Film

Family Routes

Leanne Robinson and Dwayne Wohlgemuth embark on a summer-long canoe trip across Canada's remote Northwest Territories with their two sons: four-year-old Emile, and one-year-old Aleksi.
 

About

Director

Keith Robertson

Running time

30 minutes

Country / Nationality

Canada

Our Judges say:

"We're going down here, it's a little bit steep. {Babies crying from their position strapped in the front of a canoe}." Unbelievably cute proper family adventure in a canoe. They're all mad but it's terribly impressive and so wonderful to see a family where the children are still young enough to talk to their parents.

Paul Hodgson Music Judge

Unorthodox family adventure.

Jimmy Hyland

Leanne Robinson and Dwayne Wohlgemuth embark on a summer-long canoe trip across Canada's remote Northwest Territories with their two sons: four-year-old Emile, and one-year-old Aleksi. Together they face the challenges of living off the land and criticism back home.

Sustainability Notes

Unlike most canoe trips in the Northwest Territories, Dwayne and Leanne's trip did not start or end with a chartered plane ride. Usually a group will plan a remote canoe trip and pool their money together to charter plane to get there and/or back home. Instead, Dwayne came up with a route that he could drive to, and then the family paddled all the way home. In the 47-minute version of my film, you also see that Dwayne and Leanne salvaged most of the food that we ate on this trip from dumpsters. And they dehydrated it all over the course of several months using their solar array. Similarly, due to the remoteness of this route, I charged my camera batteries all summer exclusively with solar panels.