Butterfly (2000)

After the Pacific Lumber Company, a logging concern in the Pacific Northwest, was purchased by Charles Hurwitz, a savings and loan trader who acquired the firm in a hostile takeover, the company began clear-cutting large territories, leading to public outcry from a number of environmental activists as well as local residents troubled by violations of lumber harvesting laws and the effects of soil erosion brought on by clear-cutting. A number of activists staged protests in forests threatened by Pacific Lumber's practices, but one gained an especially large amount of attention: Julia Butterfly Hill, who climbed to the top of a redwood tree in Humbolt County, CA, and refused to come down. Hill stayed in the tree (which she nicknamed "Luna") for two years, and while members of the radical environmental group Earth First! helped Hill with her protest by bringing her meals and arranging for her to have a cellular phone, she soon established herself as a separate entity who spoke for herself and the environment -- and no one else. Documentary filmmaker Doug Wolens spent a good portion of Hill's two-year vigil documenting her protest, and Butterfly examines Hill and her controversial protest, as well as the varied reactions of Pacific Lumber Company spokespeople, fellow activists, loggers, local residents, and California police and elected officials. Doug Wolens' original cut of Butterfly ran 79 minutes, though he also prepared an abridged hour-long version for possible television broadcast. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi