layout: post title: The Snow Walker created: 1078213740 categories:

• Canada
• Movie
• Review
• Vancouver

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We had free tickets to The Snow Walker tonight. A great Canadian film that is definitely worth watching.

Kate and Mary got us free tickets when they went shopping at MEC the other day.

The entire story takes place in the North West Territories. An Inuit girl teaches an ex-World War II pilot how to survive after he crashes the plane they are both in. That's basically the entire movie, but there's obviously more to it than that :p It's based on a short story called Walk Well My Brother in Farley Mowatt's collection of stories called The Snow Walker.

Barry Pepper is the lead actor, starring as Charlie Halliday, the pilot. Annabella Piugattuk is the young Inuit girl, Kanalla. And yes, she really is a young Inuit girl -- they did some "guerilla casting", sending a casting agent around northern towns with a video camera begging girls to audition. I found Barry Pepper's story quite interesting, too -- he's from Campbell River, originally, spent 10 years sailing around the South Pacific with his parents, and currently lives somewhere on the Sunshine Coast. Mary actually said afterwards that she initially groaned, thinking "Oh no, not that guy!", but said she enjoyed his acting in this movie.

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The scenery in this movie is incredible. It starts during the arctic summer, so lots of lakes and thousands of mosquitoes. Lots of landscape shots, animals, and walking for days. They even got the Northern Lights on film, apparently by randomly setting up a camera pointed at the sky and doing time lapse photography overnight (as explained by Charles Martin Smith -- screenwriter and director).

After the film there was a short Q&A with Charles Martin Smith. Another interesting factoid, he was the actor that played Farley Mowatt in Never Cry Wolf. And they needed locals to be on guard against polar bears during filming. And actually got charged by one, where everyone had to drop cameras and rush back to the trucks.

Go see the movie. It will help it stay in theaters, and it's good to support a great Canadian movie.