Women of the Klondike headed for the big screen
Award-winning writer-director Kate Melville has big plans for Women of the Klondike. At the recent TIFF film festival in Toronto, she announced that her production company, Snitch Pictures, has optioned my book, in association with Hawkeye Pictures. I’m excited about Kate’s goal of adapting it into what she describes as a “feminist western.”
In a press release put out by Snitch Pictures, Kate says: “Women of the Klondike is bursting with characters so vividly drawn, I was up all night reading it like a novel. Many different women lived in Dawson: Salvation Army missionaries, vaudeville performers, cooks, laundresses, women who panned for gold themselves, Tagish and Tlingit locals, society wives and nuns. Reading about these bold, adventurous characters, I wondered what their version of ‘frontier justice’ might look like. I’ve always loved Westerns, and these forgotten women from Gold Rush history deserve a movie of their own.” I couldn’t agree more!
Writer-director Kate Melville (photo courtesy of Snitch Pictures).
Snitch Pictures is known for Kate Melville’s directorial debut feature Picture Day, which premiered at TIFF in 2012, and won the Borsos Prize for Best Feature at Whistler and a 2013 ACTRA award for Maslany. Hawkeye Pictures is a Toronto-based production company working with some of Canada’s most exciting talents. Its latest feature, Mary Goes Round premiered at TIFF17. Bell Media’s Harold Greenberg Fund is supporting the project through the Script Development Program.
