A Beautiful Mess is a documentary film that explores North America’s bizarre and captivating obsession with beaver, and our complex and often messy relationship with the natural world.
Everyone knows beaver. They’ve got big teeth, webbed feet, wide tails. They chomp down trees and dam up rivers. We’ve seen their likeness depicted in countless pop culture icons, and their reputation as busy, eager rodents precedes them.
But the story of beaver is far richer and more complex than most know.
Indigenous groups have understood the crucial role beaver play in the natural world for millennia. There are even multiple creation stories which credit a great beaver with making the earth. In the 1800s, the trapping and trading of beaver pelts fueled North American colonization, keeping European men’s heads fashionably covered and turning John Jacob Astor into the richest man in the US. The beaver pelt craze drove the North American beaver to near extinction.
In the 1940s, we used leftover WWII parachutes to drop beavers out of airplanes in an effort to reintroduce the species to western mountain ranges. And now, a renewed interest in beaver and the benefits they offer are being recognized. Researchers are showing how beaver habitat can play a role in fighting the effects of climate change, from mitigating forest fires to extreme drought and flooding.
While self-proclaimed Beaver Believers espouse the virtues of beaver and their damming ways, many still see them as pure nuisance, useful only for their sleek pelts.
Through the story of one weird-looking rodent, we find themes about:
Our film seeks to ask questions including:
