Film puts qathet region Northern Gulf Island in spotlight

The remote, northern gulf island of Texada, located in qathet Regional District’s Electoral Area D, is the subject of a new film, also called Texada.

The film will have its world premiere at the 2023 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab, taking place November 8 to 19. The 17-minute immersive, virtual reality, 360-degree live-action film, produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), was written and directed by filmmakers Josephine Anderson and Claire Sanford.

Sanford grew up on Texada and still has family there. She currently resides in Montreal, Quebec.

“It’s [Texada Island] isolated, and also very surprising, because amid all this natural beauty, and being situated amongst the Gulf Islands, it’s also a resource town,” said Sanford. “Texada is a place that has active mining and logging, and it has that really centered in its identity.”

Although Sanford has fond memories of growing up among wilderness and nature, the cinematographer and filmmaker also acknowledges that industry becomes a part of everyday life for those living on Texada. Co-director Anderson, who filmed Texada alongside Sanford, is based out of Vancouver and has worked with Sanford for many years.

“We started to work with the technology of virtual-reality and 360-degree filming in 2016, and began collaborating,” said Sanford. “We really wanted to know what it would feel like to bring somebody to a place where they wouldn't normally have the chance to go.”

Anderson is familiar with the west coast landscape, but it was Sanford who introduced Anderson to Texada.

“Texada stands out to me because it’s such a large island compared with how many people live there,” said Anderson. “All this landscape and the power of the land feels really dominant when you’re there.”

Texada has just over 1,000 full-time residents. The film’s short synopsis states that: Texada is about rocks, people and time. The filmmakers ask the question: “How big is time?” 

“Using an immersive camera felt like we could actually bring people to the place where I grew up, which is far away,” said Sanford. “Its distance from Vancouver and from cities makes it unexplored in a lot of ways.” 

The co-directors were able to form good relationships with people working and managing the mines. They said they felt lucky to be invited to places most people don’t see. 

“We filmed the mines that are both active and those that are defunct; they are the lifeblood of the island, this industry that’s rolling and working,” said Sanford. “We explore the ups and downs of not just Texada’s history, but industry towns along the west coast and probably around the world.”

The pair of filmmakers have been visiting and filming on Texada sporadically, and did a round of filming in 2022 with a virtual reality (VR) camera. A majority of the movie does not have specific people in it, but audiences can hear voices of local Islanders woven throughout the visuals.

“What you will hear is, and most dominantly, is the voice of what we call the philosophical geologist Michael Sanford [Claire’s dad],” said Anderson. “Honestly, we didn’t actually start out intending for him to be the central character, or the central voice of the film.”

But as the filmmakers dug through their interviews, they found they were drawn to the geologist-by-training-turned-teacher’s “philosophical pondering of the unfathomed nature of time.”

Filming using a VR camera is quite different from traditional filmmaking, admitted Sanford.

“It’s a totally different way of thinking about storytelling,” she added. “You [the filmmaker] are constantly exercising the practice of giving up control in a very normally controlled medium. With VR you have to kind of give that up and accept that the audience is going to look where they want to look.”

Texada is a National Film Board of Canada production and there are plans to exhibit the VR experience at festivals and galleries across Canada, including a presentation on Texada Island at some point in the future.

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