A movie centered on reclaiming stolen artifacts is coming to Courtenay today.
Called the Great Salish Heist, it follows Steve Joe, a traditional archaeologist for the Moquahat People who brings a group of rebels from the rez to bring back their people’s stolen artifacts from a museum.
Producer of the film Harold Joe says the idea came out of his work as an Archaeological consultant.
“I had an incident with one of my works and it changed what was going with me for quite a while,” said Joe.
“I shared that happening with Les and a young lady working with him by the name of Sophie Underwood, and she asked me if it would be ok to start making notes about my experience and I said yeah, absolutely. We start to compile a lot of information about what was going on with me and lo and behold, we got the movie.”
Another producer, Leslie Bland, says for making a film, it takes years to work on the script, so it’s strong enough to be produced.
He also says you spend another couple of years to gather the money needed for the film.
“Even for a lower-budget film like this, it’s $1.25 million,” said Bland. “When we went to produce it, we needed the goodwill of a lot of people to put this together. We had to create our own fictional museum with a First Nation exhibit from scratch.”
Bland says after getting support from local artists and first nation members, filming took 18 days and post-production took a year after that period.
For what the movie’s goal is, they both want to put out an entertaining film for people to watch, while also bringing the importance of repatriation of First Nations people and artifacts back to their home territory.
“It’s also educational in a way that people can learn from it and to take a serious issue and twist it a little bit to have some laughter has been good medicine for our people for quite some time,” said Joe.
The film is part of the Comox Valley International Film Festival, where for tickets click here.
The movie will be played on May 4 in the Sid Williams Theatre, starting at 8:00 p.m.
