KONELINE: OUR LAND BEAUTIFUL (Nettie Wild, Canada). 96 minutes. Rating: NNNNN
Nettie Wild says Koneline: Our Land Beautiful, her spectacular meditation on the Tahltan First Nation’s complex relationship with the land – and the mining industry gradually invading – takes more risks than any movie she’s made before.
“I’ve been in war zones where people have actually shot at me, but with Koneline, I am taking the biggest artistic leap of my career,” she says in a phone interview from her home in BC.
The key, she says, was to shed any sense of judgment.
“Could I, along with my crew, bring a curious heart to everyone in front of our camera? Could we seek the beauty and poetry in every one of those people – understanding that good poetry embraces contradictions – rather than run away from complexity?”
What she means is that the film neither idealizes the First Nations nor demonizes the miners and company honchos.
“I felt strongly that in the roar of all the rhetoric, I didn’t want to make a polemical film. We asked what would happen if we went into this extraordinary land at this extraordinary time, just as it’s on the cusp of change. Our objective was to find the poetry in every single person in front of our camera, no matter who they were.”
Here are some gorgeous images and Wild’s commentary on them.
“I started to discover that it didn’t matter who I talked to or what they were doing there, every single person started with a real tie to the land and love of being in the bush. That was true of the lineman and the drillers as well as the Tahltan who were hunting and fishing. That differs from the assumption that people inhabit their polarized quarters.”
“We knew what our focus point had to be: that little pole (where the tower was being attached). We started by working with the company to get the camera close enough so that we could get what we needed, but far enough away so that our camera wouldn’t be destroyed by the backwash and so that we wouldn’t cause a safety issue for the camera or the crew or the chopper. As we were making that sequence on the ground, it was thrilling.”
“Before the horses got into the river, Heidi, a big-game guide outfitter, acted as if she were in preproduction. She was shooing the horses, there were logistics to deal with, but when she got on the horses and got them to move across the river, it was like she turned into a nine-year-old. The bones on her face changed. She wasn’t just surviving, she was living it and totally loving it.”
Read the review here.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
