In the middle of the evergreen rainforest on Northern Vancouver Island, a man wearing an orange helmet with a headlamp leans over a cave opening all but camouflaged by the lush vegetation surrounding it.
Secured by a length of rope attached to a climbing harness around his waist, he lets a brick-sized rock slip from his gloved hand into the darkness below.
Silence.
…
A sonorous “Bang” echoes up from the unseen.
“Ooo…. Twenty metres? Thirty metres?” guesses the man, before tossing a handful of rope into the abyss and beginning his descent. The man’s name is Peter Curtis, a caver with more than four decades of experience. He’s one in a group of adventurers that has been attempting to reach the termination points of the longest and deepest caves in Canada.
The cavers’ experiences are chronicled in Subterranean, a new documentary that takes place inside two of the vastest caving sites in British Columbia.
Subterranean premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival in April, and recently won the Best Film About Adventure and Exploration Award at the Ladek Mountain Film Festival in Poland. The film will screen at Vancity Theatre Oct. 30-31, and Nov. 2 and 5. It has a broadcast premier on the Knowledge Network on Nov. 7 before being available to stream online.
“This is a glimpse inside a world that most people will never get to see in person,” says North Vancouver producer Jenny Rustemeyer, who’s also known for her award-winning work on the series Search & Rescue: North Shore, as well as This Mountain Life (Best Snow Sports Film: Banff Mountain Film Festival), and Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story (multiple awards including Canadian Documentary Feature Award: Edmonton International Film Festival).
“It’s true exploration where no person has gone before,” Rustemeyer said. “And we were able to capture it in such a beautiful way, to put it on a big screen where people can really enjoy the experience.”
But you don’t have to be a caver to like the film, she explained. “It really is about the people who cave. It’s about the adventure. Even the logistics – like, how do you do a trip like that?”
Half of the 86-minute film follows Katie Graham, an expert caver and cave diver who leads a team of 13 on multiple expeditions between 2019 and 2021 down the Bisaro Anima cave near Fernie – the deepest recorded cave in Canada at 683 vertical metres from entrance to lowest point.
The team carries down all the supplies needed for the trip, including batteries and camera gear – which crew sleeps with to keep dry – as well as diving equipment for Graham’s final descent where the cave is completely filled with water.
Shuttling bags between multiple camps, while hiking, crawling, and abseiling down cliffs and steep pitches, the 6.4-kilometre journey takes around two days. Then Graham dives for a day, before trekking back to the outside world.
The other half of Subterranean focuses on a team tackling the ARGO cave system in Northern Vancouver Island, which is currently recorded as Canada’s second longest at 18.6 kilometres (Castleguard Cave in Banff is more than 21.3 km long). That team is led Franck Tuot, a man convinced that linking two tunnel systems will create the longest-known cave in the country.
'Easy to forget' extreme technical challenges for caving film crews
The idea for the film was pitched to Rustemeyer by documentary filmmaker and director Francois-Xavier De Ruydts, who has been named among the country’s top explorers by the Canadian Geographic Society.
“We just finished This Mountain Life, which was about people who love B.C. mountains and about the peaks of B.C. mountains,” Rustemeyer said. “This was an opportunity to go underground to the depths of B.C. mountains.”
The producer emphasized the extreme technical challenges involved in capturing the footage. The two-camera film crews needed to have technical climbing skills, while navigating damp, dark, 4 C conditions sometimes for a week straight.
“It’s so easy to forget when you’re watching this film, because you get so immersed in the story, that there was a camera person there too,” she said. “So I always keep that in the back of my head, that they went to great lengths to capture this footage. And I think they did a beautiful job.”
After making the film, one thing that stood out to Rustemeyer is a caver’s optimism – the ability to always see a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Whatever their goal is, whether it’s to make a connection or go deeper, they truly believe every trip that they are going to do it,” she said. “Ironically, success for caving is you reach a dead end.”
