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Movies & TV

Taking aim at asbestos

BREATHTAKING screens tonight (Thursday, February 24) at the Royal Ontario Museum (100 Queen’s Park).7 pm. pwyc. breathtakingfilm@gmail.com. See listing.


Planet in Focus director Kathleen Mullen’s new film Breathtaking may not blow up the conventional documentary format, but it should blow Canadians’ minds.

Ostensibly, it’s a profoundly personal story about the cancer that killed her father Richard, a cancer caused by the asbestos he inhaled while working as an engineer.

But the film is deeply political because, though she taps a treasure trove of home movies to show us her father as an active and vital man, Mullen also takes the story outside of her family to India and other places, where Canadian-mined asbestos wreaks havoc on people’s health.

Mullen’s first step in tracing asbestos’ path is to take her crew to Quebec’s Thetford Mines. That’s where they extract asbestos and deposit tailings into land fills that send property values down the drain.

The profits of the mines are major, even though Canadians use only 2 or 3 per cent of the materials mined, mostly in break pads for cares. The reason for our low consumption? Asbestos is toxic and, thanks to tough laws regarding safe levels of exposure, can’t be used here for much of anything else.

The reason for the Thetford Mine profit? Mining execs have no problem selling their product outside our boundaries.

Mullen travels to India, one of the places where Canadian asbestos is dumped, to talk to people whose health has suffered because of their exposure to the material and to activists who are trying to raise awareness there and around the world.

After the film screens at the ROM tonight (Thursday, February 24). Mullen, members of her family and health activists here will address the disturbing issues the film brings up.

Interspersed among Mullen’s various scenarios are scenes of Richard Mullen giving video testimony – or trying to, he can barely catch his breath – while he was determined to make the company that put him at risk accountable for his suffering.

In the wake of his death, his daughter has not given up the fight.

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