Description

"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 1800's. 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 insiode." -Arthur Kroker, "The Possessed Individual", New World Perspectives.