US premiere of Christopher Auchter’s NFB documentary The Stand at Missoula’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Presented in the festival’s Best Feature Competition.

January 30, 2025 – Vancouver – National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Haida filmmaker Christopher Auchter’s National Film Board of Canada (NFB) feature documentary The Stand will have its US premiere at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which takes place February 14 to 23 in Missoula, Montana.

Award-winning director Christopher Auchter will be there in person at the festival, which has programmed The Stand as its centrepiece film on Monday, February 17—one of its featured prime-time slots.

The Stand has been selected as one of 10 finalists in the Best Feature Competition at Big Sky, which is the largest documentary film festival in the American West.

About the film

The Stand by Christopher Auchter (94 min 33 s)
Produced by Shirley Vercruysse for the NFB’s Western Documentary Unit in Vancouver
Press kit: mediaspace.nfb.ca/epk/the-stand

• On a misty morning in the fall of 1985, a small group of Haida people blockaded a muddy dirt road on Lyell Island, demanding the government work with Indigenous people to find a way to protect the land and the future. Drawn from more than a hundred hours of archival footage and audio, The Stand recreates the critical moment when the Haida Nation’s resolute act of vision and conscience changed the world.
• Winner of the Audience Award/Northern Lights program and a Special Mention/Arbutus Award at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Select reviews for The Stand

• “A riveting new feature documentary… Christopher Auchter, director of the award-winning documentary Now Is the Time, recreates the critical moment when the Haida Nation took a stand.”
  • Jane Williams, Redeye, CFRO Radio

• “Impressive NFB doc… the images may be decades old, but this stand is timeless.”
  • Pat Mullen, POV Magazine

• “Four stars… A remarkable testament to the power of love applied to NVC (nonviolent communication) in the context of an Indigenous Nation in my home province of BC defending their traditional territory from indiscriminate old growth logging in the mid-eighties.”
  • Glen Grunau, Nanaimo International Film Screening Society, Letterboxd

About the director

• Now based in Burnaby, BC, Christopher Auchter (Waat’sdaa) grew up roaming the beaches and forests of the Haida Gwaii archipelago off Canada’s West Coast, and his art is rooted in the land and stories of the Haida people.
• His previous projects include Now Is the Time (2019), a multi-award-winning look back at the first new totem pole raising on Haida Gwaii in almost a century, now featured at Op-Docs, the New York Times’ award-winning series of short documentaries.

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