Rockies Repeat - Live on Wild Commons
A century ago, an artist painted the glaciers and peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Six women just went back to find out what's changed.
In 1930, Catharine Robb Whyte arrived in Banff and spent much of her life painting the mountains around her: glaciers, alpine lakes, forests, and familiar peaks captured at a particular moment in the life of a landscape that can easily appear timeless. In the summer of 2021, six Indigenous and settler artists carried reproductions of her paintings back into those same mountains. They were not asked to recreate what she had painted. They were invited to respond to what they found.
Rockies Repeat, directed by Caroline Hedin, follows artists Ariel Hill, Kayla Eykelboom, Cheyenne Ozînjâ θîhâ, Sikapinakii Low Horn, Emily Beaudoin, and Kerry Langlois as they work across painting, beadwork, glass, and photography in landscapes already visibly altered by climate change. Glaciers have retreated since Whyte's time. Wildfire smoke obscures the peaks. Extreme heat follows the group into the field. What begins as an artistic expedition becomes something harder to categorise: a record of environmental change told through personal experience, cultural history, and the distance between one artist's vision of a place and another's, separated by nearly a hundred years. The Indigenous artists in the group bring a longer history still, broadening the project from a comparison of past and present into a conversation about who has always belonged to these landscapes, and how they have been understood across generations.
The contemporary works created during the expedition were later exhibited at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies alongside Whyte's originals. The film had its world premiere at the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2021 and has since screened at EarthX, Kendal Mountain Festival, No Man's Land Film Festival, and Wild & Scenic.
Why This Film Matters
Climate change is often communicated through data and projections. Rockies Repeat takes a different approach, letting environmental change become visible through the gap between what one artist saw and what another encounters a century later. It is a film that makes room for multiple perspectives without flattening them into a single message, and a reminder that documenting a changing world is not only the work of scientists. Artists, communities, and the people who know a place intimately are all part of that record.
Film Credits
Director: Caroline Hedin
Director of Photography: Jamie Wensley
Presented by: Rundle Films and Transmission Media (now Fieldlab Films)
Producers: Caroline Hedin, Jamie Wensley, Viktoria North, and Carrie Yap
Editor: Jamie Wensley
Score: Tyler Bragg
Runtime: 20 minutes
Release Year: 2021
What is Wild Commons?
Wild Commons was co-founded by the Wild Lens Collective and Impact Media Lab to provide a new way to distribute independent wildlife and environmental films. So many films have successful festival runs and then never get seen again due to the very broken distribution system - we’re here to change that!
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