Garrett Gilbart carved plants into the doors of abandoned cars. Then his scrapyard closed for environmental cleanup
VANCOUVER, B.C. – October 19, 2026 – The Green Channel has added Echoes in Steel, a 14-minute documentary by Rob Viscardis. The film follows artist Garrett Gilbart and the vintage car scrapyard that supplied him for years.
Gilbart carves metal and other found industrial materials into sculptural forms. Each piece carries the plants, land and histories of the place where its material was found, so the doors and hoods he pulled from the scrapyard came out of the yard carrying the yard with them.
When the scrapyard closed for environmental remediation, for Gilbart, that meant losing a defining source of inspiration and material for one body of his work. The film follows him as he lets that go and accepts that his work, like the steel he cuts, will keep changing.
Echoes in Steel is set in a post-industrial landscape full of the traces of labour, mass production and decay. It looks at our attachment to objects and at our complicated relationship with the land those objects eventually return to.
Viscardis shot the film in an intimate observational style with anamorphic cinematography, following Gilbart from the scrapyard to his studio. The original score is by Rob McAllister, and the film includes archival footage from two 1936 industrial films, Steel: A Symphony of Industry and Master Hands. It also draws on Christine Poulson’s book William Morris, about the designer at the centre of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The film was nominated for a Golden Sheaf Award for Best Short Documentary at the Yorkton Film Festival. It has also screened at the ReFrame Film Festival in Peterborough and had its Northern Ontario premiere at Sudbury Indie Cinema’s international documentary film festival.
“We usually talk about cleaning up contaminated land as a simple good, and it is,” said Scott Renyard, founder of The Green Channel. “Echoes in Steel shows what that cleanup can cost one person who found beauty in what we left behind. It is a quieter kind of environmental film, and we are glad to have it on our platform.”
Echoes in Steel is streaming now on The Green Channel, the environmental documentary streaming platform.
About The Green Channel
The Green Channel is a Canadian environmental documentary streaming platform with a growing library of exclusive films and series: thegreenchannel.tv
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Company Name: The Green Channel Inc.
Contact Person: Scott Renyard
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City: Vancouver
State: British Columbia
Country: Canada
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