Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past

“Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, “Moose Jaw” is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along with a giant moose), and schemes to restore yester-year boast the motto “There’s a future in our past” – ironically adopted by Hancox himself in this one-hour, experimental documentary filmed over the course of a decade. A poetic, multi-levelled excavation of personal memory, social and political history, and the pre-historic, “Moose Jaw” is also a reflective portrait of the filmmaker’s hometown as a faded symbol of Empire, and “storm centre” on the frontier of a museumized future. “Rick Hancox’s ‘Moose Jaw’ is a poetic prophetic analysis into a personal and deeply existential journey…a meeting point of autobiography and history… Here the museum has finally come inside.” – Arthur Kroker, “The Possessed Individual,” New World Perspectives