What motivated you to make this film?

I have always followed the debate on the seal hunt with special interest. Sealing is one of the activities that has kept Newfoundland outports going over the generations, and members of my own extended family have relied on the hunt. I remember years ago when the International Fund for Animal Welfare first launched its campaign against the hunt and Brigitte Bardot came to Newfoundland. I knew many of the people that were being demonized - they were my uncles and my cousins - good people - so it hurt to see them portrayed in such an unfair and skewed manner.

As the years have passed, I have observed the debate and taken an interest the underlying issues. With this film, I try to tell their side of the story. But I want the film to be more than a defensive reaction to the anti-hunt forces. I want it to contribute in a reflective and meaningful way to the debate on the hunt - and to talk about the complex relationship between culture and environment.

How do you position yourself in relation to the environmental movement?

I grew up on the outskirts of St. John's, on a self-sufficient organic farm. My immediate family was well versed in issues relating to global warming, pollution, sustainable development, the arms race and so on. Later I moved to Vancouver to study contemporary dance, where I shopped at the local food coop, briefly adopted a vegan diet, lived in close quarters with environmental activists and shared many of their values.

But when it came to the seal hunt, I found that the terms and methods employed by many of the anti-hunt groups were simplistic and just plain wrong. Their position was often based on misconceptions and sentimentality. I saw numerous urban activists jumping to conclusions on the basis of misinformation, with little or no understanding of what it's like to live in a Newfoundland outport.

For nearly the first decade of my life, I lived in my Grandparent's house. My Grandmother was from a working class outport family - and I was deeply influenced by her. She was part of a generation for whom radio was a modern invention. She had grown up in an isolated and self-sufficient community - a resilient and resourceful society, wherein people made a living from fishing and a broad range of other activities, from farming and berrypicking to hunting wild game.

My grandmother and her contemporaries were respectful of the natural world, and more attuned to nature than many contemporary urban environmentalists.

So my intention has never been to attack the environmental movement, but rather to broaden the discussion of our relationship to the natural world.

The campaign against the hunt made effective use of images of seals being slaughtered. How do you respond to the accusation that the hunt is a cruel practice?

Hunting and slaughter of animals has taken place since the beginning of human history, so it's important to understand the context in which the hunting is taking place. In the case of outport Newfoundland, people hunt to put food on the table - to feed themselves and their families.

Sealing has never been a sporting activity for them. The commercial seal hunt is carried out in small to medium sized boats in extremely dangerous conditions - especially on the north-east coast where my family is from. Sealers venture into these treacherous conditions - most have years of experience which gives them the skill set to do so - to slaughter enough animals to make up about one third of their income. This is through the sale of pelts, fat and a portion of the meat. The methodology of the hunt has changed since the large boat hunt, but the dangers haven't. In 1914, 78 men died on the ice while sealing - that event and many other similar disasters are part of Newfoundland history and as you see in my film, the hazard of living from and with the north Atlantic is a consistent presence in this culture.

As for the accusation of cruelty -I find it strange that we consider hunting wild animals as cruel, while we view the industrialized raising of livestock farming as normal. Is it more cruel to kill a wild animal quickly - or to confine a creature for its entire life within a factory environment? I strongly believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, but I feel that the ethics surrounding the treatment of animals are often skewed. You could argue that our entire economy tacitly supports the inhumane treatment of livestock animals on a massive scale - yet we're incensed when hunters engage in the traditional practice of hunting wild animals and eating them.

I've heard anthropologists compare the hunting that happens within Newfoundland outports to the hunting-and-gathering that sustains Native communities. In both cases, hunting is part of a traditional economy that is based on a deep practical knowledge of the land and the life it sustains. My Cousin Jack, for example, knows all kinds of things about seals. He has developed a sense for them - he knows their seasonal habits, their feeding and whelping behaviour, their favourite haunts. It's all part of growing up in a community where sealing is an important seasonal activity. He understands that the seals and he share an environment, and he has absolutely no interest in hunting them - or any other species - to extinction.

All that is to say that I think people have had a long and complex relationship with animals, and it's simplistic and wrong to condemn hunting out of hand as a cruel activity. As I have heard Garry say, it's easy for people in cities to put a value on a creature as long as that creature is away from them in the country. A few years back, people in Los Angeles were upset by the trapping of coyotes and they put a stop to it. Then the coyotes started coming into suburbs and eating poodles and cats and the public changed their tune on respect for that particular wildlife. Garry said that the public likes wildlife as long as it's out there away from human communities. But of course, as we"develop" and/or poison more and more habitat,there are fewer places for the animals to go. We are still losing something like a hundred species a day to extinction, and it's not at the hand of indigenous hunters.

You single out the International Fund for Animal Welfare for their campaign against the hunt? Why?

It was the International Fund for Animal Welfare who orchestrated the first big media campaign against the hunters. From the beginning their approach was cynical and self-serving, and from the beginning they have used manipulative sentiment in a highly-sophisticated media campaign. The IFAW has profited hugely from a scapegoating communities like Twillingate and vilifying hardworking and resourceful people. The seal hunt has been the main focus of their fund-raising activities for years - and they pull in close to $100 million every year. Brian Davies, the founder of the IFAW and central figure within the organization, recently retired as a multi-millionaire.

