If you don’t see the connection between kayaking and mental health, Friday’s event at the Goldtown Nickelodeon aims to make it more clear.
It starts at 5 p.m. with “Adventurmentalism,” a 35-minute film that chronicles Luke Holton and Chelsea Karthauser’s journey by kayak from Haines to Wrangell, followed by a presentation and book signing by Susan Conrad, author of “Inside: One Woman’s Journey Through the Inside Passage” which charts her trip from Vancouver Island to Juneau.
Holton and Karthauser embarked on their journey shortly after he returned from serving seven years in the army, and after someone close to her committed suicide, circumstances that promoted them both to move to Juneau.
“We were both in different places when we got here, (and) used this trip as a good avenue to try to find some closure (and) peace for ourselves,” Holton said. “The film itself is about kayaking but it’s also about mental health and suicide survival.”
He calls Conrad’s book “a very similar project where she tried to gain insight into her personal life and sort through different life experiences while in a healthy place to do it.”
For himself, Holton said, one of the longest problems he faced on his return from Afghanistan was the “actual, urbanized living that I was stuck in” at his hometown of Reno, Nevada.
“I was still suffering from a lot of the physical, surface PTSD issues,” he said, which led to an “underlying urge to get out of the city and move back out to the wildlife and to smaller populations. So that landed me here in Juneau.”
He adds that “putting yourself into nature and ecotherapy is just a good way to tune out a lot of the stresses in everyday life that everyone has that might just be a little too much for someone who has suffered from trauma.”
It was after finishing the trip that Holton and Karthauser decided to make the movie, which involved getting a better camera and editing software, and shooting additional landscape filmography — especially time-lapse filmography.
Holton said he found this process even more therapeutic than the actual trip. In “time-lapse photography,” he said, “each six second clip takes hours and hours to capture. So that gives you a good excuse to go hike up a mountain and set up your camera and not move for six or seven hours at a time.”
Neither had any experience with filmmaking or editing before they decided to make this movie. The new camera and software was crowdsourced through GoFundMe.
“It was hours and hours of YouTube tutorials,” said Holton. “When you love something — and I do, I love photography, I love film and I love nature. So when you love all three of those things it makes it enjoyable and it’s a labor of love.”
Despite it being their first film, it was accepted at seven film festivals. Holton was unable to attend the premiere at the Arlington National Film Festival in Arlington, Virginia, so the film was represented by a team member from Afghanistan, where Holton served with the 10th Mountain Division.
Earlier this month, Holton was able to see his film before an audience for the first time at the G2 Green Earth Film Festival in Los Angeles.
“It was probably one of the top ten moments of my life,” Holton said, “just in terms of being able to be humbled by everyone’s reception on it. It was absolutely amazing.”
You can expect more films from HoltHaus Productions. Holton is already shooting a documentary about the culling of predatory animals that he plans to debut in fall of 2017.
Adventurmentalism’s run will likely be complete after the film festivals, but Holton is working on disseminating it in various ways, including his website, http://holthauspros.wixsite.com/adventurmentalism/adventurmentalism.
• Contact Capital City Weekly design wizard and staff writer Randi Spray at randi.spray@capweek.com.
