tree farm, as Daniel did. Among monkeywrenching acts of protests, there’s also a difference between pulling up survey markers used for oil exploration and burning a lot full of SUV’s. Curry has some of his interview subjects address this matter of distinction only briefly, but it is implicit in the questions raised by his movie more broadly throughout.
     To be certain, the film was not made to defend Daniel’s actions nor those of his EFL brethren who memorably torched a Vail, Colorado ski resort to protest its expansion and set fire to a $23 million apartment complex in San Diego, which they saw as a sign of urban sprawl. Yet Curry’s empathy for the perpetrators of these crimes in light of the treatment that they received upon being caught clearly motivates him to question the wisdom of lumping them into the same group that includes Timothy McVeigh or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. By imbuing his film with a very real sense of the urgency demonstrators felt in Eugene, Oregon around the time of Daniel’s arrival there, as they helplessly watched their concerns go unaddressed, and by showing evidence of the barren mountainsides left behind after logging was complete, Curry says he hoped to make audiences feel the emotions that drove the extremists.
     “I wanted people to understand what it felt like for Daniel to see an old-growth forest of trees 500 – 700 years old completely cut down and to feel powerless,” he explained. “It takes 700 years to grow a 700-year-old tree.”