A documentary on Wrangell and the people who live here is set to premiere on July 5 at the Nolan Center. “Walk Gently on This Land” was created by three filmmakers and inspired by the unique stories the community has to tell.

Sam Pausman was reporting for the Wrangell Sentinel for a little over half a year in 2024 when he made a trip home to Maine to visit family and friends for the holidays.

It was December 2024, and when he met to debrief post-grad life with his old friend Skyler Piltch, Pausman couldn’t help but gush about the wonderful Alaska town he found himself living and working in.

“I told him about all the ridiculous things happening in Wrangell, like people coming in late to the Sentinel office to offer me a basket of eggs,” Pausman said.

A lightbulb went off for Piltch, who studied film and lives in California making movies. He wanted to make documentary on the wild and wonderful people of Wrangell.

“It just seemed like such a beautiful place,” Piltch said. “I think it reminded me of growing up in Maine, in a town that was surrounded by the ocean and mountains and trees and wildlife.”

It also helped that he’d spent the past year in Los Angeles and was itching to film something in a town “rooted in nature.” So in a bar in Maine, the idea for a documentary about Wrangell was born.

When Pausman returned to Alaska he started pocketing interesting stories, people and things to highlight in the film. He quickly realized it would be hard to narrow it down, there’s simply too many fascinating tales about town, so he started throwing all of them Piltch’s way.

“The blessing and the curse of my involvement in this documentary is I knew a lot about Wrangell but nothing about documentary work,” Pausman said.

Eventually, the scope of the film was narrowed down to covering four pillars of life in Wrangell: timber, fishing, Tlingit culture and education. Pausman pieced together the characters he thought best embodied those areas.

The film, which is about 20 minutes long, profiles the four sectors, featuring the Herman family who bought Canoe Lagoon Oysters in 2020 and moved up from Arizona to run it; sawmill operator Mike Allen Jr.; educator Barb Neyman; and cultural bearers and revivers Mike Hoyt and Esther Aaltseén Reese.

“It definitely came down to doing a portrait on the town, it wasn’t a doc on fish or timber, it was a doc on the town with these four pillars,” Piltch said. “The hardest part was definitely shortening everybody’s stories so that our doc wasn’t six hours long.”

Producer, writer and director Katie Liebert, who is also based in Los Angeles, joined the team after the idea for the project was established, bringing an expert perspective with her background in documentary film work.

The documentary is self-funded, with the trio investing their own time and money. The main expenses were plane tickets and gear, though Piltch managed to get camera lens maker Zeiss to loan about $40,000 worth of equipment. They shot the scenes on a rented Sony digital camera.

After months of lead-up, the team prepared for a nine-day visit to Wrangell in May of 2025. But just before that, Pausman decided to take a job in Boston. He called Piltch in a frenzy, unsure of how the project would change.

“I told him we’re still going to film the doc, you just have to buy a plane ticket,” Piltch said.

The trip last May was a whirlwind. Looking back, the team all said they were amazed they got everything done in the little time they were in town.

“I kind of felt like the preproduction was the nine months Sam was living there,” Piltch said. “All the interviews started with him catching up with them [the subjects] and sharing about our project.”

The trio experienced all the culture shocks expected in a new place. Liebert and Piltch didn’t really know what an oyster farm was before they visited, but they were pleasantly surprised by the welcome they received in town.

Liebert recalled initial skepticism from people about the film crew’s East Coast origins, but the more they got to know the subjects and town the more hesitation dissipated and they were welcomed with open arms.

The team has worked tirelessly over the past year to distill the hours of film into a documentary. With Liebert and Pausman writing and shaping the narrative and Piltch cranking out edit after edit, it’s been a labor of love and the team couldn’t be prouder of what they’ve created.

“I hope people see themselves in the film. I think that it’s important to us that people in this town see an image of themselves that they resonate with in their own specific, individual lives,” Liebert said.

For Pausman, the film is a chance to snapshot a place that granted him a deeply transformative experience. Since he first touched down in Wrangell in 2024, he’s been trying to explain the town’s magic to people in his life and this is the most complete way he can see doing that.

“But at the end of the day, after the premiere at the Nolan Center, you could put the film on a thumb drive and bury it six feet in the ground and have no one see it after that and I’d be just as happy,” Pausman said. “To me this has always been for the people of Wrangell.”

There are plans to keep sharing the documentary beyond Wrangell, with film festivals and family and friend showings in the crew’s respective cities. Soon they’ll all be in the same place — Pausman is moving to Los Angeles, leaving journalism to pursue documentary work. His first project was a love letter to a place that offered many life changes.

In their reflections on the experience, the team kept coming back to the connection they made with the film’s subjects, especially Hoyt and Reese. It was at the end of an over six-hour interview with them that the title of the film was spoken.

In response to the question — “If you could tell the people of Wrangell one thing you hope for the future what would it be?” — Reese responded with a poetic reflection on the balance of life and human interaction with the Earth.

“She said in order to maintain that balance you have to ‘be kind to each other and walk gently on this land,’” Liebert recalled. “We all had the same moment where we looked at each other and thought ‘no way.’ Once the cameras cut, the first thing we said to each other was, ‘We have the name of our film.’”