Living 180 feet off the ground in an ancient redwood tree for over two years, Julia Butterfly Hill captured the hearts and minds of the world by showing us that one person can make a difference.
about the film
For two years, Wolens interviews Julia Butterfly Hill, her support team, and her critics. He spent six nights with Hill on her 180-foot high platform and 40 days trips, revealing an intensely spiritual and articulate woman determined to accomplish her goal. We get a sense of the awesome beauty of her days and nights lived in an ancient tree, of the horror of being assaulted by lumber company helicopters, and of the strangeness of fierce media scrutiny seeking out a woman in a tree.
Julia has become her cause and her cause has become her. BUTTERFLY shows us the situation out of which Earth First activists have regularly engaged in civil disobedient “actions:” The whys, the hows, and the whos. But to fully see why Julia is in the tree, BUTTERFLY presents who she is and what leads her to live as she does.
Although it’s easy to view BUTTERFLY as a film about the environmental movement, forest issues or of course about Julia Butterfly, at its heart the film is really about what each of us can achieve, the greatness we can all become.
about the filmmaker
Doug Wolens
Doug grew-up in Chicago, earned two BA degrees, a law degree, and spent seven years as a practicing attorney in New York City; he moved to San Francisco and became a filmmaker in 1993. Wolens’s first short, Happy Loving Couples, was selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival. He’s made two other shorts, Reversal (1994) and In Frame (1995), all of which have played at film festivals throughout the world. His 1996 feature documentary, Weed, premiered at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and had a 40-city theatrical tour of the U.S. In 2000, Wolens’s feature documentary Butterfly was broadcast nationally on P.O.V. PBS’s award-winning documentary showcase and on The Sundance Channel. Wolens successfully self-distributed Butterfly to more than 50 theatres throughout the country. The Singularity (2012) Wolens’s third feature documentary is a timely and insightful film about future technology and the possibility of greater than human intelligence. The film was shown in many theatres and at universities throughout the country and globally, and is now available on iTunes.
Doug lives in San Francisco with his wife Katie and 2 sons. He is currently finishing up a documentary on American urbanism, racial segregation and equity.