Film Description

Jean Guy Comeau and Francis Wishart walk through ravaged landscapes: good wood left rotting on the ground, stagnant pools of water, uprooted trees blown over. Trenches more than 2 metres deep have been gouged into the ground by heavy machinery. Red plastic flagging tape reading "No harvest" flutters limply over the felled remains of a stand of trees. This is clear-cutting in New Brunswick's Acadian forest. And what most people don't realize is that it's being done on public (or Crown) lands ' lands that are supposed to be managed by the government on behalf of the people.
Six multinational corporations control cutting on New Brunswick's millions of acres of Crown land. In Forbidden Forest, we meet two very different men united by a passion to save the forest and to bring some of the province's public forest under community control. Together, Comeau and Wishart travel to Finland ' home of UP -Kymmene, one of the largest licence holders of New Brunswick Crown lands ' to urge company officials to practise responsible forestry and to warn them that they may one day be held liable for the damage done by clear-cutting. And the two go head-to-head with the New Brunswick government in an effort to secure a new, community-based forestry policy ' one that is environmentally sustainable and that produces more jobs than the highly capital-intensive, mechanized techniques used today. Forbidden Forest is a tale of corporate greed, lax government oversight and people passionate about the places they love.