I should add that others, including some environmentalists, have also taken issue with the IFAW. One of participants in the film, Annemeike Roell, is a former employee of the IFAW who has since come forward to criticise Davies and the way he attacked the hunters. When she started working with IFAW, she accepted the standard line that sealers and their families were barbarians, but once she actually entered into contact with the communities in question, she began to see things in a new light. She and my cousin Garry, came up with a plan for a sustainable hunt, setting quotas and so on. But when Annemeike brought this plan back to the IFAW, she was promptly fired. The suspicion is that the IFAW has never been genuinely interested in issues relating to sustainability or responsible hunting. Their whole existence is based on their anti-hunt campaign. The baby seal is their poster child - and the hunter is their villain. Strangely enough it is the IFAW who profits the most from the seal hunt, the industry itself being worth a fraction of what they take in as a result of their protest.

Meanwhile there was not a peep out of the IFAW about the devastation of the cod stocks or any number of other species in our province that are genuinely threatened. But then, codfish are less photogenic than baby seals, and I guess celebrities like Brigitte Bardot and Brittney Spears are less likely to leap to the defence of fish.

I am also disturbed by the extreme rhetoric employed by the IFAW and certain other elements of the animal rights movement. A number of people in Newfoundland have had their telephone numbers posted on animal rights website, and have received death threats. My cousin Garry got a phone call from a nun who told him that she hoped his children drowned in their own blood. The extremists within the movement have little understanding of the hunt and its history, but they fashion themselves as righteous crusaders. And it's frightening to get caught in their line of fire.

Your cousin Garry Troake plays a key role in your story. Tell us about him.

Looking at the experience of my family over several generations was one way to examine Newfoundland history over the last ninety years or so, from the time when my grandmother was a girl in Twillingate until now. So many changes have taken place over that time - we went from being a separate country to being a province of Canada, and we were kicked into a new global economy. Garry was my contemporary, part of my generation - and he was a remarkable person.

As a young guy, he did what so many Newfoundlander have done, and went to the mainland in search of work. But then he chose to return and renew his connection to the place where he was born. Yet he never turned his back to the outside world - he consciously set out to bridge the gap between both worlds. He was equally interested in contemporary and traditional culture. He had a deep appreciation of traditional outport values and was always an open thinker and a visionary. In fact before we met, he came to one of my contemporary dance performances. So, in Garry I found something I had been looking for - a bridge between my own work in an urban-based modern art form and my ethical foundations in working class Newfoundland experience.

When it came to the seal hunt, Garry made a genuine effort to reach out to the opponents and to engage them in real dialogue, and he was very successful at this. He was courteous and smart, patient and likeable - and people responded well to him. Garry was not just as an activist. He was also a teacher.

His death was more than a loss to our family and his community - it was a loss to a whole generation of Newfoundlanders. He had the kind of clear perspective and vision that made him a great leader and our entire province suffers his loss.

There's a bitter irony in the fact an ill-conceived and pointless regulation from the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans - one stipulating that fishing nets can only be in the water on certain days of the week contributed to his death. Too often federal bureaucrats impose limits on outport life without any real understanding of how these communities work, and hard-working people are treated like criminals for trying to make an honest living.

What was your relationship to grandmother? And what role does she play in the film?

My Grandmother was more like a mother to me, so it's hard to know where to begin. Most of my earliest memories involve her - berrypicking, learning what plants to eat and which were poisonous, learning how to chew spruce gum - also learning to cook and sew my own clothes. She passed on so much practical knowledge, but also an outlook, a willingness to go out into the world - a way of being firmly rooted in a specific place and open to other possibilities at the same time.

She taught me resourcefulness. It would seem there was no food in the house, and Nan could still make a wonderful meal out of something. She was frugal. She always saw the usefulness in things. When I look at my own life, I sometimes feel that my decision to work in the arts was like taking a vow of poverty, yet I never feel poor. And that's due in large part to what Nan taught me.

As for her role in the film, she is a pivotal figure in the story that I wanted to tell. So many themes that I wanted to address were present in her own life - the ingenuity and industriousness that survival in the outports demanded, her proud sense of community, her practical good humour.

What can the people of Twillingate teach us?

They have a unique and practical knowledge about the environment. The Newfoundland fishermen were the first to sound the alarm about the diminishing fish stocks. And I came to appreciate the values that the community holds in common. Theft is virtually unheard of in Twillingate, and cooperation is the norm. People help each other out as a matter of routine, whether it's building a boat, repairing a roof , offering fresh vegetables from the garden or a bottle of seal, rabbit or caribou. Despite the same pressures that affect many communities, outports are remarkably crime-free. When the film crew was worried about leaving an expensive camera unattended, Jack said,"Just leave it there - it will be fine."

I also learned to appreciate their frugality - a quality born of necessity. I remember how my grandmother was horrified at the wastefulness of contemporary life. She was raised at a time when people made use of everything and knew how to repair things when they were broken. And I came to love their resourcefulness. As Jack Troake says; "All I need is a punt, a one-clawed jigger and a shotgun, and I'll always go to bed with a full belly."

What artistic choices did you face in making this film?

I wanted to structure the film in the way my family tells stories - to reveal information through a series of anecdotes. The episodic story form allowed me to say more about culture and context than a linear argumentative form.

I wanted the film to reflect the extremity of our seasons. Visitors to Newfoundland usually come during the summer, rarely in February, so they get to know the place within a narrow seasonal band. I wanted the film to reflect the complete range of geography and climate, to give a sense of what its like to be here.

I wanted to communicate the presence of history in the lives of the film's subjects - how people planted their first gardens with Devon topsoil, and everything that means. I also wanted to show how people can be cash-poor yet have rich lives, how they are motivated less by profit than by the basic desire for security - for food and shelter and company. And as much as possible, I have tried to make a film in which people speak for themselves.