Let me introduce myself. My name is Leo Anderson. and I’m a new filmmaker in northern Minnesota. I am currently working on a documentary about a Superfund site in my home town of Cass Lake, Minnesota.  As a child I lived on a section of the Superfund site that is currently surrounded by a chain link fence.  The fence is there to keep people from entering the contaminated area.

A little background on Cass Lake - Cass Lake is home to the headquarters of the Leech Lake Chippewa Indian Reservation. Cass Lake is home to about 1,000 people. It is also home of one of most toxic sites in the United States. For fifty years, a company treated utility poles in the middle of a residential neighborhood on the south side of our town.

The people that lived in this neighborhood were unaware that the water they were drinking and the air they were breathing was contaminated with dioxins, furans, pentachlorophenol and a whole witch’s brew of chemicals.
 

I am often amazed at the number of people that live on or near the Superfund site that are not aware of the risks that they are exposed to.

In poor communities, like Cass Lake, it's often very difficult to get people to listen to your concerns.   I started this film to bring the concerns of the residents of the superfund site to a larger audience.

I am in my second year of filming. 

I made a quick movie trailer with some of the clips from the film, you can view them here:

Dioxin Exposure clip - Windows Media Format (4.5 MB)

QuickTime format (16.1 MB)
Windows Media Format Small (8.29 MB)
Windows Media Format Large (29.2 MB)

To view the movie trailer, you'll need Microsoft Media player 9.0 or higher or QuickTime.