B.C.鈥檚 coastal rainforest and its unique creatures are featured in an IMAX documentary film opening this week in Victoria and around North America.

Great Bear Rainforest, Land of the Spirit Bear is narrated by Vancouver actor Ryan Reynolds, and features the camera work of Ian McAllister, co-founder of environmental society Pacific Wild.

It has its red carpet premiere at the Royal B.C. Museum IMAX theatre in Victoria on Wednesday, on Friday, Feb. 15. It also begins its international theatre tour Feb. 15 in Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and other giant-screen venues around the continent.

The is an ambitious entertainment and educational project, produced with the support of Kyle Washington, a Vancouver resident and executive chairman of Seaspan Corp. In an interview with Black Press, Washington said McAllister was pitching him to support 鈥檚 work in the remote Central Coast area, and the documentary project came out of that.

鈥淚 grew up wanting to be a marine biologist,鈥� Washington said with a laugh. 鈥淭his is just an expensive way to do it.鈥�

The film comes with a classroom educational guide and is designed as a field trip for students around the world to get a vivid look at the wilderness teeming with whales, wolves, bears and marine life.

鈥淭he film is really a big-fish-eat-little-fish story,鈥� Washington said. 鈥淚t starts in the spring with the herring coming in. It changes the whole ocean. Through the film you start with those little tiny things and end up getting into the wolves and the bears.鈥�

Choosing a narrator for a wildlife documentary is 鈥渕ission critical,鈥� Washington said, and he was looking for a younger voice.

鈥淩yan, he鈥檚 so witty, he鈥檚 a good Vancouver boy, and when we reached out and told him about it, he took us up on it,鈥� Washington said. 鈥淲e met him in New York. What a professional.鈥�

The run time of the film is under 50 minutes, which was required by IMAX so it would qualify for an Academy Award nomination.

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As the movie was preparing to launch, the B.C. education ministry launched its , sponsored by the Great Bear Rainforest Education and Awareness Trust.

The region, which spans 64,000 square kilometres of the B.C. Central Coast, was subject to a unique protection area worked out with 26 Indigenous communities that put 85 per cent of the territory off limits to commercial logging.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited the Heiltsuk village of Bella Bella in the heart of the region as part of their B.C. tour in 2016, where Prince William announced that the Great Bear Rainforest was being included in the Queen鈥檚 Commonwealth Canopy Initiative to promote forest preservation.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca
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