Bird Box, a film directed by Susanne Bier and starring Sandra Bullock, had tremendous success since it was released on December 21 on the Netflix platform. In fact it became the most successful original production so far , as it was reported that in just over 45 million accounts they viewed it in its first week of being available.
However, the film has stumbled upon a delicate subject. And it has been harshly criticized for using images of a tragedy that occured in real life. The footage appears in a newscast when the fictional apocalypse begins to hover over humanity.
Real footage of the Lac-Megantic tragedy was used in the Netflix film "Bird Box" and in the sci-fi show "Travelers," as pictured here. pic.twitter.com/RzAtOxyr80
The tragedy in question is the Lac-Mégantic railway accident, which occurred in 2013 in the town of the same name in southern Quebec in Canada, where 47 people died, there were dozens of injured and a greater contingency as the derailment was several cisterns that transported oil.
The mayor of Lac-Mégantic criticized Bird Box for the use of images from that tragedy. He told the local press: “You can be sure that we will follow up on this and that our citizens are on our side.”
Although Deadline reports that Netflix has not declared anything in this regard, it also states that the BBC claims that the streaming company has refused to remove the images. On the other hand, Bird Box would not be the only Netflix title to use the images from the tragedy of Lac-Mégantic, because Travelers, of American-Canadian production, also used them in one of their episodes. In that case the producer from the show, Peacock Alley Entertainment, undertook to change the footage and reiterated their claimed ignorance that the images corresponded to a real tragedy, since they were bought in a stock footage company.
It was at dawn on Saturday, July 6, 2013 that an unmanned train derailed on a main street of Lac-Mégantic. The high speed and a series of inconsistencies in security on the part of the company in charge of transporting the fuel caused the wagons to leave the tracks, generating between four and six explosions in the urban area. It is said that the explosion was so strong that the heat of the fire was felt around 2 kilometers from the accident and that the outlook was “like being in the apocalypse “.
An aggravating factor in the tragedy was that the epicenter of the fire was a bar where dozens of people were inside. The fire affected at least 30 buildings and spread for two days despite the support of fire departments from nearby towns, including Maine from the United States. The accident caused the evacuation of thousands of people and an environmental impact that has taken a long time for the people to solve, if it is even possible.
It was therefore an accident of epic proportions, both for the lives it claimed and for the material and environmental damage. In the following NASA image you can see the extent of the fire (by infrared) seen from the ISS.
Because of the impact from this event, it is not easy for the Canadian community to grant the use of the images from the tragedy they lived for entertainment purposes. The position that the producer from Travelers was the right one to take, especially because it is a product made for streaming and it may be “easier” to edit the episode in question. Of course, it can also be that Bird Box remains as is because the argument Netflix has is that the images were purchased in a stock and it is possible that the license endorses the use for a fictional film.
