In the late 1800s, tens of thousands of people stampeded the Yukon for gold, some of whom carried newfangled film cameras. Inventor Thomas Edison and his company captured the first known footage in the Klondike, a few rough minutes featuring gold miners and the rugged frontier culture Edison’s team encountered. Despite the gold rush being the world’s most heavily documented event by the turn of the 20th century, it would take nearly a hundred years until a feature-length documentary would be directed and produced by Yukoner themselves. The remote distance coupled with the small population meant that staging a full film production was challenging and costly.

In the intervening years documentaries were made by outside filmmakers, but these films often continued the idea of the Yukon as a frontier territory. When Tlingit filmmaker Carol Geddes set out to make a film about her clan relative Kaash KlaÕ (George Johnston) in 1996 she wanted to highlight a side of the Yukon that was lesser known. Picturing a People: George Johnston, Tlingit Photographer details the larger-than-life story of an Indigenous man, who as a teenager, hiked hundreds of kilometres to meet his ancestors in Alaska and in 1910 taught himself how to shoot and develop film in order to document his community.

Photography plays a key role in Australian-Yukoner Marty O’Brien’s, Camera Trap, a film about a wildlife photographer betting his life savings and personal safety to snap an elusive photo of a caribou herd on their long land migration (an image that incidentally echoes the lines of gold prospectors scaling the Chilkoot Trail mountain pass during the Klondike gold rush).

Unsurprisingly, nature is a theme that underlies many of the films produced in the Yukon by the very fact of how difficult it is to survive the elements and how reliant people are on each other. In the award-winning All The Time In The World, director Suzanne Crocker and her family set out to live in the wilderness for nine months without any modern conveniences. Outside the pressures of deadlines and daily commutes, the family discovers the rewards of reconnecting with nature and one another.

David Curtis’s Sovereign Soil is a revealing look at farmers and homesteaders in Dawson City who have taken up the challenge of growing food north of 60 and celebrates the beauty of this ferocious and remote place. Through stunning visuals, the film explores these growers’ commitment to food sovereignty, community, and environmental stewardship.

A love of the land and a good sense of humour are common currency in the North, two things Dennis Allen’s charming CBQM provides in spades. The former Yukoner documents the beloved radio station in Fort McPherson which serves as a lifeline connecting and entertaining the local Gwich'in community.

In all five of these films, the Yukon features prominently with its exquisite landscape and memorable subjects. Over the last century, the representation of the Yukon has evolved from a simple frontier vista to a richly textured portrait of life lived north of 60. As the Yukon Film Society celebrates its 40th anniversary, we hope you enjoy the films in this series and gain a greater understanding of this unique Canadian region.

Vivian Belik
Guest curator
Hot Docs, Available Light Film Festival

Share this film