Canada Now: Koneline: Our Land Beautiful

Koneline: Our Land Beautiful
Directed by Nettie Wild
Screening as part of Canada Now Film Festival

by Bernie C Byrnes

Koneline: Our Land Beautiful premiered at the 2016 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, where it won the award for Best Canadian Documentary. It has also won the award for the ALFF 2016: Audience Choice for Best Canadian Documentary, and CSC Robert Brooks Award for Best Cinematography (Van Royko). The film garnered three Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 5th Canadian Screen Awards in 2017, for Best Feature Length Documentary, Best Cinematography in a Documentary and Best Editing in a Documentary.

Directed by Nettie Wild and produced by Betsy Carson Koneline explores the different lives of the Tahltan First Nations located in northern British Columbia, featuring interviews with the natives, miners, hunters, linesmen, geologists and tourists in Telegraph Creek; all filmed in front of a breathtaking backdrop.

My goodness Canada is beautiful! But if you want to experience it you’d better get a move on – the mining companies are systematically raping the land and displacing the Native American people. It’s not a new situation but it’s no less disgusting for being inevitable. All must make way for greed driven economic pillage and environmental exploitation that the developers soften by using the term ‘progress’.

Human beings do not come out looking good in this documentary. But then, largely, we are a greedy, destructive bunch.

See this film alone and be prepared to avoid other human beings for a fair few hours after watching it. If you want me I will be face down in a pot plant for the next three days for fear of exacting retribution on my fellow man.

Heartbreaking.