’Heller Skelter

Kurt Blanchett, a Drumheller resident who appears in The Cross and Bones. Courtesy Equipe Spectra.

Lesson one for aspiring documentarians: never turn off your radar. A gripping narrative can emerge in the unlikeliest of places. So it was with Canadian filmmaker Paul Carriere. While on vacation in Alberta in 2003, he visited the Drumheller Valley, located in the fabled Badlands. “I was just blown away by the landscape, which to me looked like a scar in the prairie,” Carriere says. “It’s ancient. It’s almost lunar. It’s mythical, also.”

Although awed by the grandeur of the valley’s rolling hills, it was Drumheller’s peculiar culture that struck him as documentary material. This town of less than 6,000 is a functioning paradox: it’s home to the biggest dinosaur cemetery in the world and a hotbed for creationism.

A quick refresher: creationists believe God created Earth, and every living thing that inhabits it, no more than 10,000 years ago; it took six days and was a fait accompli. Evolutionists, citing several centuries of scientific inquiry, contend that life on Earth has been a slow process of natural selection that began many millions of years ago — and that the existence of dinosaur bones is irrefutable proof of this.

For Carriere, the presence of so many creationists in a town where you can’t drive a block without seeing a kitschy dino statue was irresistibly ironic. His new film, The Cross and Bones, is about competing pilgrimages. The film opens with shots of paleontologists arriving in the Badlands to dig for remains, while in the hills nearby, devout Christians gather to rehearse the annual Passion play (the re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion). If that juxtaposition isn’t odd enough, Carriere introduces us to yet another local pilgrimage: the annual biker rally held in the Drumheller Valley, a scene of black leather, sun-baked skin, motorcycle stunts and loads of drinking.

Carriere is a gifted chronicler; his film Laura Riese was hailed Best Biography at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in 1994 and Mum’s the Word — about four Ontario woman who come out as lesbians — won a Genie Award in 1996 for Best Short Documentary.

The Cross and Bones, which kicked off the Canadian Spectrum showcase at Hot Docs this weekend, is a wry, non-judgmental film about belief — in God, in science, in the right to party. Carriere explores these various ideologies through a cast of lovable eccentrics. D’Arcy Browning is a Drumheller real estate agent who plays Jesus in the town’s highly touted Passion play and uses his divinity-by-proxy to help him sell homes. (Browning’s wife and business partner, Theresa, is Mary in the play; their business card depicts the two in period garb.) Then there’s Pastor Dan Dannhauer, who preaches the Seven Days theory every Sunday; Paul Johnston, the staid paleontologist leading Drumheller’s evolutionist charge; Gilles Denis, who makes a living reassembling dinosaur skeletons and selling them to museums; and Denis Maday, a grizzled biker and former sinner who now walks with Jesus.

When prompted, Carriere cops to siding with the evolutionists. But he never lets this inclination taint the narrative. “Both sides wanted to know, what was my agenda,” says Carriere on the phone from his home in Montreal. Like any good documentarian, he remained open-minded. “I never went [to Drumheller] and said, ‘I’m making a creation and evolution film.’ It was always, ‘I’m making a film about this unusual, original place where three camps exist.’ I always said it was a modern type of pilgrimage that was happening there. People come there for science, faith or just to enjoy themselves for a weekend.”

Of the three “camps,” the evolutionists proved the most wary; Carriere feels that members of Drumheller’s Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology might well have refused to cooperate had they known he’d also been talking to creationists. The bikers, on the other hand, were very forthcoming. Blissfully oblivious to Carriere’s project — thanks in large part to free-flowing beer — they supplied all sorts of on-camera disclosures. Some revealed their religious faith; others revealed their breasts.

A musical duo provides interludes throughout The Cross and Bones. Courtesy Equipe Spectra.

Overall, The Cross and Bones doesn’t shy from subtle humour. A pair of musicians provide jokey interludes throughout the film; as well, Carriere employs a narrator, whose commentary recalls Waylon Jennings’s folksy voiceovers on The Dukes of Hazzard. The film has the comedic and emotional payoff of a Michael Moore doc without the overt manipulation.

Case in point: while traveling with the Brownings on the way back from a play rehearsal, Carriere saw a group of museum workers digging through rock at the side of a hill that features a giant Jesus statue. For Carriere, it was a can’t-miss opportunity: a chance for the two camps to butt heads. Given the ideological rift, you might expect a highly fraught encounter with shouting, hand-waving and the threat of fisticuffs. The scene is actually quite civil, but poignant all the same. D’Arcy asks a female museum worker about the dinosaur timeline. Creationism holds that man and dinosaurs co-existed; science, on the other hand, figures dinosaurs predated the earliest humans by about 200 million years.

“Man did not — could not — have seen these animals alive?” D’Arcy asks the museum worker.

The young woman offers a polite “No.”

“Is that right?” D’Arcy marvels, with almost comical earnestness. “What a shame.”

Theresa takes the opportunity to read a Bible excerpt that she thinks addresses who came first, dinosaur or human. She hopes the good book will clarify this particular point, but finds the passage inconclusive. “I still believe that man was created for His praise and worship,” Theresa says, trying to make sense of this chronological pickle. Then, a theory emerges. “Maybe before that, He had dinosaurs as pets,” Theresa says, before conceding, “I don’t know!”

For all its soul-searching, Carriere says The Cross and Bones is less an ideological debate than an ode to the Drumheller Valley.

“I think that’s the reason the film starts with the landscape and ends with the landscape,” he says. “It’s an homage to this land. It’s a film about how people use that landscape. They use it to investigate the origin of life and the death of dinosaurs. They experience it for hedonism or pure joy. Or they use it as a theatre backdrop.”

The Cross and Bones plays at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto on Monday, April 25.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.