ADVENTURE ON THE WATER
Film fest focuses on paddling
When this relentless winter weather finally abates, thoughts will turn to open water and the great outdoors.
The Paddling Film Festival at the Bytowne Cinema April 19 transforms those thoughts into gorgeous images via a spate of short films, 10 in all, including the award-winning best-canoeing film, Connected by Canoe, a Canada 150 project of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough and the Community Foundations of Canada.
James Raffan, the museum’s executive director, helped lead a disparate group of 16 paddlers, through what he terms a “floating conversation about Canada” while undertaking a canoe trip from Kingston to Ottawa via the Rideau Lakes Waterway.
While Raffan imagined a humble, 60-second snapshot of the trek, Canadian film maker Goh Iromoto raised the bar, showing up with a wide range of camera gear and ultimately producing seven minutes of spectacular footage. The close-ups reveal paddlers battling the elements along the waterway past Seeley’s Bay (Raffan’s home base), Westport, Perth, Smiths Falls, Kemptville and on into Ottawa.
“He not only captures the message, but it’s also a really beautiful visual portrait of people and landscape and ideas,” Raffan says of Iromoto. The adventurers engaged with the communities en route to discuss Canadian issues.
That message, in a time of reflection and reconciliation in Canada, is trying to help move a nation beyond a troubled past and into
a more hopeful future, with the iconic canoe as a vehicle.
“It’s the notion of journey, the notion of being in the same waterway together, being in the same boat and pulling together,” Raffan says.
The metaphors come easily, with the canoe as a vessel of reconciliation, on a venture shared by Inuit, Metis, and other First Nations people, among myriad ethnic backgrounds.
As a female paddler says in the film: “You have to pull together to move forward.”
Another noted how “we’ve lost the sense of community. We have to care about the people next door.”
For Raffan and the canoe museum, the ambitious goal of a “floating conversation” about Canada helps place the canoe as a potential way forward, and not merely a link to Canada’s pioneer past.
The final thought on the trip from Raffan as the paddles dried and the muscles ached: “It had a dimension to it that left me exhausted, but full of hope.”
For viewers, that canoe trek is but one sampling from the Paddling Film Festival 2018 world tour, created and produced by Scott MacGregor of Rapid Media.
Individual venues among the hundreds accessing the festival throughout North America, select their own films for presentation. At the Bytowne, that assignment fell to programmer Bruce White, who chose 10 from a field of 27 films. They range in length from five to 27 minutes with a total running time of two hours, 29 minutes.
While previous paddling films have aired in community halls and high schools, White says the filmmakers have “upped their game” with quality high-resolution, highdefinition film better suited to a cinema experience. The 650-seat Bytowne somewhat famously sells out four showings of the Banff Outdoor Film Festival each year. Now, the adventure is on water.
“I’m learning there are a lot of keen paddlers in the Ottawa region,” White says.
The films include shorts on sea kayaking in Juneau, Alaska, a Greenland trek that culminates in a kayak down a glacial river and Don’s Canoe, a look at how Aboriginal peoples made the first canoes, from birch bark using basic tools.
Ottawa is upping its outdoor game. Last fall, the Mayfair sold out two presentations of the inaugural Ottawa Adventure Film Festival. Now the paddlers have their day. “The films really profit by being on the big screen,” White says.