TRAPLINE

LOGLINE

In the remote Yukon wilderness, rivalry over a family trapline explodes between a damaged teenage girl and her ex-convict half brother.

SYNOPSIS

Left alone by her grandfather’s sudden death, 17-year-old Scarlett quits school and sets out into the wilderness to bury his ashes. Her task accomplished, she resolves to stay where she is and work the family’s abandoned trapline. Amidst the silence and harsh beauty of the snowbound woods, Scarlett finds consolation for her grandfather’s loss and unhealed wounds: above all, that of her mother’s desertion years earlier—a mystery that has cast a long and bitter shadow over her childhood. Never meeting her non-Native American father combined with her mother’s sudden disappearance, Scarlett had a confusing and lonely upbringing. She was bullied ay school on the reserve for not being fully native, making her struggle to find friends and an identity.

Over the objections of local conservation officer and lone friend JEANINE, Scarlett repairs the derelict cabin, gathers her food supply, and prepares her traps for the coming winter. But the wintry landscape holds more hazards than Scarlett has foreseen, and midway through her first trapping season her isolation is shattered by unwanted arrival of her crafty older half brother, MIKE, recently paroled from prison and in search of a place to lie low. To get past Scarlett’s defenses, Mike claims to have the power to reunite her with their vanished mother; he also asserts ownership over half the trapline as his rightful inheritance. For a time his gambit succeeds and Scarlett allows him to work the trapline alongside her. But as Mike reverts by degrees to his old patterns of violence and manipulation, wounds inflicted in a similar childhood resurface and eventually overwhelm their fragile accord. Against the backdrop of the icy northern wilderness, a clash of wills between siblings grows into a violent and ultimately deadly struggle for control over a contested birthright.