Land of the living Manitoba documentary focuses lens on environmental defenders, beauty of prairies By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Thursday, Jul. 16, 2026

Everything We Need Is Here is the latest sumptuously shot Manitoba film rooted in the Prairie landscape.

Though totally unrelated in subject matter, the documentary recalls the 2024 Daughters of the Sun with its saturated and slow-mo sweeps across boreal forests and limestone tinted lakes.

But while Daughters has much murmured narration and arthouse flair, Everything is a plucky film, a can-do sort of doc about the land and its grassroots defenders.

Their voices resonate strong and clear across storylines that weave together the joys of foraging and local environmental protests.

“We’re not a flyover province. We have incredible riches here,” says Everything’s filmmaker, Katharina Stieffenhofer.

Her 90-minute film, now available on Bell MTS Fibe TV1, is also a finalist for Best Environmental Documentary at this month’s Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.

“I (recently) heard Niigaan Sinclair quote an Indigenous elder saying, ‘Everything we need is right here.’ And as soon as I heard that, I said, ‘I believe that. I totally believe that, and I want that to be the title of my film,’” she says.

She’s not just paying compliments to Manitoba’s film talent — and a certain Free Press columnist — though she’s also doing that. Stieffenhofer knows how good her film looks, and is quick to credit director of photography Tyler Funk, editor John Gurdebeke and Joel Penner (who created the film’s mesmerizing time-lapses of organic life in various stages of bloom) for their contributions. She also shouts out Winnipeg musician Keri Latimer for shaping her film’s score.

“I spent more than a year just editing. Life is layered and complex, and so is this film. One has to take the time to watch it,” she says.

But when Stieffenhofer invokes the saying “everything we need is here,” she’s referring, most of all, to the land and its peoples. Two of the storylines centre on local activist efforts.

One is the Lemay Forest protest, which sprang up after a developer began clearing trees from the 20-hectare forest, rich with old-growth riparian woodland, along the Red River in St. Norbert. Protesters established a camp and blocked the road to the forest — with one protester fined as much as $15,000.

As the film reveals, Lemay was frequented by Métis leader Louis Riel. It also reportedly harbours thousands of unmarked graves, mostly those of small children and babies associated with the Asile Ritchot orphanage in St. Norbert between 1904 and 1948.

Lemay Forest is now to become provincial park after Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew intervened on its behalf in the spring of 2025.

“Inside Lemay, we meet Terence, who is a sweatlodge keeper, and he has been conducting healing ceremonies inside of that forest for over 30 years,” Stieffenhofer says.

“And then we travel to meet his relatives in Hollow Water at Camp Morningstar, who are trying to defend their ancestral land against silica sand mining. Theirs is a spiritual resistance that goes on until this day.”

Silica sand extraction on Black Island, not far from Hollow Water First Nation on the east side of Lake Winnipeg, began in 1920. This operation lasted for 70 years, “leaving the land and the water irreversibly polluted,” in the words of documentary protagonist Marcel Hardisty

He’s a spiritual leader for Camp Morningstar, set up to delay, if not stop, Canadian Premium Sands’ more recent efforts to mine the silica-rich sands in protection of traplines, wildlife and water. The company’s environmental licence in Hollow Water First Nation was given approval in early 2024, despite Camp Morningstar filing two appeals.

Everything’s ominous imagery of heavy-metal leaching surrounding Black Island, from the earlier silica operation, is every bit as striking as the film’s more bucolic moments.

“We do need economies, but when you look around at what’s happening right now, this heat wave, the floods, the storms, the forest fires — I wish our leaders would calculate those costs and figure them in their economic calculations,” Stieffenhofer says.

While Everything’s activist message is strong, the film’s tone is personal, related through tender moments between parents, children and old and new friends foraging, cooking and hanging out.

“I want people to fall in love with nature,” the filmmaker says. “And my hope is when that happens, that people will be more likely to stand up and defend nature.”

winnipegfreepress.com/conradsweatman