TORONTO — Many viewers will watch the new documentary Wiebo’s War having already pre-judged the controversial Ludwig family, notorious for its dogged battle against the oil and gas industry’s encroachments onto their rural Alberta property.
The family patriarch, Wiebo Ludwig, was convicted in 2001 of bombing sour gas wells in southern Alberta and served about a year and a half in jail. Many then suspected that Ludwig, a relentless critic of the industry, was behind a spate of pipeline bombings in British Columbia that started in 2008.
The opening scene of Wiebo’s War recounts a massive three-day raid on the Ludwig farm in January 2010 in connection with those bombings, one of several police searches that are seen in the doc.
Police found nothing they could use to lay any charges.
Toronto-based filmmaker David York hopes audiences will listen to the family’s impassioned pleas, consider the evidence they’ve documented in home movies over the years, and then decide if controversial eco-warrior Wiebo Ludwig is the villain some make him out to be.
“One thing I tried to do in the film is let the audience experience the family as I did without making explicit judgments on them,” York says about the movie, which premieres at the HotDocs festival in Toronto on Saturday.
“The audience can decide for themselves whether they’re sympathetic or unsympathetic. The audience can decide for themselves how they would react if they were provoked in the same way the Ludwigs feel they saw themselves provoked by oil and gas.”
Among the most powerful moments in the film are videos the Ludwigs shot documenting startling incidents that they blamed on gas leaks from nearby developments just off their property.
Water flowing into the kitchen sink is seen to ignite into flames when matches are struck near the tap. Animals suddenly fall ill and die on their farm. And the most gruesome and disturbing video shows the grieving family coming together in August 1998 around the stillborn body of Abel Ryan Ludwig.
“Certainly it’s uncomfortable to look at and you have to, when you look at material like that, you really have to wonder whether it’s appropriate to put it in,” York says.
“The death ... was an enormously important incident for the family. It, as they say, galvanized them and steeled them in their struggle against oil and gas. And it’s visually emotional, very powerful —there’s just no way to sugarcoat it.”
Two days after the family memorial, a bomb went off at a Suncor site about 300 kilometres away from the Ludwig home. Wiebo Ludwig was initially charged in the bombing, but the charges were stayed.
York is a detached observer in the documentary and doesn’t take the Ludwigs’ side, despite having spent more than 70 days on the family farm shooting the film.
In fact, although the Ludwig family eventually co-operated fully with York, they considered him somewhat of an adversary. Twice they walked away from the project, with stretches of months passing before filming could resume.
In all, it took three years for the film to be completed and much time was spent at the outset persuading the Ludwigs that York could be trusted. Fittingly, one of the film’s first scenes unfolds with the deeply religious family interrogating York about his intentions and his own spiritual beliefs.
“First of all, the filming is limited because a lot of this is spiritual and unseen, it cannot be put on a picture,” the stern and steely-eyed Wiebo Ludwig says.
“And the other thing is, if you’re an atheist you can’t even possibly get in touch with it, because you’re living in terrible darkness. And until your eyes are opened and you give yourself to that you can’t begin to understand who we are.”
That tense scene runs a couple of minutes and was snipped from an hours-long conversation, in which York promised the clan — which includes Wiebo and his wife Mamie, five other married couples, seven unmarried adults and 38 grandchildren — that he would approach the film “without malice or cunning.”
“I thought at about the mid-point (of that conversation), I was pretty certain, that our film was over, because the doubts they were expressing were pretty profound,” York recalls.
“I didn’t think that we were going to continue with the film at that point.”
The family has seen the film and doesn’t object to their portrayal, although they wish their religious beliefs were given a more prominent focus, York says.
They also thought less time should’ve been given to the story of Karmen Willis, a 16-year-old girl who was shot and killed on the Ludwig farm in 1999 as a group of teenagers went joyriding on the property. Wiebo Ludwig called 911 after the shots were fired but denied pulling the trigger.
Video shot by the Ludwig family shows police in camouflage fatigues and facepaint standing by as the property was thoroughly searched. Even young children were frisked by police during the investigation.
None of the Ludwigs were charged and Willis’ death is still unsolved.
“I explained to them that for most Canadians that’s — if not the crux of their story — the most controversial part of the story and it’s something we needed to spend a lot of time on or we just wouldn’t be telling the story properly,” York says.
It was difficult to decide exactly when to stop filming for the documentary, York says, but he found his cue when the Ludwigs planned a protest in February 2010 at a well near their land. Despite being media fixtures for years, no reporters showed up to cover it.
“It struck me that the family was going to have to soldier on alone against oil and gas and watching that protest unfold that did feel like the end of the film to me,” York says.
Trailer for Wiebo’s War: http://bit.ly/em5T1k