In 1862, smallpox swept the Northwest Coast. One Tsimshian man wrote down exactly what he saw. His diaries survive in London. His great-great-granddaughter wrote this film.
Grounded in the only known first-person Indigenous account of the 1860s Northwest Coast, Wild Woman of the Woods is a mythic thriller. A castaway daughter carrying a volatile shamanic relic must hunt down the architect of the plague—the most feared chieftainess on the coast—or watch her world be erased forever.
Thrown from a cliff at birth, Neshekai survived.
She grew up with no clan and no name worth speaking. But she carries a Soul Catcher—a shamanic relic she barely understands. When a devastating sickness begins erasing her people, she is forced to cross open ocean, haunted forests, and trading posts thick with fortune seekers to find the one medicine that can save them.
But the plague is not a natural disaster; it is a weapon. Neshekai must confront the architect of the sickness—the most powerful and terrifying chieftainess on the coast. Neshekai must choose: destroy the leader her people fear most, or become the wound that made her.
Built for Scale
Period-accurate longhouses. Naval ships. Sea wolves. This was the Northwest Coast in 1862. Not a wilderness—an empire. A world where nations met sea captains as equals and gave no ground. Then, smallpox arrived. What followed erased more than half the region's Indigenous peoples within a single season.
The Revenant—a brutal, near-wordless historical epic—earned over $530 million worldwide against a $135 million budget. Killers of the Flower Moon drew ten Academy Award nominations, including the first-ever Best Actress nomination for a Native American performer.
Both were period pieces. Both were drawn from real history. Wild Woman of the Woods is the epic neither of them told—told at that exact scale, on its own terms.
This is a thriller — built the way Northwest Coast stories have always been built. For ten thousand years the potlatch was court and Broadway at once: entertainment that carried the law, the warning, the initiation, the name. This film works the same way. You won't be lectured. You'll be pulled in — by the characters, the politics, the love story — and the world will already be around you when you look up. The history is the flavor, not the lesson. Salmon is the dish. The fire makes the taste.
The theme is heavy — cultural erasure, generational trauma. The chassis is a thriller. Nothing slows the ride.
She carries the moral weight of the film. She was thrown away to die; she grew up to be the one who won't let anyone else be thrown away.
The most feared leader on the coast, a woman who believes her cruelty is love. A terrifying product of survival and a Goliath role for a veteran actress.
Carved from bone and inlaid with abalone, the Soul Catcher was a sacred tool used by shamans to find lost souls and bring them home — or set them free.
In this film, it holds one power more. In the right hands, it returns the dead to rest. In the wrong hands, it commands them.
Neshekai carries one. She doesn't yet know what her hands will do with it.
A chief walks the beach at dawn, his wolf at his heel. A boy runs up with his first fish, proud as a warrior, and the chief kneels to admire it. "That one fought you, didn't he?" Down the shore, his warriors tease him about the old woman who keeps finding reasons to touch his arm. He'd seen ships on this horizon his whole life. So had his father. There is no fear here. Only a morning, like ten thousand mornings before it.
This was the Northwest Coast in its last whole year.
Not wilderness — a civilization. Totem poles eighty feet tall holding the lineages. Clans passing through the mothers: Wolf, Raven, Eagle, Killer Whale. A world where a chief proved his power not by what he kept but by what he gave away — coppers broken at the feast, food and blankets pressed into a thousand hands. The sea captains wrote home frustrated. These nations met them as equals, traded on their own terms, gave no ground.
That's not mythology. That's the colonial record.
Then, 1862. Smallpox reached the coast. Colonists were vaccinated; the nations mostly were not. When the sick filled the camps outside Victoria, the authorities drove them up the coast at gunpoint — by order. What followed erased more than half the region's Indigenous peoples within a single season.
The land was wanted. The people were on it.
Eight countries. Three continents.
In vetted competitions from Houston to St. Petersburg to Tokyo, industry readers — different languages, different markets, different traditions — chose this story. Not for the same reason twice. What travels is the world itself: a coast no screen has held, and a mother and daughter at the center of it.
These are not website opinions. They are judgments from produced filmmakers, working agents, and contest judges who read the full script.
