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Naknek filmmaker screens work at Finland film festival

Anna Hoover

Anna Hoover's film The Last Walk is set and filmed in Naknek. She recently screened it for the first time and the Skábmagovat Film Festival in Finland .

Audio Transcript: Naknek filmmaker, Anna Hoover, screened her short film The Last Walk at the Skábmagovat Film Festival in Finland this weekend. Hoover is a part of the Arctic Film Circle, an international partnership of nine film makers from five indigenous arctic areas. Hoover says that Arctic Film Circle met in October 2015 to plan their project.

“We wrote a collective framework of a story and then went to our respective homes and made versions of the same story,” Hoover says. “They’re all about two sisters, and one of them is involved in an accident or a tragedy. It affects the other one greatly, and the one that committed the crime is banished”

Three of these films, including Hoover’s, screened at Skábmagovat.

Hoover grew up fishing in Egekik, and she has lived in Naknek for the past several years. She says the community rallied around the film.

“In my film, the accident happens on a gillnetter on the water. We were fortunate that the community opened their arms and allowed us to borrow a boat and borrow a skiff to get to the boat. And then there’s airplanes in there, so we had pilots that were helping and landing on beaches. In that way, as far as transportation, I feel like it accurately shows a glimpse of our life in Bristol Bay.”

This is Hoover’s first venture into fiction film. Previously she has made documentaries and video art. She says that that reception at Skábmagovat was welcoming that she hopes to make more short films going forward.

Hoover says, “I’ve been bitten by the bug. I love it. I hope to do another.”

Credit Anna Hoover