Artist:
Xstine Cook is a Calgary artist. A mask and puppet maker and experimental theatre creator for over 20 years, she is making the leap to new media.

Maezy, Medina and Zaiyah are Xstine's daughters, age 7, 5, and 3. As practicing anarchists, the trio tackle order and injustice with equal passion on a daily basis.

Xstine's first film "Face and Mooks at Home" was shown in the National Gallery in Ottawa as part of Alberta Scene centennial celebrations.

Her second film "Dead Boyfriends" was shown at Strasbourg IFF, International Film Fest England, California Intl Animation Fest (nomination - best music video), Spooky Movie Film Fest, Edmonton IFF, Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival (nomination - best experimental), Brainwash, Radar Hamburg, Melbourne Underground Film Fest, Coney Island Film Fest, Ming Short Film Fest (winner - best original score), Big Easy Shorts, and the International Festival of Animated Objects. She is currently in post-production for her third film.

"Tar Sand Pudding" is Xstine's fourth film, the first with her daughters.

Xstine and her family are so delighted to have taken part in Emmedia's Crash Compression Camp, and would like to thank Tomas Jonsson and especially Noel Begin for their incredible support and unflagging will.

Description:
In a hilarious send-up of a cooking show, three kids take on Alberta's oilsands and create a holy mess of their own, complete with oil-drowned dead ducks. And a pink bunny.

As the world's largest industrial project, Alberta's oilsands are proclaimed by many as our biggest environmental disaster - its scars on the Earth can be seen from space! Toxic wastewater water flows into dozens of lake-sized toxic tailings ponds that cover 130 square kilometers!

With the maniacal logic of pre-schoolers, Maezy (age 7), Medina (age 5) and Zaiyah (age 3) satirize Syncrude's environmental disaster of April 28, 2008 while making "Tar Sand Pudding". Syncrude did not report the incident when 1606 ducks died in their toxic wastewater tailings pond. When a whistle blower told the media, Syncrude lied about it.

Syncrude Canada has since been charged under the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, and the Migratory Birds Convention Act. Syncrude Canada Ltd. plead not guilty to the precedent setting charges because criminal charges "... will do nothing to bring back the 1,600 ducks," as stated by Robert White, Syncrude's lawyer.

Syncrude's trial begins March 2010. It was recently announced the first tailings pond in more than 40 years is expected to be reclaimed sometime in 2010.

"It would be easier just to fold our hands and not make this fight... to say, I, one man, can do nothing. I grow afraid only when I see people thinking and acting like this. We all know the story about the man who sat beside the trail too long, and then it grew over and he could never find his way again. We can never forget what has happened, but we cannot go back, nor can we just sit beside the trail."
Poundmaker, Cree Chief

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