Meet some of YKIFF’s films and filmmakers

The 2024 Yellowknife International Film Festival has begun, featuring more than a dozen films from across Canada and the world.

From Wednesday to Sunday, movies from 11 countries will screen at Yellowknife’s Capitol Theatre.

The schedule includes nine feature films and four short film programs. You can find our guide on what to watch here.

Four filmmakers whose works will be featured at the 18th annual festival are sitting down with the hosts of Mornings At The Cabin this week to talk about their films.

You can listen live on Cabin Radio’s website or on the Cabin Radio app. You can listen to the Mornings at the Cabin podcast any time on Spotify and Apple.

We’ll post highlights from the interviews below.

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Ryan Dickie, Tea Creek

Ryan Dickie’s documentary Tea Creek follows Jacob Beaton, the co-creator of Tea Creek Farm, an Indigenous food sovereignty and trades training initiative on Gitxsan territory in Kitwanga, BC.

Dickie, a member of the Fort Nelson First Nation, said it’s a unique and empowering story about Indigenous food sovereignty, security and healing.

“The price of food for Indigenous communities is quite substantial,” he said.

“For our communities to be able to really be sovereign within our food systems and our food network, I really think it’s within us to be able to find solutions to be able to produce our own food locally. And when you do that, it reconnects our communities to the land.”

Dickie said Tea Creek is a viable solution for a more sustainable future that is also helping to heal people from generational trauma by reclaiming Indigenous agriculture.

“With a lot of our traditional food networks we’ve seen steep declines in those networks, so Tea Creek’s essentially created an initiative that provides a sustainable solution to help mitigate those challenges of food insecurity in our communities,” he said.

“The lead character Jacob Beaton says it best: ‘Our past is our future again.’”

Dickie hopes the film will inspire other Indigenous communities to start similar initiatives and various levels of government to support them.

“What I really want people to take away is that when given the opportunity, despite everything that’s happened in the past, Indigenous people can be sovereign,” he said. “We just need that opportunity.”

Tea Creek premiered at the Doxa documentary film festival in Vancouver and has screened across Canada.

It plays at the Yellowknife International Film Festival on Saturday at 2pm. Dickie will be in attendance for the screening and a Q&A.

Tova Krentzman, Fire Tower

“Observing the observers” is how Tova Krentzman describes her film, Fire Tower.

The documentary introduces viewers to fire tower “lookouts” as they work to protect the land and people from wildfires.

“So many people, when they finish the film, they’re like, ‘I want to do that so bad,'” she said.

“There is something incredible about it but it’s really tough as well.”

The film also explores the theme of solitude versus loneliness.

“A lot of people don’t know that there’s lookouts that spend six months alone, climbing a 100-foot tower day after day – 10, 12 hours a day – just looking for smoke,” Krentzman said.

Despite that, she said many lookouts have “such a strong connection to their surroundings that they don’t feel so alone.”

Krentzman said she was inspired to make the film after working as a cook at a wildfire-fighting camp in northern Alberta. Having worked on ships, she said she related to the idea of being connected while alone and observing your surroundings.

“I just wanted to document something before it disappears and also really highlight these incredible unsung heroes,” she said.

Krentzman said being a lookout is “an old-school profession” being taken over by technology, but she argues something gets lost without the human aspect.

“The technology is not there yet,” she said. “Hopefully it’s more about just more tools in the toolbox rather than getting rid of the lookouts.”

Fire Tower screens at the Capitol Theatre on Friday at 7pm alongside a Behchokǫ̀ evacuation documentary from Artless Collective and the Tłı̨chǫ Government. The screening will include a Q&A.

Karl R Hearne, The G

The G is “a dark thriller about a mysterious older woman who’s out to get revenge on a corrupt legal guardian who’s destroyed her life.”

Director Karl R Hearne said the film is driven by the main character, the titular G, inspired by his Irish grandmother, who he described as a “notorious tough cookie.”

“She never expressed fear in her entire life and in situations where you would expect someone to express fear, it would come out as anger,” he said.

“And she’s just a really talented, smart, interesting person. So really it was just I started writing something based on her.”

In the film, Hearne said the lead character becomes subject to a guardianship scam, noting fraud and abuse are real issues in the guardianship industry.

“You plunk this very, very intense older female character down within this scenario and then things go off the rails from there,” he said.

In the starring role is Dale Dickey, an American actress who viewers may recognize from popular films and TV series such as Iron Man 3, Winter’s Bone and Breaking Bad.

“She’s one of the best actors working anywhere,” Hearne said.

“The role was perfect for her.”

The G screens at the Capital Theatre on Saturday at 9pm. Hearne will be in attendance for a Q&A.

Leila Conners, Legion 44

Leila Conners’ film, Legion 44, explores the rise of carbon removal.

The documentary chronicles visionaries “who have invented groundbreaking solutions to reverse climate disruption” around the world.

“Basically we figured it out,” Conners said.

“Like the water cycle, we have a carbon cycle and human beings, our civilization, needs to live inside the carbon cycle.”

Conners said, for example, that driving a car powered by fossil fuels is akin to emitting trash into the sky. The solution, she said, is to take that carbon of the sky and reuse it or sequester it.

“Because we didn’t really know how to do that until recently … the trash has been sort of accumulating in the sky,” she said, adding that carbon removal is “a unifying message” across the political spectrum.

“This particular technology of carbon removal kind-of sits outside of political argumentation because it’s basically saying, ‘hey look, we’re cleaning up our mess and we’re making fuels, we’re making materials, we’re sequestering it and people have jobs.”‘

Over the hour and a half film, Conners said viewers will learn a lot about carbon removal and how they can get involved.

“People cry in this movie, which is really interesting,” she said. “I think it’s because you actually are convinced there’s a way forward and you’re always being told there isn’t.”

Legion 44 will screen at the Yellowknife International Film Festival on Sunday at 2pm and feature a Q&A with Conners.

Jesse Wheeler contributed reporting.