The Cinematheque

In Person: Nettie Wild

“[Wild’s] fast-moving doc is no polemic … [The director] remains an off-screen presence, skillfully steering her human subjects into highly personal observations about this majestic topography and their relationships with it.”

Ken Eisner, Georgia Straight

Veteran Vancouver filmmaker Nettie Wild has documented political revolutions, land blockades, and the fight for safe injection sites with a nuanced understanding of complex issues and a refusal to reduce them to ​“us/​them” binaries. In KONELĪNE, her sixth feature, Wild turns this curious lens to the controversial Red Chris mine development in Tahltan territory, northwestern British Columbia. KONELĪNE​’s spectacular cinematography emphasizes the dynamic forces at play in this fraught landscape, from the kinetic power of workers installing electrical towers to the muscular resistance of horses pulled across a rushing river. Opinions on the mine development are as varied as the landscape: Wild interviews Tahltan both opposed to and working for the mine, as well as a range of settlers and visitors. KONELĪNE never tries to reconcile these differences under a simplistic call to action, but instead views them as interrelated forces in BC’s complex ecology. KONELĪNE is as beautiful and haunting as the landscape it portrays. —Chelsea Birks

After the screening, The Cinematheque’s Learning & Outreach Director Chelsea Birks will moderate a Q&A with director Nettie Wild. Birks’s award-winning book, Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film, features a chapter on KONELĪNE.

“Nettie Wild, recipient of the 2023 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, is one of our most fearless documentarians. With KONELĪNE: Our Land Beautiful, she aspires to cinematic poetry.”

Harry Killas