Rob Stewart was an exemplary human being. The celebrated film-maker died this week. He was only 37 years old and had many adventures and films to make ahead of him. Rob, the creator of Sharkwater, was working on a sequel to this movie when he mysteriously drowned off the coast of Florida. Rob wanted us to see what humans were doing to the shark population, like many other beautiful creatures and places on earth which are in danger of going extinct.
Rob was using his experience to make a movie here in Muskoka. He saw the same imminent, human-caused destruction happening in his own backyard, a place he had spent happy summers in his youth. When he found out about the proposed hydro plant in Bala Falls, he knew he would use his skills to protect it. The situation in Bala must have seemed like other places in the world that he had famously tried to protect. He wanted to show how corporate greed had twisted the fate of his beloved Bala Falls. He wanted to know why a private energy company had been given a heritage waterfall and park. He was fully engaged in exposing this to the world.
Rob has given us on film the best reasons in the world to fight the hydro plant in Bala. In the trailer to the movie ‘The Fight for Bala Falls-Not a Done Deal,’ he has shown the government, and all of us, why this project needs to be stopped, once and for all.
This is the mark of an unforgettable, award-winning human being.
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