Barri Cohen, the director, with her daughter

The documentary was screened last week as part of the eighth annual Planet in Focus festival, which presents works that aim to raise awareness about various environmental issues.

Cohen, who has been making films for the last 16 years, and is currently working as a producer and director for Summerhill TV and the W Network, said Toxic Trespass is an investigative, activist documentary that looks at the effect pollution is having on children’s health.

“We’re talking about at any one time, thousands and thousands of chemicals are out there. We trust that someone is awake at the switch, making sure that anything we’re consuming, breathing, drinking and eating is safe. I wanted to know, is it safe? And how do we know it’s safe? And who are the gatekeepers who are telling us it’s safe?” she asked.

“You can’t ignore the fact that there are escalating cancer rates in young adults like never before, like testicular cancer, which was unheard of a generation ago. It is still rare, but increasingly there are women in their 20s and 30s getting breast cancer.”

Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg, the film’s executive producer, who had been doing environmental research with the Women’s Health and Environment Network (WHEN), asked Cohen to write and direct the documentary because of her experience with making health-themed documentaries.

“She really is the driving force in all of this, in wanting to do this film, pushing to get it made, and fundraising to get it made. It’s as much her film as it is mine,” Cohen said.

She added that one of the reasons she wanted to make the film was to explore the fact that people tend to work to find a cure to a disease, rather than tackle its cause.

She said the usual knee-jerk reaction is to blame bad genes, or bad eating habits.

“All of those things are factors, potentially, but there is so much more that we need to be looking at.”

She said she heard of researchers at Harvard University and Boston University who were analyzing urine and blood samples for heavy metals and toxins.

“I wanted to know what was in my blood and what was in my daughter’s blood.”

She said that when she began working on the film in 2001, she discovered that the same service wasn’t available in Canada.

It wasn’t until 2005 that a Canadian environmental group established two labs, one in Vancouver and one in Quebec, to conduct the same tests that Americans had been doing for a number of years.

“Canada is so behind the times,” Cohen said.

She said that she arranged to have her and her daughter’s blood and urine tested, and they were tested in a group with four other families from across the country.

She said the man who created “Happy Planet,” a Vancouver-based company that produces organic juices and smoothies, was part of the group.

“He’s an organic farmer, with three or four kids raised on an organic farm, and they had the same crap in their blood as my daughter did in hers.”

She said that discovery is what lead her to research where all the chemicals in their blood come from.

She chose Windsor and Sarnia, two southwestern Ontario cities that are known for their high levels of pollutants, as the setting for her film.

She interviewed three physicians, two of whom are oncologists.

In the film, a pediatric oncologist at the Hospital for Sick Children said there isn’t enough evidence for parents to worry about the effects of the environment on their children’s health, but he did say that people should push public policy-makers to change the laws regarding chemicals found in pesticides.

Cohen also interviewed a physician in Windsor who had seen many children with cancer and who raised questions about the link between cancer and industrialization.

She also spoke to another oncologist in Windsor who got in trouble with her hospital for saying that cancer is a chemical disease.

Most challenging, she said, was the “tremendous amount of resistance” she received from government officials.

“I managed to interview one official from the ministry of the environment who is in charge of the Windsor-Sarnia area… but for the most part I was completely stonewalled.”

She said the most shocking thing she discovered while making the film was “the extent to which the government has taken a very passive role in protecting our health.”

Cohen added that the existing protocol is for industry to prove that the chemicals they produce cause no harm, rather than prove that they are safe.

“There is a colossal lack of transparency and a lack of co-ordination around health and the environment at the public policy level,” Cohen said.

“The environment should not be a political potato. Let’s just get the job done. Let’s just try to find solutions and protect our health, because it costs us money in the end. If everyone is worried about trying to bring health care expenses down, this is one way to do it.”

A shortened version of the 80-minute film will be shown on TVOntario on The View From Here this winter. It will also air on RDI, a French TV station.