Matt Paproski hangs out with timberwolves Aurora (white) and Timber (black) at the Boreal Discovery Centre on Sept. 17.

Photograph By KYLE DARBYSON

Back in late September, wildlife filmmaker Matt Paproski played a big part in Thompson’s AuroraFest 150 celebration.



Not only did Paproski and his crew from Drumheller, Alberta document many of the highlights from this 10-day event—including the city’s attempt to break the Guinness World Record for group wolf howling—but they also provided one of the featured attractions by housing a pair of timberwolves at the Boreal Discovery Centre.



These two wolves, named Aurora and Timber, are the centerpiece of an upcoming documentary named How Will Wolves Survive? which will chronicle the filmmaker’s efforts to raise these animals over the course of a decade.

According to Paproski, he originally rescued the pair from a game-hunting farm when they were only pups. Since then, Aurora and Timber have gone on to thrive by appearing in a selection of the filmmaker’s projects for his company Starland Studios.



Of course, this journey wasn’t always easy. Paproski even told the Thompson Citizen that there were “despairing days” when the crew thought they wouldn’t be able to raise these wolves properly.



“We ran out of money and ran into issues where we lived,” he said. “We had to keep moving, working with the government, working with all of the different animal rights groups, trying to make sure that we were raising the animals in, ultimately, the best way.”



However, the team persevered and eventually their interests in wildlife conservation intersected with local efforts to rebrand Thompson as the Wolf Capital of the World.



After making contact with groups like Spirit Way, Paproski became involved with the planning of AuroraFest and eventually got the opportunity to show Thompsonites how these animals behave in person during the week-long event itself.



“This is a great thing for our film and our story,” he said. “Our wolves basically have come from being animals that should have been dead when they were a year old as game in a hunt farm, and they are now ambassadors for the Wolf Capital of the World.”



Paproski plans to use this AuroraFest footage and supplement it with material he shot over the past decade in the hopes of painting a broader picture of the issues these animals face in 2017, like Alberta’s ongoing wolf cull.



“We’re using their intimate, personal story to show the bigger story, which is wolves in general,” said Paproski. “Where they’re disappearing, where they’re a problem, how they’ve been managed, how we got to keep them in the future.”



As of right now, Paproski can’t divulge a release date for How Will Wolves Survive? since his crew still has to grapple with formatting such a protracted project. 



”We have 10 years of footage already raising the wolves, but it’s in different formats,” he said. “So we have to bump that all up to 4K, and then we’re going to fill in a few of the gaps and add more stuff for the story.”



When the documentary is eventually released Paproski believes it will have a broad appeal that will captivate animal lovers and environmental activists alike, with the end result hopefully being more awareness and action on behalf of wolves.



“We all have to work this out together, and if we don’t work on the wolf situation we have no hope of saving ourselves,” he said.



For the time being, Paproski encourages everybody who is interested in this film’s development to visit Starland Studios’ official blog or Facebook page, where updates will be given on a semi-regular basis.