playbill

“That’s amazing! David freaking Suzuki wants to do a play with me!”
- Miriam Fernandes

A few years ago our team began creating a play with David and Tara.  We all quickly fell in love with them, their stories, and adventures, and we wanted to share their stories to inspire others to care for our planet as they do. Miriam worked tirelessly to transcribe and sift through hours and hours of our recordings. Then Ravi and Miriam would piece the stories together and read them at 3 am to Kevin, who would help to shape the story. David and Tara would then want to rewrite and add MORE stories and we just kept piecing this puzzle together. It was an amazing detective story, scouring through evidence and making our case till 4 o’clock in the morning! Once the puzzle started to form a picture, what became clear to us was how David and Tara’s five-decades-long love bolsters and reinforces their individual convictions and actions for the planet. We thought, maybe their love stories could become a template for others’ actions. In Feb 2020, we got to perform the show with a live audience. They loved it and were as moved and inspired as we were.  It was magic. And then COVID hit.  

“Every generation needs to understand it’s responsible to take care of the planet for the future.”
- Tara Cullis

Every day the climate emergency became more urgent. And while COVID shutdowns prevented us from gathering in theatre spaces, we knew we had to find a way to continue to spread the message of the theatre piece - that love can be both a catalyst for action and an antidote to climate despair.  So what do we do when the story you have to tell is urgent but people can’t be together to share it?  

“The real war isn’t to stop the dam or leave the oil in the ground. It’s to change people's hearts and minds.”
- David Suzuki

Film presented a host of challenges — we had a whole new aesthetic vocabulary and set of tools to work with and… um… where is the audience?! Where is the energy and the feedback of performance!? No raucous laughter at our jokes? No standing ovation at the end?! Many of these challenges became opportunities for us to stretch our creative muscles –  film provided us the ability to find new and different ways to convey the intimacy that we had in live performance. And it also allowed us to place our conversations in specific settings and tell the story of David, Tara, Miriam and Sturla’s blossoming relationship more subtly.  

We were also privileged to get to know the incredible lands that we filmed on — the unceded territories of the Laich-Kwil-Tach, specifically the We Wai Kai, as well as the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh, and the Squamish. We tried to convey the beauty and power of these locations in the poetic interludes in the film. 

Working on this project and being able to spend time in nature as we did has been such a privilege. It allowed us a deeper understanding of an important lesson that David and Tara have received from their Indigenous friends and colleagues over the years, which they recount in our film: the importance of reciprocity. To acknowledge that we are deeply connected to the land and that the land gives us life. It cares for us, and we must be responsible to care for it in return. We are nature. 

In creating this film, we wanted to tell a story that could help us remember and recognize all that we receive from this planet, and to practice gratitude for it. A story that helps us recognize our deep interconnection with all that surrounds us. A story that can help us to fall in love with this planet and care for it the way it has and will care for us.
Like Tara and David, we want audiences to understand that you can find your own unique voice, contribution, and role in a movement for a healthier, more liveable planet.
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It’s not too late.

“When you love something, you will do anything you can to protect it…”
- Tara Cullis