Award-winning documentary to be screened Sunday in Troy

A free showing of the film, “The Beast of our Time: Climate Change and Grizzly Bears,” along with a reading by Livingston poet Marc Beaudin will be presented by the Yaak Valley Forest Council at 5 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 17. The event will be held in the Roosevelt Park Pavilion in Troy and will include live music by Strong Buffalo and Ben Weaver.

“The Beast of Our Time,” a 28-minute documentary produced by Save the Yellowstone Grizzly, is an unflinching inquiry into the relationship between climate change and grizzly bears. The film is narrated by one of America’s most beloved actors and storytellers, Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges and scored by pianist Bill Payne of Little Feat. The film recently one first place at the Bigfork Independent Film Festival.

In recent years, the catastrophic effects of climate change have become more and more clear, and grizzly bears are facing the brunt of those challenges, between food and habitat loss. The film, which features conversations with celebrated authors such as Terry Tempest Williams, Doug Peacock and Rick Bass, is both a dire warning and a compelling call to action advocating for habitat protection, connectivity, tolerance and co-existence, highway wildlife crossings, and room to roam.

Beaudin is the author of “Life List: Poems, a 2020 Montana Book Award Honor Winner,” which includes the Spur Award finalist for Best Poem of the West, “25 Bears” — written during a past visit to the Yaak Valley.

“The poems are exquisite and full of life like the birds themselves,” writes Terry Tempest Williams. “In each poem we find clarity and compassion as we stand on the razor-edge of uncertainty.”

An Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation artist-in-residence, Beaudin is also the author of the hitchhiking memoir “Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals,” and several other books. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Cutthroat, High Desert Journal and Whitefish Review, and has been widely anthologized in publications dedicated to environmental and social justice. A frequent performer of poetry and spoken word, Beaudin has worked and recorded with a variety of jazz and rock musicians at venues across the country.