Fort William First Nation filmmaker recognized with Best Documentary award

By Rick Garrick

FORT WILLIAM FIRST NATION—Fort William filmmaker Erin Collins was recently recognized with Best Documentary for her film about Fort William ski jumper Steve Collins at the Three Minute Film Festival in Santa Barbara, California.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Collins says. “This documentary in particular has been all over, in France and it’s been to Berlin and Toronto. It’s really exciting to see it win an award.”

Collins created the film, Thunderbird, when the Wapikoni Mobile travelling training and creation studio held a month-long workshop for Fort William and area youth in 2017. She was the local coordinator for Wapikoni during the workshop.

“To be honest, it started out as such a last-minute idea,” Collins says about the film. “We had to change our ideas so rapidly in post when things just didn’t work out, so it’s really nice to see Steve recognized and to see the hard work of the crew at Wapikoni recognized.”

Collins says her original idea to film Steve at the Big Thunder ski jumps did not work out so she began looking at archive material.

“It just wasn’t telling the story how I had wanted it to,” Collins says. “We found all of these really great photos of Steve that really did him justice, rather than just walking on a hill.”

Steve competed with Canada’s National Ski Jumping team from 1979-1988, including at three Olympic Winter Games in 1980, 1984 and 1988. He won a World Cup competition in Lahti, Finland and various other competitions during his career.

“From what I understand, he skied all his childhood and then one day they were just messing around and it turned into a really great career opportunity for him,” Collins says. “So with the team at Wapikoni, we decided he’s got such a great story and it really deserves to be shared.”

Steve says his family used to live below Mt. McKay, so he began skiing when he was four-years-old.

“We started jumping and Slav Kardas was our first coach,” Steve says. “We kind of built jumps up from there and went after it after that and we succeeded in the sport for 15 years.”

Collins adds that a woman she met at a film screening in Montreal explained how Steve influenced her and her friends when they were children.

“She remembers seeing him on TV growing up, and they would jump off the table and pretend to be just like him,” Collins says. “I thought it was really important for kids to see themselves represented that way.”

Collins says it is important for Indigenous people to share their stories.

“It is really important for us to share our history to move forward and to heal, and that’s something that I found a lot of joy in doing,” Collins says.

Collins currently works in video production with Ninesixty Media Group in Thunder Bay.

“We do a lot of branding and web design,” Collins says. “I work in the video division, so we do a lot of commercials and short documentary stuff.”

Steve says the Best Documentary award is “awesome.” The Three Minute Film Festival’s 5th Season screening featured films from Canada, China, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.

“That is a big award,” Steve says. “I’m just really proud of Erin, just for one that we took it on to do a short film like that, and she really put it together in a good way.”

Collins’ film is posted on the Fort William Facebook page.