Shadow of a Giant – 29min30 sec Documentary/Web Documentary – www.shadowofagiant.com – 2015

Full length Version

 

 

Shadow of a Giant is a short film and interactive web documentary that tells the story of one Canada’s largest
environmental disasters, Yellowknife’s Giant Mine. Buried in collapsing chambers, within the municipal
boundary of Yellowknife, and beside the 9th largest lake in the world, sits 237,000 tons of the highly toxic
contaminant, arsenic trioxide, a byproduct of the defunct gold mine. The city of Yellowknife and the
surrounding aboriginal communities depend on a remediation plan that will refrigerate the arsenic into place,
until a permanent solution can be found. Shadow of a Giant tells the story of Giant through the people who
live on top of it and call it home. From the remediation (clean up) team, who work to stabilize the arsenic;
to the people who live and work in Yellowknife; to those who worked at the mine; to the proponents of the
extraction industry in the north; to the Yellowknives Dene First Nations that live within hundreds of metres of
the contaminated site. Their collective voices tell the story of Giant’s history. Their ideas of what the Giant
mine site could become reflects a painful history for these communities, but also reveals a brighter future
this toxic legacy.