expertise, hence the Kickstarter fundraiser.
“We’re completely funded out of pocket, and a lot of the costs come up in post-production, boring things like licensing the film, insurance, some exciting stuff like music and color work, festival submission fees – it all adds up, ” he said. “We’re at the point in the process where we’re not just relying on our own skills and equipment anymore, we’re enlisting other people and need some money to be able to do so.
“We chose a goal of $8,500, because … we think that’s what we need to get this project done,” Burger added. “We’re halfway done our campaign now…. and we have a bunch of rewards for people depending on how much they donate.”
The Kickstarter campaign can be found by entering ‘Petrolia Documentary’ into the search bar at www.kickstarter.com. The film’s trailer can be seen on the Kickstarter page or at The Heart of The Valley’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/theheartofthevalleydocumentary/.
“If everything goes according to plan, next fall will be when we’ll be hosting our first screening,” Burger said. “We’ve already been talking to people about screening our movie there, as well as in Sarnia and Oil Springs, too – get the people who helped us make this film see it first.”