People looking to learn more about the Fraser Canyon area and its history can now do so by watching the Grand Prix winning film Red Run — online for free — on the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) website.
“I think the story is still relevant because we’re trying to save the salmon right now. There’s fewer salmon coming up,” said Murray Jurak, the film’s director, writer, and creator. “It was interesting because this thing happened in 1913 and most people forgot about it. It kind of passed into history and no one really knew.
“To find someone who knew about the story was really hard. And after that disaster the economy in the Fraser Valley collapsed. People normally sold their salmon to workers coming down with the railway. Almost everyone (in the area) made their money from fish and then all of sudden there was no fish.”
Released in 2001, Red Run is a 25 minutes long documentary about the 1913 railway blast that “sent hundreds of tons of rock cascading into the Fraser River and blocked the path of thousands of returning salmon.” During that time, the First Nation communities of the area spent days trying to save the fish and carried “them one at a time over the fallen rocks.” The film, which was shot on the Siska reserve between Lytton and Kanaka Bar, is set in 2001 and sees Jurak following three Siska families and documenting their current relationship to the river; the film follows them to the river’s edge, “as they carry on their fishing traditions, while also detailing the impact of the blast, how it still affected area in 2001,” and how it affected the community’s dip net fishing practices.
The documentary won the Grand Prix award in 2002 at the Barcelona River film festival. It was also nominated for an Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association (AMPIA) award for best documentary under 30 minutes.
As part of an initiative to release more NFB films, Red Run was restored and uploaded from the NFB vault, near Montreal, in June.
The documentary was the first film created by Jurak. A member of the Lower Nicola Band, Jurak has been making films for over ten years and has “created programs for the National Film Board of Canada, Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta, Métis Nation of Alberta, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, ACANA Japan and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.” His works have appeared at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival, the 13th annual One World film festival in Ottawa, the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco, and on CanWest Global and Knowledge Network.
Jurak is also the president of the “Dreamspeakers Film Festival, vice president of the Global Visions Film Festival and serves on the board of the National Aboriginal Media Arts Coalition and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.”
When not producing films, he works as a electrician in Kitimat.
According to Jurak, the film, with its focus on the importance of the Fraser River in the Fraser Canyon, still holds relevance today; parallels can be drawn between the recent Chilcotin landslide and the 1913 railway blast in how both events altered the landscape of the Fraser Canyon area.
Additionally, the film provides a snapshot of the area during the early 2000s’ and provides examples of how things have changed over the past two decades. It also touches on salmon runs and how disaster type events can cause declines in the salmon population.
To watch the film, readers can visit www.nfb.ca/film/red-run .
