Port Alberni landmarks will soon be coming to a theatre near you thanks to a robust motion picture industry.
The Alberni Valley and in particular the McLean Mill National Historic Site will play feature roles in film productions that were recently shot in the area. “One Mile,” “One More Mile” and “The Stolen Child” were all filmed here in the past year and will bring more notoriety and economic impact to the region.
"The return is multi-million dollars over the last year and a half into the Alberni Valley,” said Vancouver Island North Film (INFILM) commissioner Joan Miller.
Miller said the area, like much of the mid-Island, is reaping the rewards of being diversified. "We continue to attract things like reality shows and reality challenge shows that have been filming. They’ve shot in Port Alberni as well as a West Coast area and up in the Comox Valley.”
The productions, along with some large crews and major budgets are coming after the commission has invested 27 years of promotion of not only the region, but also in the training of future crew members.
"Going back to about 2015 when we started really putting our training programs together, we’ve covered every cent of the training, for everyone that's taken it. So that's a huge investment in labour,” she said.
That has helped to build a roster of more than 700 crew members on Vancouver Island that Miller says can be hired by visiting productions, helping them to fill their crew rosters without having to bring workers from elsewhere.
One of those local hires is Jane Victoria King, who often works as a set designer but also served as a location scout on the “One Mile” and “One More Mile” films as well as a location manager for “The Stolen Child.”
“Location scouting on Vancouver Island is ideal. We have majestic mountain ranges, trails, old growth forests, we have vintage beautiful homes. We have a lot of barns and farmland, we have ocean, we have rivers, we have it all on Vancouver Island,” Victoria King said.
Among the locations Victoria King helped secure for productions was the McLean Mill site. "I spent four and a half hours shooting McLean Mill and uploaded thousands of files. It was really, really an eye-opening experience to see what had gone on in that land for so many years that is now a historic site,” she said.
The site is owned by the City of Port Alberni but has been managed by the Alberni Valley Chamber of Commerce since 2020 through a special fee-for-service agreement. The chamber’s director of operations Elliot Drew says it is an ideal location for producers.
“It’s a very unique, very interesting site that offers a lot more than just the history of the site. (There’s) opportunities with some old buildings and some great landscapes, but we also offer a lot of really interesting nature and we have the facilities and the space to support productions as well,” Drew said.
He added that producers were attracted to the facility for one particular sequence but then greatly expanded their usage of the site once they discovered all that it offered. "The opportunities that our almost 13-acre site can provide with its different locales, its great nature, its opportunities with almost 100-year-old infrastructure made them say ‘if we can be here for two weeks that would be great.'"
The mill has partnered with INFILM to get the word out on what the site has to offer. “The opportunities here are immense and the great thing about it for the most part is that it’s relatively undiscovered, and that means right now that there are deals to be had,” Drew said.
He also predicts an upshot in more visitors to the facility once the films make it into the theatres and television.
"Anybody that sees this film is going to know McLean Mill. We know that nothing makes people more passionate than film, so if they get passionate about a movie, you know they’re going to take time out to come and visit us,” Drew said.
Miller said future film projects for the Alberni Valley and all of the Island are looking good for the foreseeable future, even despite talk of Canadian productions getting caught up in American tariff issues.
"Right now we’re starting to see the fruits of 27 years of work coming together as we are in back-to-back-to-back productions throughout our region. These are Canadian domestic productions not affected by anything that’s going on within the tariff war between the United States and the world,” she said.