"This world has never been shown — and it deserves to be."
"You made me feel something deeply, and that's hard to do."
"I'd go see this movie without hesitation."
Austin Film Festival Pitch Competition Judges · 2025
"This is the kind of voice-driven epic people say they want and rarely get."
Santa Barbara Screenplay Awards · Professional Analysis
"It has the potential to become a landmark film — poetic, political, and unforgettable."
Judge ML, PAGE International Screenwriting Awards
"The Indigenous background feels completely authentic and respectfully drawn."
Story Analyst, Major Agency · Stage 32 Coverage
"This reads like a writer who knows exactly what they are doing and why."
Santa Barbara Screenplay Awards · Professional Analysis
The recognition is settled. The film isn't made yet. That belongs to whoever moves first.
Tobi Iverson is a Tsimshian, Nisga'a screenwriter and cultural producer — and the great-great-granddaughter of Arthur Wellington Clah, the only known Indigenous diarist of the 1862 Northwest Coast smallpox epidemic.
She did not come to this story secondhand. Iverson holds a degree in Anthropology and American Indian Studies from the University of Washington and served as a National Park Service ranger at Sitka National Historical Park. For years she has studied the history, mythology, and material culture of the Northwest Coast — handling pre-contact objects in the Bill Holm Center archives at the Burke Museum, and traveling to London to read Clah's original journals at the Wellcome Collection, which has held them for over a century.
Her professional background is operational as much as creative. For two decennial censuses she led federal partnership and outreach programs in the Pacific Northwest. In 2010 she directed the American Indian and Alaska Native program across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska — conducting formal government-to-government relations with the twenty-nine federally recognized tribes of Washington and tribal nations across the region. In 2020 she led Washington State's partnership program, the cycle in which Washington recorded the nation's second-highest self-response rate. Earlier, she worked inside tribal government at Warm Springs, in roles reaching the office of the Secretary-Treasurer.
Clah's journals — a public historical record for more than a hundred years — are the source and inspiration for this screenplay: an original work of fiction Iverson wrote, drawing on her own research, scholarship, and lifelong connection to this world.
She is an Artist Trust Fellow (2026) and is represented by entertainment counsel Caitlin DiMotta of Troy Gould PC.
The training to understand this world. The craft to bring it to the screen.
What it needs now is a partner.
This story is carried, not claimed.
Iverson writes from inside a living culture — one she loves, has studied, and shares with the community still carrying it forward. Her work is shaped by the artists, the ceremony holders, the knowledge keepers, and the people who hold this world today. She does not stand above that world. She stands within it, in unison with the people who keep it.
What she brings is not sole authority. It is devotion — the same love for this history and culture that her community carries, turned toward the screen so the world can feel it too.
That is what makes the work true. And it is what no production can manufacture from the outside: a story told with its people, not about them.
Sixty-nine volumes. Fifty years. 650,000 words in his second language. The missionary came to teach him English. Clah taught the missionary his own tongue right back.
A bishop came to his tent once, ready to pity a poor Indian. Found a stove. A made bed. A desk. White loaves cooling, because it was Saturday. The bishop left rattled. He'd expected less of a man.
Clah couldn't stay still. Three thousand seven hundred miles in a single year — canoe, foot, river, mountain — home barely a hundred days. Not for money. He wanted to see his world while it was still his world. So he went, and he wrote down what he saw.
January. The Skeena. The canoe went over. Ice an inch thick. Half an hour in the water. "My live lost very soon," he wrote — certain he was dying, talking to God in the cold. He didn't drown. He noted the date and kept going.
Then smallpox came to Fort Simpson, 1862 — the heart of this film. Clah counted his own dead. 363 Tsimshian. 266 at Fort Simpson alone. Every name. Every number. By hand.
And across every journal, for fifty years, he wrote the same vow. His name. His tribe. His reason: 'writed by him to let all new people know about old People.' Again and again. Year after year. He wrote so they couldn't be erased. In one entry — June 6, 1904 — he records a birth: Tobi's own grandfather.
When Tobi held those pages in London, she knew she had to finish.
Currently entertaining inquiries from qualified Producers, Directors, and Financiers.