A Maine filmmaker’s offbeat mockumentary is paddling against the current of indie film distribution.
www.midcoastvillager.com
I haven't seen this so-called mockumentary, but it seems to be built on this false premise from the linked article:
"The sport, which has a small but passionate fanbase, involves performing complex choreographed canoe maneuvers set to music like a figure skating routine. Competitors demonstrate extraordinary control of their boats, but often also perform with emotion, narrative flair and even costumes, making it as much art as sport."
No, that's not "the sport". That's a description of interpretive freestyle demonstrations, not of functional freestyle sport canoeing. As far as I know—and I'll accept corrections if I'm wrong—there have not been any formal interpretive freestyle competitions with costumes and music for more than a decade. Interpretive freestyle exists now mainly as short, voluntary demonstrations at the end of freestyle clinics.
All the freestyle clinics, or symposiums, or rendezvous, or workshops, or whatever the events may be called these days, simply teach basic-to-advanced canoe control moves—the same thing you would have learned from Bill Mason 50 years ago, or Reg Blomfield and Omer Stringer 100 years ago, or Henry Rushton 150 years ago, or any native North American in a birchbark canoe 5,000 years ago.
I have never really liked the word "freestyle" because it implies that the activity is something other than basic-to-advanced flatwater canoeing technique. I much prefer the historically earlier term "sport canoeing", initially advocated by Patrick Moore, Mike Galt, Harold Deal and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s. What they were trying to convey by that term was learning how to enjoy the
motion pleasure achievable in a recreational canoe,
solely for the sport of that canoeing motion pleasure itself, as opposed to using a canoe as a vehicle or platform for some other flatwater activity such as fishing, hunting, carrying cargo, tripping, photography, racing, or canoodling.
In addition, all intermediate to advanced whitewater canoeing employs boat control principles analogous to those taught in flatwater canoe clinics.
paddlerezine.com
