By Juan Markos
I recently attended a special screening of 500 Days in the Wild, a documentary by Canadian film director Dianne Whelan. The film chronicles her incredible journey across the Trans Canada Trail, where she became the first person to complete the 24,000-kilometer trek. The Trans Canada Trail is the longest in the world, connecting three oceans. Despite the title, the journey took her six years to complete. Throughout most of the trek, Dianne is alone with her camera, but she receives help from strangers and friends along the way.
The film captures many beautiful scenes, showcasing Canada’s uninhabited and uninhabitable parts. It starkly contrasts with the urban scenes we are accustomed to seeing. Dianne’s journey through these untouched parts of Canada sheds light on the vastness and diversity of the country. I had the opportunity to meet Dianne at the screening and was amazed by her journey. It truly was a call of the wild, as she faced the challenges of nature, animal life, weather, and solitude. Dianne also respects the ancestors and the indigenous people who still live on these lands. I believe that her journey was protected in many ways by these people and their traditions.
I highly recommend watching this film, as it beautifully documents an amazing journey.
Award-winning director and cinematographer Dianne Whelan is the only person to complete this epic journey of discovery—hiking, biking, paddling, snowshoeing and skiing across the country.
For a woman in her 50s who is not an extreme athlete, it was sometimes gruelling, occasionally harrowing, often exhilarating and always surprising. She started out alone, disillusioned with the state of the world and worried about climate change, to look for different ways of caring for the land and each other. She ended the journey a bit wiser, more hopeful, in love and with a passion to share this story.
This journey began on July 1, 2015, in St. John’s NL and ended on August 1, 2021 in Victoria, BC. Although the Trans-Canada trail was built to celebrate 150 years of confederation under the government’s banner of “Strong, Proud and Free,” 500 Days in the Wild will present an alternate story, another vision of this country, its past and its future.
There are adventure scenes of paddling rapids, struggling in storms, escaping a bear attempting to destroy her camp in the High Arctic or the perils of being alone in a canoe on one of the biggest inland seas in the world. And there is of course humor —many good belly laughs about the absurdity of the situations she occasionally found herself in.
“It’s kind of funny when I think about it now. When I left I actually had a daily schedule—and by day 10 I had not even completed what I thought I could do in one day. So I lit a small fire and burned the schedule. And I stopped measuring my journey by how many kilometres I did in a day. I joke with people and tell them that’s the day I dropped the rabbit suit.”
Dianne Whelan: director, writer, adventurer
Dianne is an award-winning Canadian filmmaker, photographer, author and multimedia artist residing in Garden Bay, BC. With every project she tries to multi platforms the stories into films, books and interactive projects. In April 2010, Whelan traveled to Nepal and Mount Everest Base Camp to direct and shoot her award-winning documentary film 40 Days at Base Camp.
The film had its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival and was the opening night film at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. She also wrote a book about it called Base Camp 40 Days on Everest about her experience living and making a film on the world’s highest mountain. The subject of her first book, This Vanishing Land, references her experience as an embedded media person on a historical Sovereignty Patrol in the Canadian High Arctic. Her National Film Board documentary, This Land, is based on the same journey and has won several awards, including Best Short Documentary at both the Planet in Focus Film Festival in Toronto and the 2010 Leo Awards for BC film and television. A multi-media web project on her Arctic journey was released in June 2010 and won Best Small Multimedia Site at the Online Journalism Awards and was nominated for best art at SXSW. The site was nominated for a 2011 Gemini award for Best Original Program or Series Produced for Digital Media – Non-Fiction.
Dianne’s films, books and multimedia projects are based on adventures and the blending of traditional wisdom with modern cultures. To see more you can visit these links.
www.40daysatbasecamp.com
www.diannewhelan.com
www.nfb.ca/film/this_land
www.thisland.nfb.ca/#/thisland
