The stark divide in our wild beyond

If you’re looking for a simple take on the politics of development in the wilds of British Columbia, keep looking.

If, on the other hand, you can handle some moral ambiguity being served by fantastic visuals, then keep looking at this beautiful, complicated, compelling documentary by Nettie Wild.

Winner of the best Canadian feature at the recent Hot Docs festival, Koneline: Our Land Beautiful features gorgeous images of British Columbia’s natural beauty, but equally striking shots of “bad” development.

Take the scene in which a giant helicopter delicately manoeuvres a massive power-transmission tower into place while a group of workers struggles to finesse the final few centimetres and bolt it down. The windswept drama feels poised between a zeppelin mooring and a spaceship landing.

The meandering narrative takes in several other stories. There’s an unusual juxtaposition between First Nations and white hunters. One uses a rifle and pickup truck to bag a moose; the other favours a bow and arrow, and talks about how the activity connects him to his ancestors of 200,000 years ago. Guess which one is the white man?

The film also features a First Nations linguist, coaxing his father into speaking their native tongue in order to record and preserve it. “There were 500 ways of looking at the universe,” he says, referring to the many languages once spoken across North America. “Now there’s 200 left.” (Koneline, in the Tahltan language of the region, translates as “Our Land Beautiful.”)