What: The Sun at Midnight
Where: Cineplex Odeon
When: Tuesday, 7 p.m.
Rating: three stars
A person could be forgiven for assuming Duane Howard just can’t seem to get enough of the wintry conditions he endured while filming The Revenant in the wilds of Alberta and beyond.
After the Nuu-Chah-Nulth actor wrapped his final scenes in Argentina and Los Angeles playing Elk Dog, the mournful Arikara warrior whose search for his missing daughter parallels the journey of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Hugh Glass, he barely had time to catch his breath before he began shooting another movie in the land of ice and snow.
While Kirsten Carthew’s feature debut The Sun at Midnight was also filmed in sub-zero temperatures, it was the polar opposite of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Oscar-winning survival adventure in other ways.
What the film being shown tonight at Cineplex Odeon did have in common with The Revenant, he says, is that he delivered a performance he was particularly proud of.
Howard, who was born in Esperanza, the tiny community between Tahsis and Zeballos on the northwest side of Vancouver Island, will attend Tuesday night’s screening and participate in a Q&A.
The northern coming-of-age adventure centres on the unlikely friendship that develops between his character Alfred, a solitary hunter searching for a missing caribou herd, and Lia (Devery Jacobs), a rebellious, pink-haired teenager from Montreal. After the death of her mother, Lia is sent to live with her estranged Gwich’in grandmother in a small sub-Arctic community depicted by Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories.
Determined to flee to Dawson City, the restless urban princess steals a canoe but runs into trouble after drifting ashore and realizing how tough it is to survive in the region’s beautiful but harsh wilderness.
Armed with attitude but little else, Lia comes to rely upon Alfred, who reluctantly takes her under his wing during what turns out to be a journey of discovery for both.
While The Sun at Midnight isn’t action-packed, Carthew’s gorgeously filmed odyssey works as a character study that offers a compelling perspective on northern native culture.
After Howard, 54, wrapped The Revenant in late summer of 2015, he returned home to Vancouver long enough to take care of some personal business before flying up to Yellowknife to begin the three-week shoot. Almost as soon as he started work on the film, made for just $250,000, he could feel how dramatically different it was from filming The Revenant.
“Kirsten did a beautiful job, even though we had a 15-man crew instead of a 115-man crew,” said Howard, relaxing in front of the fireplace in the lobby of the DoubleTree Hotel.
“A lot of them were first-timers because most of the crew had worked on documentaries, so this was their first time shooting a feature. It was a bit of a turnaround for them and a big adjustment but they handled it well.”
Howard, who began his career as a stuntman before landing roles in TV shows (The X-Files, Arctic Air) and films (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee), said he loved working with Jacobs, a relative newcomer.
“We really hit it off right away,” he said.
It didn’t hurt that they got to shoot some of the film’s most dramatic sequences in such “beautiful terrain” — even if they had to take a two-hour drive to get to the set during 15-hour days.
“It has such a sense of value, a place you can go and just wander and feel right at home,” says Howard, who hasn’t hunted caribou himself. “Just deer and elk.”
Filming was originally slated to start in the summertime but had to be delayed until September because of Howard’s schedule.
“As the days were going by it would start to get colder, and it got to the point it was really cold,” he said with a laugh. “It’s long, tedious hours, but we did have our enjoyable moments.”
Howard still does his own stunts when circumstances permit, including one scene for The Sun at Midnight that didn’t make the final cut.
“I roll down this hill and get attacked by a bear,” he said. “I kind of hoped they’d keep it.”
Howard has drawn upon his own troubled past to flesh out some of his characters, and has openly recalled his own experiences to offer guidance to at-risk youths as a drug and alcohol counsellor.
After living in Gold River until the age of 3, he moved to Port Alberni and lived there until he was 14 before living on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for years.
By sharing his own story of how he began drinking at age 10 and becoming addicted to drugs until age 23, when he became clean and sober, he uses his reputation as a positive role model to help others.
He says that’s how he became familiar with Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories before his movie career took off.
“I was doing a worshop there, travelling around B.C. talking about alcohol awareness and suicide prevention,” he said. “I really love the landscape and everything up there.”
Howard also became spokesperson for the I Love Attawapiskat and Canada’s Youth campaign last year, visiting schools in the remote indigenous James Bay community with an alarmingly high suicide rate.
“I encourage young people to really look at themselves, go within themselves and take this initiative to not give up on things,” he said.
“I encourage them to get educated, stay in your culture and if you haven’t found your culture yet, pick it up and practise your culture and those values, the lifestyle we love.”
He also mentors young actors through the Indigenous Independent Film Program at Capilano University, where another independent film he made, River of Silence, was just test-screened.
He plays Trevor, a member of the Buffalo Mountain reservation who learns that his missing niece has been murdered. The film was directed by Michael Auger from a screenplay by his wife Petie Chalifoux, the film’s producer, whose story was inspired by the loss of her own grandmother who went missing in 2000 before being found dead.
“The story is about the aftershock of what the mother and father go through and their friends and family,” Howard said. “It’s dedicated to all the murderered and missing women.”
Displaying a tiny moose hide pin, he says he’ll be back in Victoria on Feb. 16 as part of the Moose Hide Campaign, a grassroots movement of men standing up against violence toward women and children.
“We’ll be doing a one-day fast to raise awareness,” he said.
>>For more articles and reviews on the Victoria Film Festival, go to timescolonist.com/entertainment/film-festival.
