Anyox
Jessica Johnson & Ryan Ermacora, 2022, 87 min
English & Croatian with English subtitles

Strikingly composed of 35mm and 65mm large format cinematography, Anyox tells the story of the small Canadian company town of the same name, abandoned by the Granby Consolidated Mining Company in 1935. The town was built to house a largely immigrant workforce from Eastern Europe who came to mine the rich nodes of copper discovered in the nearby forests and surrounding mountainscape. Save for two residents, the town of Anyox is now a desolate and uninhabited ghost town. The film shows us a landscape that has been ravaged by exploitation. Machines stand within huge, excavated spaces against a backdrop of slag heaps, and abandoned buildings have been taken over by wilderness. Scenes from the town today are interwoven with a range of diverse archival materials: newspapers, company reports on microfiche, audio, film footage, and letters voiced by actors are combined to reveal a bitter struggle between workforce and company management – a conflict between the capitalist and socialist ideologies of the 1930s. 

Followed by a Q&A with Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora

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Screening as part of the Open City Documentary Festival