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Rossland part of ‘The Wild Canadian Year’

A new documentary series premiering on the CBC this Sunday features footage shot near Rossland.
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Larches near Rossland are featured in The Wild Canadian Year , a documentary series premiering on CBC this Sunday. (Submitted)

A new documentary series premiering on the CBC this Sunday features footage shot near Rossland.

The Wild Canadian Year begins Sunday, Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. on CBC’s The Nature of Things with David Suzuki and features larch trees near Rossland. The series is in five parts, the first four of which cover the four seasons across Canada. The larches are part of the fall episode.

“One of the seasonal stories in the fall episode is how the trees prepare for winter by shedding their leaves and things like that. Now, most people think of that happening in the eastern hardwood forest with broad-leaved trees, but we wanted to sort of show that’s there’s actually a coniferous tree or an evergreen type tree that does actually shed its needles, which are leaves, the same as they do in the east,” explains Jeff Turner, series director and co-producer.

The “Fall” episode will air on Oct. 8.

Rossland cinematographer Derek Frankowski shot the larch trees for the series — and that’s not the only Kootenay flora he captured.

“We did some beautiful wildflower filming, which Derek did for us as well, up in the area around [the Slocan Valley],” says Turner.

The flowers are featured in the “Summer” episode.

Asked how he chose what to film for each season when he had the entire of the Canadian wild to choose from, Turner said, “That is the question, isn’t it? It’s a big country and it’s filled with lots of wildlife and great stories. So it’s a process that we go through. We spend months and months researching and writing scripts and thinking about what are the stories that we want to tell that are going to give us a nice overview of Canada and show a variety of animals and make a compelling and interesting film.”

The fifth episode in the series is “Making the Wild Canadian Year” and shows how the series was shot.

Turner and his team started filming in March 2015 and didn’t finish filming until March 2017. But because the series is divided into seasons, they were able to start editing in July 2016, when they first started cutting together “Spring.”

Turner himself has spent most of the last year in the editing room and has been overseeing the series as a whole, while his fellow producers have directed individual episodes. His wife and co-producer Sue Turner and his daughter Chelsea Turner co-directed “Summer,” Louise Ferguson directed “Spring,” and Jeff Morales directed “Fall.”

“And then I was kind of responsible for the whole series and pulling it all together and making sure that the whole thing was a cohesive piece,” says Turner.

The series is set to an original score performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

Turner is filming a Spirit Bear IMAX film that will likely be completed in 2019.