Voices Across the Water: Canoe-Building Doc Surprisingly Absorbing, And Free to Watch

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

Canoe-building may not seem like an obvious topic for a film, even one supported by the National Film Board, with its mandate of chronicling Canadian life in its many facets.

Yet Voices Across the Water, Yukon-based director Fritz Mueller and writer Teresa Earle’s feature documentary following two master boat builders “as they practice their art and find a way back to balance and healing,” carries surprising gravitas.

That’s in part because the craft of canoe building appears to be precariously in decline despite the vessel’s long history of helping humans explore, fish, travel, and generally advance. Also, because the act of handcrafting something from something else is necessarily deliberate and meditative.

For Alaskan Tlingit carver Wayne Price, taking on a protégé and teaching her how to painstakingly make a dugout canoe from a huge, felled red cedar is both a way to ensure the canoe tradition continues and, perhaps even more poignantly, a way for both Price and his apprentice Violet Gatensby to connect with their Indigenous roots.

For transplanted Francophone artist, Dawson City–based Halin de Repentigny, meanwhile, his handmade birchbark canoes are both an expression of his creativity and a release from more pressing, sometimes quotidian details of his life.

Both are worthy protagonists: frequently hilarious, pillars of a sort of their communities, and supremely grounded in their realities. Mueller’s gentle, slow-rolling, and contemplative film — he also serves as director of photography — captures the intense work required to coax these astonishing, one-of-a-kind vessels out of wood, while weaving each man’s, and Violet’s, story into a broader context about what it means to be part of a community.

Filmed over several years variously in Yukon Territory, Alaska, and in the traditional territories of the Carcross/Tagish, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Kwanlin Dün and Coast Tlingit, Voices Across the Water is visually beautiful, narratively compelling, and was met with great enthusiasm in Whitehorse where it screened last February as part of the Available Light Film Festival.

Our thanks to the NFB for sharing a screening link to Voices Across the Water, which we highly recommend. It’s hard to imagine a more thought-provoking, soul-soothing way to spend 84 minutes.