Indian Road Trip premieres at Whistler Film Festival, where it all started

Indian Road Trip is the film you need right now. 

Filled with laugh-out-loud one-liners, a range of loveable goofballs, and shot in the picturesque Thompson-Nicola region, it’s a one-hour-and-45-minute escape from our current realities.  

“This is kind of a love letter to my people up there where I’m from and to those quirky characters,” says A.W. Hopkins, who’s from the N’Quatqua First Nation near D’arcy. “And those stupid, funny, wild situations we got into. They emerged from the back of my subconscious and imagination.” 

Hopkins’ debut feature film is the story of two cousins—Hank, the brooding brains, and Cody the beefy sidekick—who embark on a road trip to travel from their small, stifling reserve where “everyone knows what you’re thinking before you even think it” to the fabled Wreck Beach (Vancouver’s famous nude beach/ hippie hangout). 

After getting caught in a few cons, mostly perpetuated against clueless tourists, they get assigned a task before they can hit the road. They have to drive a curmudgeonly (but hilariously blunt) elder to see her estranged, dying sister on the old reserve. 

“I realized as I was writing, I had tremendous affection for my characters,” Hopkins says. “I like them all. I want to spend time with them. It was really easy once I got going to write the script and put them in those situations. I want people to walk away with not so much a political [take] or thinking about an issue, but mainly just an emotion. ‘I experienced something that is different, that is authentic.’” 

Hopkins grew up between N’Quatqua and Vancouver. He spent years working for CTV covering Indigenous current events stories. But when his job got cut, and he noticed the state of the industry, he decided to focus on scriptwriting. 

It’s been a running theme throughout his filmmaking career that someone notices an opportunity and connects him with the right people, just under deadline. It all started with the Whistler Film Festival’s Indigenous Filmmaker Fellowship in 2015. 

“It was the first time I spent a lot of time around Indigenous filmmakers,” Hopkins says. “That was great to connect on that level and see what people were interested in doing. Everyone seemed to like my script. I was sure I would have the very worst script and no one would like it, but it was the opposite; everyone seemed to like it.” 

The following year, he was accepted to the festival’s Screenwriters Lab to further hone the script—and make industry connections. 

“My career so far is very much dependent on the Whistler Film Festival,” he says. 

To that end, he had a few festivals that wanted to debut the film, but he knew it had to be at Whistler. 

“I’m just really grateful Whistler wanted to debut it,” he said. 

The road-trip genre had always been appealing to Hopkins, but it’s the Indigenous angle that makes it unique and compelling. He taps into a humour that might be common to Indigenous people, but is rarely seen on the big screen.  

“I think it is a bit untapped,” he says. “That kind of humour was a daily thing when it was in my formative years on the reservation. The two main characters are kind of loosely based on my brother and my cousin who just had such a great dynamic. They were so funny. Everyone thought they were hilarious and very cool. There has been Indigenous humour for years and years; it doesn’t get a lot of attention.” 

At its core, the film is about grappling with the desire to forge your own path or stay where you have roots and connections. For Hopkins, it’s a bit of a fantasy of what could’ve been if he had chosen another path. 

“I think a lot of Indigenous people who leave their land and their people and some of the history back on the reserve struggle with this feeling of, ‘How do I maintain that connection? Have I lost that?’ Once you get into the city and [start] doing education and working in an office and getting onto that wheel of accomplishment, I think a lot struggle with that and try and work out their own personal way of dealing with it.” 

Catch Indian Road Trip as part of the virtual Whistler Film Festival on Dec. 15 at whistlerfilmfestival.com.