Wildflowers film blends Rockies history and backcountry to explore the legacy of Mary Schäffer.
An all-female crew of artists and adventurers are debuting their tribute to a Rockies heroine at the 2024 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
Wildflowers, by local filmmakers Trixie Pacis and Meghan J. Ward, is a soulful retelling of early 20th-century explorer Mary Schäffer’s 1908 expedition to Maligne Lake in what’s now Jasper National Park.
Re-tracing the last leg of Schäffer’s route over historic Maligne Pass, the women’s poetic adventure honours the hard bushwacking Schaffer did on the trail, and against the patriarchy.
“I set out to tell the story of a woman I saw as a ‘wildflower’ — someone feminine and beautiful yet rugged and resilient,” said director Pacis, from Kimberley.
Ward, an outdoor writer and historian based in Banff, who is as comfortable in wet hiking boots as she is in the immaculate cotton gloves of an archivist, was likewise captivated by Schaffer’s dignity and determination.
“Schäffer reinvented herself as a mountain explorer after the loss of her husband and parents when she was just 43 years old,” Ward said. “She was a complex character whose life intersected with a tumultuous time of westward settlement in the Canadian Rockies.”
The film pays homage to that complexity with nuanced editing and creative weaving of mixed media. Archival images are brought to life by modern animation techniques; a collaboration of Métis watercolour and beadwork maps out the magical Maligne River Valley; and the film features several repeat photographs in which expedition photographer Natalie Gillis replicated images from Mary Schäffer Warren’s collection of lantern slides.
Wildflowers sets out to demonstrate how it’s important to honour our trailblazers of the past, “but it’s also important to identify where we need a course correction… knowing what we know now about the legacy of colonial influence in the Rockies,” Ward says.
Wildflowers opens at 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 2 at the Banff Mountain Film Festival at the Max Bell Auditorium during the Bow Valley Filmmakers Showcase. Buy tickets here. And for those unable to get to Banff, you can watch all the films online here.
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