NECESSITY: Documentary Screening and Discussion

Please join Allard's Centre for Law and the Environment (CLE) and Green College for a screening of Janice Haaken's NECESSITY, a two-part documentary on legal strategies, allyship and climate resistance.

This two-part film series unfolds around activists and their use of the necessity defense in jury trials in different regions of the US after being charged with trespassing.  Legal strategies in the climate movement take center stage as Indigenous leaders, and Native and non-Native activists respond to the growing climate emergency.  From the Mississippi Headwaters, wild rice fields and Great Lakes in Part I, to the rivers and mountains of the Columbia River Gorge in Part II, awe-inspiring terrains are sites of coordinated resistance to corporate expansion of oil through pipelines, rail and terminals to get their lethal products to market. As inspiring and hopeful as they are informative, the films show how alliances form around shared commitments to save the planet.

Running time for the two films is one hour and 52 minutes. The films will be shown consecutively, with remarks by the Director, Jan Haaken, followed by commentary from Law's Naomi Klein and a question period. Session will be moderated by Stepan Wood, Professor of Law, Canada Research Chair in Law, Society and Sustainability, and Director of the Centre for Law and the Environment.

Tickets are pay what you can (suggested contribution of $10) and can be purchased at the door.

Please note that this event is hosted off-site from the College at UBC's Norman Bouchard Memorial Theatre.

Janice Haaken is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the inaugural John Grace Memorial Filmmaker in Residence at Green College. She received audience awards at major film festivals in 2019 for her previous documentary, Our Bodies Our Doctors. NECESSITY was selected by the Doc Society NYC as part of the 2019 Inaugural Climate Story Lab where Janice Haaken and co-director Samantha Praus joined the lab as fellows. Janice also taught visual methods in the social sciences and screened a number of her films as a Fulbright Scholar at University College Cork in Ireland in the winter term of 2020. 

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist and international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire, which have been translated into over 35 languages. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept and an inaugural Marielle Franco Fellow of the Social Justice Initiative Portal Project at the University of Chicago. In 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice.