MIDALE — Jack Hilkewich's 14-year labour of love is about to come to fruition.
The former Midale resident, who has many years of experience in the film industry, is the director and a producer of Mainprize – a project that chronicles the life, career and commitment of Dr. William Graham Mainprize, who served the Midale area for decades. The film will be released as part of activities in the town during the Saskatchewan Day long weekend.
Murray Kerr and Dwayne Melcher are co-producers for the project.
Mainprize, known by generations of people in Midale simply as Doc, began his practice in Midale in 1911 and spent more than 50 years in the small town. He travelled many long hours by horse, sleigh or whatever he needed to see his patients.
The Mainprize Manor and Health Centre and the Mainprize Regional Park are among the amenities in the Midale area that carry his name.
The documentary will premiere with an invite-only showing on Aug. 2 at 10 a.m. at Midale Central School. Further showings will be Aug. 2 at 12:30 p.m., and Aug. 3 at 12:30 and 5 p.m. All will be at the school.
Hilkewich said he has put in so much time on the project, his evaluations are no longer reliable.
"I can't tell if it's good or bad or what," he said in an interview with SaskToday. "I'm a little too close to it. There are points in time where I thought 'Yeah, this is pretty good,' but now I've seen the footage so much, it's really hard for me to tell. I think it'll be well received."
While the beloved physician is the primary focus, the documentary is about communities and the importance they played in the history of the province.
"People needed communities to survive. They needed each other to survive, or else they would have never made it, especially through those tough early years when there were no roads and infrastructure amid the harsh weather and rough terrain. People needed and depended on each other to make it through."
It started in 2011…
Mainprize began when he went to the Midale area to make a brief documentary about the 50th anniversary celebrations for the original Dr. Mainprize Park. Mainprize Regional Park opened years later and in another location.
"I was just going to talk to a few people, shoot some video of the festivities and then put it on DVD," Hilkewich recalled.
Most of the festivities were dashed because of flooding in 2011. Hilkewich interviewed some people, but most of them were unusable due to audio problems, and he was eager to salvage something. Some of the footage appears in the finished documentary.
Hilkewich asked one of the event organizers if she had any pictures of the original park. She gave him a small box, and Hilkewich thought he could scan in and edit them for his project. When he returned home, he realized he had photos of the new Mainprize Regional Park.
He decided to proceed with a documentary on the old park and its namesake. A short time later, he was approached by someone about making a donation.
He worked on Mainprize on evenings and weekends, and he took a week off for interviews.
"Once we got going, we got enough donations where we could get a professional camera and hire some crew for small periods of time throughout the 14 years," he said. "We would try to shoot a week at a time to get as much as we could for the smallest amount of money."
He believes he received just over $300,000 in donations during the past 14 years, which covered the bulk of the cost for the project.
"It covered the most important stuff, going out to gather the interviews. We would try to schedule as many in a week as we could, and that's when I was able to hire a videographer and a sound person. The three of us would go out and shoot these interviews for a week," said Hilkewich, who had to pay some money out of pocket to complete his labour of love.
The fundraising petered out after shooting was largely finished in 2021 or 2022. A couple of donations have come in as the film's premiere approaches.
Hilkewich said his goal is to enter Mainprize into film festivals and find a buyer for the picture. He doesn't want to go to people for money, because many people donated to the project and want to see it finished.
Memories of "Doc"
Mainprize delivered Hilkewhich when Hilkewich was born, and Hilkewich believes Mainprize continued practicing until 1974.
"He was just Doc in my brain for most of my life, even my adult life. I didn't really understand what he meant to the community until I started talking to other people in the community about Doc," said Hilkewich. "It made me realize what a sacrifice he made for his entire life to serve this community and the surrounding communities."
Hilkewich believes Mainprize was so talented that in today's society, he would have been one of the most sought-after physicians – a man who could have chosen where he wanted to practice.
"He could have went anywhere in the world and made a really good living. But he chose to stay where he was, and that just showed what was important to him, and to him it was community. He did so many amazing things in order to serve his patients that required a lot of effort and work that he could not have done without his community helping him."
Blacksmiths and mechanics built things Mainprize thought of to help him get to remote patients amid inclimate weather at a time when there were no roads.
"He realized that he wouldn't have been able to do anything without his community, and it was this mutual respect and love for each other that I really didn't understand until I started making this film," Hilkewich said.
Employer for a day
Mainprize occasionally hired local teenagers and paid them $5 per day to do maintenance work at the park, which Mainprize took ownership of. Hilkewich's oldest brother Kim was one of them. When Jack Hilkewich was about 10 years old, he thought he could use the $5 to purchase some comics.
Hilkewich hung out around Mainprize's house until the doctor agreed to hire the lad.
"He was quite old at the time … and I remember driving down to the park with him in I think it was his grey Impala or something," said Hilkewich. "It looked like a huge floating boat, because we were all over the road and he was singing gospel tunes really loud, and I was scared because I realized that if we met another car on the road, we might be in trouble."
Hilkewich admits he didn't know how to work at that point in his life and wasn't very good at it. He removed weeds in the area leading up to the church.
"I thought I was there for hours. It was probably 10 minutes, and I was already thinking 'This is crazy. I don't want to do this anymore,'" said Hilkewich.
At the end of the day, Hilkewich was paid his $5 and never went back.
Seventy-seven interviews later
Excluding the six or seven people he talked to in 2011, Hilkewich said he interviewed 77 people for Mainprize.
"This is my first documentary I've made, and it will be my last. Don't interview 77 people. Just pick some good ones, because it's hard to go through all 77 interviews and it's time consuming. All of them seemed to be very good, and it's how do I cut that one out? They're just as important as the other person."
But he has some great stories from the people he talked to, and he believes 18 of the interviewees have died. He wants to create an online link for family members of those who died so they can access the interviews as a memento.
When he did the interview with SaskToday, he said he was at the computer and still working on editing. The documentary was at two and a half hours at that time; he wants to get it down to two hours for the premiere.
"This version will likely never be seen, other than in Midale, because it's going to be longer than it should be, just so that I can include more of the interviews. I figure that this is the built-in audience for this film, and I've been hinted at by some people that longer is better," said Hilkewich.
After the weekend, Hilkewich said he was going to take a bit of time to further trim it to a 90-minute feature.
Hilkewich admits he's nervous about the premiere, but it's supposed to be a feel-good documentary and he hopes it comes across that way.
"I hope I did a good service to Doc Mainprize in making this," said Hilkewich.
A companion book by Midale's Mary Lou Rosengren is to be released later this year. SaskToday will have a future article on her efforts.
