For two years, Wolens interviews Julia Butterfly Hill, her support team, and her critics. He spent six nights with Hill on her 180-foot high platform and 40 days trips, revealing an intensely spiritual and articulate woman determined to accomplish her goal. We get a sense of the awesome beauty of her days and nights lived in an ancient tree, of the horror of being assaulted by lumber company helicopters, and of the strangeness of fierce media scrutiny seeking out a woman in a tree.
Julia has become her cause and her cause has become her. BUTTERFLY shows us the situation out of which Earth First activists have regularly engaged in civil disobedient “actions:” The whys, the hows, and the whos. But to fully see why Julia is in the tree, BUTTERFLY presents who she is and what leads her to live as she does.
Although it’s easy to view BUTTERFLY as a film about the environmental movement, forest issues or of course about Julia Butterfly, at its heart the film is really about what each of us can achieve, the greatness we can all become.