Seriously Moving Images

View The Water Dwellers on the NFB.ca site

The Water Dwellers is another National Film Board documentary that I recall somewhat fondly from my childhood. I remember that it played as the short subject when my parents took my brothers and me to a show at the Kelowna Drive-in Theatre. (We were in the back seat, in our pyjamas, with blankets and pillows, just in case the movie was too long for us.) I think the feature presentation was either How the West Was Won (with Jimmy Stewart and Debbie Reynolds) or Billy Rose’s Jumbo (with Jimmy Durante). In any case, I remember this NFB short more clearly than that night’s feature.

Directed by pioneer Canadian filmmaker Gordon Sparling, Dwellers is a profile of the floating community in and around Simoom Sound on Gilford Island in the Central Coast region of British Columbia. Most of the local homes and businesses in this resource community are built on floats, so that they can be moved easily from one moorage to another, following the needs of the local forest industry. The film shows children traveling to school by motorboat; the arrival of the mail plane and the weekly freightboat (the M.V. Alaska Prince); and sawmill and logging operations, run by one or two people, respectively. The longest sequence follows a forest ranger on the BC Forest Service vessel Nesika as it patrols the area, and shows the critical work of forest fire prevention and control.

As a child, I was fascinated to learn that people lived and worked in a floating village, and that boats were their cars and trucks. The Water Dwellers is one in a fascinating group of NFB shorts from the mid-20th-century. These productions moved away from the depiction of cities to explore small towns, rural communities, and isolated settlements all over BC–especially on the coast and in the North. These films are valuable today because they record a way of life that was (and is) gradually disappearing.