''Kayak to Klemtu'' is a Canadian drama film, directed by

Zoe Leigh Hopkins Zoe Leigh Hopkins is a Canadian Heiltsuk/Mohawk writer and film director who began her career in acting in 1991 and later pursued filmmaking. Biography The daughter of journalist Brian Maracle,Laura Neilson Bonikowsky"Brian Maracle" ''The Canadi ...

and released in 2017.Alison Gillmor, "Movie pushes environmental message: Kayak to Klemtu a protest against supertankers, pipelines in First Nations territories". ''

Winnipeg Free Press The ''Winnipeg Free Press'' (or WFP; founded as the ''Manitoba Free Press'') is a daily (excluding Sunday) broadsheet newspaper in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It provides coverage of local, provincial, national, and international news, as well as ...

'', August 11, 2018. The film stars

Ta'Kaiya Blaney Ta'Kaiya Skoden Stoodis Kayden Gwanden Blaney (born 2001) is a singer, award-winning actress, speaker, and environmental activist from the Tla A'min Nation in British Columbia, Canada. She is an ambassador for the Native Children’s Survival In ...

as Ella, a teenage

First Nations First Nations or first peoples may refer to: * Indigenous peoples, for ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area. Indigenous groups *First Nations is commonly used to describe some Indigenous groups including: **First Natio ...

girl from

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

who decides following the death of her uncle Bear (

Evan Adams Evan Tlesla Adams (born November 15, 1966) is an Indigenous Canadian actor, playwright, and physician. A Coast Salish from the Sliammon First Nation near Powell River, British Columbia, he is best known internationally for his roles in the films ...

) to take up his activism against a proposed

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

development, and undertakes a 500-kilometre

kayak A kayak is a small, narrow watercraft which is typically propelled by means of a double-bladed paddle. The word kayak originates from the Greenlandic word ''qajaq'' (). The traditional kayak has a covered deck and one or more cockpits, each se ...

trip to the family's ancestral home at

Klemtu Klemtu is an unincorporated community on Swindle Island in the coastal fjords of British Columbia, Canada. It is located on Kitasoo Indian Reserve No. 1. Klemtu is the home of the Kitasoo tribe of Tsimshians, originally from Kitasu Bay, and th ...

to testify at the pipeline hearings. The film's cast also includes

Sonja Bennett Sonja Bennett (born August 24, 1980) is a Canadian actress and screenwriter. Her film debut was in the Canadian feature film ''Punch'' (2002), for which she won the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress in a Canadian Film. She ha ...

, Carmel Armit, Tyler Burrows, Jared Ager-Foster and

Lorne Cardinal Lorne Cardinal (born 6 January 1964) is a Canadian stage, television and film actor, best known for portraying Davis Quinton on ''Corner Gas''. He is a former rugby union player. Early life Cardinal was born on a reserve of the Sucker Creek ...

. The film premiered on October 20, 2017, at the

imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival is the world's largest Indigenous film and media arts festival, held annually in Toronto in the month of October. The festival focuses on the film, video, radio, and new media work of Indigenous, Abori ...

, where it won the Audience Choice Award. It went into commercial release in 2018. At the 2018

Leo Awards The Leo Awards are the awards program for the British Columbia film and television industry. Held each May or June in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the Leo Awards were founded by the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation of British C ...

, Blaney won the award for Best Actress and Bennett won the award for Best Supporting Actress.Sabrina Furminger
"Pipeline protests fuel family film"
''

Vancouver Courier The ''Vancouver Courier'' was a Canadian semi-weekly local newspaper published in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, by the Van-Net chain owned by Glacier Media Group. In 2007, it was Canada's largest distributed community newspaper, with a wee ...

'', July 17, 2018.

References

External links

* 2017 films 2017 drama films Canadian coming-of-age drama films First Nations films Films shot in British Columbia Films set in British Columbia Films directed by Zoe Leigh Hopkins 2010s English-language films 2010s Canadian films {{2010s-Canada-film-stub