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“He not only captures the message, but it’s also a really beautiful visual portrait of people and landscape and ideas,” Raffan says of Iromoto. The adventurers engaged with the communities en route to discuss Canadian issues.

That message, in a time of reflection and reconciliation in Canada, is trying to help move a nation beyond a troubled past and into a more hopeful future, with the iconic canoe as a vehicle.

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“It’s the notion of journey, the notion of being in the same waterway together, being in the same boat and pulling together,” Raffan says.

The metaphors come easily, with the canoe as a vessel of reconciliation, on a venture shared by Inuit, Metis, and other First Nations people, among myriad ethnic backgrounds.

As a female paddler says in the film: “You have to pull together to move forward.”

Another noted how “we’ve lost the sense of community. We have to care about the people next door.”

For Raffan and the canoe museum, the ambitious goal of a “floating conversation” about Canada helps place the canoe as a potential way forward, and not merely a link to Canada’s pioneer past.

The final thought on the trip from Raffan as the paddles dried and the muscles ached: “It had a dimension to it that left me exhausted, but full of hope.”

For viewers, that canoe trek is but one sampling from the Paddling Film Festival 2018 world tour, created and produced by Scott MacGregor of Rapid Media.

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Individual venues among the hundreds accessing the festival throughout North America, select their own films for presentation. At the Bytowne, that assignment fell to programmer Bruce White, who chose 10 from a field of 27 films. They range in length from five to 27 minutes with a total running time of two hours, 29 minutes.