Koneline: Our Land Beautiful

[projekktor id=’24374′]

Koneline: Our Land Beautiful is a Canadian documentary directed by award-winning director Nettie Wild. She premiered the film in Telegraph Creek, Dease Lake and Iskut, British Columbia before screening it at the Available Light Film Festival in Whitehorse and the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.

An art film with politics, drama, and humour, KONELĪNE: our land beautiful explores different ways of seeing — and being. A guide outfitter swims her horses across the vast Stikine River. The world’s biggest chopper flies 16,000-­‐pound transmission towers over mountaintops. KONELĪNE’s characters delight while smashing stereotypes: white hunters carry bows and arrows; members of the Tahltan First Nation hunt out of a pickup with high-­‐ powered rifles. There are diamond drillers — both Native and white — and elders who blockade them. There’s a Tahltan son struggling to preserve a dying language, and a white guy who sings “North to Alaska ” to his stuffed moose. KONELĪNE: our land beautiful does not lecture; it surprises with cinematic action and visual poetry. It is a bold experimental film from some of Canada’s leading documentary artists.

“For the last 20 years I have explored the mountains of British Columbia’s northwest, deep in the hereditary territory of the Tahltan First Nation,” Wild says. “It’s a staggeringly beautiful landscape with wildlife so abundant hunters refer to it as the Serengeti of the North. The mining industry also calls it the Golden Triangle because the forces of nature have melted the earth’s core and folded these mountains to create massive deposits of copper and gold. Millions of years ago, the stage was set in the northwest for the biggest controversy of our modern times – how to mine the riches of this earth without destroying the planet itself.”

Koneline: Our Land Beautiful is rated PG.