Marc-André Leclerc, an exceptional climber, has made solo his religion and ice his homeland. When filmmaker Peter Mortimer begins his film, he places his camera at the base of a British Columbia cliff and waits patiently for the star climber to come down to answer his questions. Marc André, a little uncomfortable, prefers to return to the depths of the forest where he lives in a tent with his girlfriend Brette Harrington. In the heart of winter, Peter films vertiginous solos on fragile ice. He tries to make appointments with the climber who is never there and does not seem really concerned by this camera pointed at him "For me, it would not be a solo if there was someone else" . Marc-André is thus, the "pure light" of the mountaineers of his time, which marvel Barry Blanchard, Alex Honnold or Reinhold Messner, interviewed in the film. An event film for an extraordinary character.
A small mountain community in Canada is devastated when a school bus accident leaves more than a dozen of its children dead. A big-city lawyer arrives to help the survivors' and victims' families prepare a class-action suit, but his efforts only seem to push the townspeople further apart. At the same time, one teenage survivor of the accident has to reckon with the loss of innocence brought about by a different kind of damage.
Morgan and his friends are on a hunting trip on a remote Canadian island when they are attacked by a swarm of giant wasps. Looking for help, Morgan stumbles across a barn inhabited by an enormous killer chicken. After doing some exploring, they discover the entire island is crawling with animals that have somehow grown to giant size. The most dangerous of all of these, however, are the rats, who are mobilizing to do battle with the human intruders.
A boy learns to deal with personal loss by making friends with a wild animal in this drama for the entire family. Jesse is a 16-year-old who is trying to put his life back together after the death of his father, who died while trying to rescue him in the wilderness. Jesse goes to live with his Uncle Roy, who lives in the rugged mountains of Washington State. While exploring, Jesse finds and rescues a wolf who has been seriously wounded; Jesse bonds with the animal, and while Roy understands the dangers of trying to tend to a wild animal, reluctantly allows Jesse to keep him. Jesse, who is fond of snowboarding, teaches the wolf to be his partner in skijoring, a sport in which a dog is used to haul a man on skis. John Rockwell the owner of a ranch, has different plans for the animal; he sees the wolf as a threat to his stock and is determined to see that the animal is put down.
When a young Japanese man with an affinity towards American western films is fired from his job, he sets out to become a real live cowboy.
A cattleman fights to establish a ranch in the middle of gold country.
A couple of youngish adventurers go into the wilderness of British Columbia in search of a lost colleague. Their plane crashes and they find themselves at the mercy of a crazed old Scottish miner, who has lived in isolation for many decades searching the mountain caves for a chamber of long lost gold. He is prepared to do anything - including murder - to keep his gold for himself.
Mountain Men is a comedy/drama that follows two estranged brothers, Toph and Cooper, as they journey to a remote family cabin in the mountains to evict a squatter. Buried resentment and bruised egos soon derail the plan and when the smoke clears they've destroyed their car and burned down the cabin, leaving them stranded in the cold Rocky Mountain winter. With their very survival at stake, they must learn to work together as brothers to get back to civilization.
When a young boy is captured by a grizzly bear, he begins the most incredible journey of a lifetime, full of breathtaking excitement, harrowing danger and thrilling surprises.
The story of a young idealistic teacher and his struggle with a class of difficult students in a northern British Columbia school.
Marie Deschamps has her whole life ahead of her but isn't sure what to do with it. To the disappointment of her parents, she drops out of college and decides to go work in Whistler in order to perfect her English. After a journey across Canada, her arrival in British-Columbia is less glorious than she dreamt. Fortunately, she meets Jean-Francois Laforest, a Quebecois skier who has been living on the West Coast for 10 years. J-F will introduce her to his Anglo friends and to the lifestyle of the mountains. Somewhere out West, this adventure will change her life forever.
In the 50 years since he carved his first totem pole, Robert Davidson has come to be regarded as one of the world’s foremost modern artists. Charles Wilkinson (Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World) brings his trademark inquisitiveness and craftsmanship to this revealing portrait of an unassuming living legend. Weaving together engaging interviews with the artist, his offspring, and a host of admirers, Haida Modern extols the sweeping impact of both Davidson’s artwork and the legions it’s inspired.
My American Cousin is a Canadian drama film, released in 1985. Written and directed by Sandy Wilson based on her own childhood, the film stars Margaret Langrick as Sandy Wilcox, a pre-teen girl growing up on a ranch in rural Penticton, British Columbia in the late 1950s. Sandy's longing to be treated as an adult is roused even further when her older American cousin Butch Walker (John Wildman) comes for a visit. The cast also includes Richard Donat, Jane Mortifee, Babz Chula and Camille Henderson.
Set off the West Coast of Canada in 1965, a hip new teacher with a miniskirt and lots of ideas turns a small town upside down. The soft autumn light of Galiano Island is beautifully rendered in writer/producer Peggy Thompson's The Lotus Eaters, and that's not the only elusive element that this film has captured. In revisiting its particular time and place - the Gulf Islands of the early '60s -Thompson obviously draws on her own family experiences there. For those who share Thompson's love of Gulf Islands magic, the elements she has assembled will feel as familiar as their own childhood blanket. But there are problems at the core of this story about a family's loss of innocence.
Director Mirjam Leuze’s The Whale and The Raven illuminates the many issues that have drawn whale researchers, the Gitga’at First Nation, and the Government of British Columbia into a complex conflict. As the people in the Great Bear Rainforest struggle to protect their territory against the pressure and promise of the gas industry, caught in between are the countless beings that call this place home.
Ten women in Canada talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first affairs, the pain of breaking up, frequenting gay bars, facing police raids, men's responses, and the etiquette of butch and femme roles. Interspersed among the interviews and archival footage are four dramatized chapters from a pulp novel, "Forbidden Love".
Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.
This short documentary offers a portrait of life on a cattle ranch, for both its human and animal inhabitants. Featuring sprightly music by folk singer Pete Seeger and narration by theatre actress Frances Hyland, the film is shot through the seasons on a large Canadian cattle ranch near Kamloops, British Columbia. With hundreds of cows and calves on the ranch, there’s no shortage of work to be done: soil cultivation and crop maintenance are taken care of by seasonal ranch hands while the resident cowboys—“anxious guardians”—brand and breed their bovine charges.
Acclaimed Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh presents a compelling documentary that puts a human face on a national tragedy: the murders and disappearances of an estimated 500 Aboriginal women in Canada over the past 30 years. This is a journey into the dark heart of Native women's experience in Canada. From Vancouver's Skid Row to the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia, to Saskatoon, this film honours those who have passed and uncovers reasons for hope. Finding Dawn illustrates the deep historical, social and economic factors that contribute to the epidemic of violence against Native women in this country.
The human impact on forests is explored through breathtaking vistas and poignant vignettes set in Canada's Pacific Northwest. Those who rely on this precious resource highlight the tensions and dilemmas between commodification and conservation.