“One thing that is so incredibly exhilarating about film,”
says filmmaker, producer and Pollination Project co-founder Camelia
Frieberg, “is the process by which it comes together. Talk about
cross-pollination—you’ve got the music, the visuals, the writer, the
actors bringing their craft—all those things have to come together
and collaborate. Sure, you have one unifying vision, but the director
isn’t making a film on their own, they are making it in concert with
others.”
Frieberg has gamely answered the inevitable question of whether she
considers film to be a wasteful business, which is relevant because we
are really talking about Pollination Project, her multi-dimensional
initiative, encompassing arts, ecology, health and social issues.
Though she readily admits that the business is a resource guzzler, she
prefers to focus on what, in her mind, are the harmonizing aspects of
making films—people working together to create one thing, and the
parallels of the process that can be found in nature—a multitude of
connected things—which, in turn, gets at the heart of what
Pollination Project is all about.
Pollination Project, a collaboration between Frieberg and her
romantic partner, Toronto litigator Peter Biro, is enjoying its first
season of sustainability-minded workshops and further development. The
site is located on Watershed Farm and Chanterelle Forest—a 250-acre
landscape owned by Frieberg outside of Bridgewater—with an organic
farm, bunks for visitors, as well as a parcel of land hugged by the
LaHave River that Frieberg is toying with various ideas for. Both
Frieberg and Biro make clear that the project exists “on the level of
consciousness,” in Biro’s words, as a shared set of values and desires
for social change.
“The emphasis for me is about the values, and very much about the
quality of the conversation, the quality of the discourse we have with
each other as citizens. To me, that is every bit as
important—especially when we look at the societal aspects of what
Pollination Project is about,” Biro says, explaining that one goal is
to discover, reassert and debate what connects humans to nature,
democracy and communities.
An example of that aim is Building Community, an event planned for
September 13, wherein the project will gauge interest and ideas for
that LaHave-adjacent land. Frieberg has long been interested in
co-housing models and, in her words, “intentional communities of shared
values.” She’s exhilarated by the possibilities event attendees could
offer.
“I find those models enormously fascinating because here’s a group
of people that come together and say, ‘This is how we want to do
things. Let’s talk about it until we’re blue in the face and then at
the end of all this talk, let’s actually get the shovels out and get
going.'”
Despite being interviewed separately, Frieberg and Biro touch on
very similar themes during their respective conversations. Biro speaks
of Pollination Project (pollinationproject.org) as being
an opportunity to test “postulations,” particularly on sustainability’s
role in forming a more just society, while Frieberg speaks of the
Project as being an experiment deeply informed by guiding
principles.
Both agree that this open-ended conversation is Pollination
Project’s strength. “If I were to put this into a film script,” jokes
Frieberg, “it would come out as too earnest. Or garbled because it’s
too big!”
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2009.