A new doc on surviving the ice road pro-wrestling circuit

The Death Tour is a Canadian professional wrestling institution. For pro wrestlers in this country, as well as for wrestling fans, the titular tour — also known by other unofficial nicknames, including the Northern Hell Tour — is the stuff of legend. It's a scramble across remote rural highways and seasonal ice roads to bring the gift of professional wrestling to remote Indigenous communities in Northern Manitoba. 

The tour's various nicknames come from the fact that it is a grueling time. On the tour, the inherent punishment that's part of being a professional wrestler gets compounded by late nights, early mornings, sleeping on gym floors, and long drives across dangerous roads. (Promoter Tony Condello famously had a van fall through an unstable ice road in the 1990s. Fortunately, everyone in the van survived.) 

Directors Stephan Peterson and Sonya Ballantyne spent the entire 2023 tour with the wrestlers in order to produce the documentary The Death Tour, which premiered at this year's Slamdance Film Festival. They can confirm that the pace is relentless.

"The hardest part was just the constant go, go, go of things," says Ballantyne. "It was very overwhelming to constantly be going. All the wrestlers are putting up the ring, and we were going to try to get ahead of them so we could capture it. So even if we weren't wrestling, we felt like we were."

Peterson, a career documentarian, says that before making the documentary, he wasn't a huge wrestling fan, but came across the tour while working on an unrelated project in one of the communities. He was transfixed by both the in-ring performance and the crowd's response, and the more he dug in, the more he felt the need to tell the story.

"I just found myself enthralled by the stories of each of these people I spoke to," he says. "It sounds corny, but I was just really inspired by all these wrestlers. These are people who, like us, are artists or creatives in their own way, who are taking a swing at a career that is not guaranteed. They have a bag by their door at all times, ready to take a call or take a job, at the expense of their love lives, their friendships, any job security. So that really kind of resonated with me."

For Ballantyne, the Death Tour story resonated on a couple of levels. Ballantyne is herself from a Northern Manitoba First Nation — Misipawistik Cree Nation — and is also a life-long pro-wrestling fan. She says that when she joined the project, she wanted to make sure it wasn't just going to be a history of the tour, but about the impact it has on both the wrestlers and the communities it visits. She adds that the story gave her a chance to focus on Indigenous joy, something that is sometimes difficult due to  "our background, and the history of colonialism or whatever."

"Having that amount of joy come from all these indigenous kids on every reserve was incredible," she says.

For wrestlers, a stint on the tour can be a career maker. The list of Death Tour veterans reads like a who's who of Canadian pro-wrestling: Lance Storm, Christian Cage, Adam Copeland, Kenny Omega and Chris Jericho have all done a stint on the Death Tour. The 2023 edition of the tour featured several early-career wrestlers trying to make their mark in the industry, as well as veterans. The two ends of the spectrum are best exemplified by Deztro the Eskimofo, a.k.a. Dez Loreen, an Inuvialuk newbie wrestler from Inuvik, NWT, and Sean "Massive Damage" Dunster, an Edmonton-based veteran who's been a fixture of the prairie indie wrestling scene since the 1990s. Throughout the documentary, you can see the unofficial mentor-mentee relationship blossom between the two.

"Dez runs a wrestling promotion up north, and he's mostly self-taught, from watching videos and stuff like that," says Ballantyne. "I think the tour helped him get a lot more matches under his belt, and he got to learn from somebody who has been training and working in wrestling for almost 30 years. That was worth its weight in gold in terms of becoming a better promoter and a better professional wrestler."

The 2023 edition of the tour featured three Indigenous wrestlers: Loreen, Wavell Starr, and Sage Morin, who wrestles under the name The Matriarch. Ballantyne says that, as an Indigenous wrestling fan, this sort of representation is a big deal. She adds that Morin — who is originally from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, but now lives in Edmonton — particularly resonated with the crowd.

"It was just so cool to have people tell Sage when she was wrestling, how much she looked like them, how much she inspired them," she says. "I don't know if the kids will ever become wrestlers, but it gave them the opportunity to think, like, 'Oh, if this girl can do it, maybe I can as well,' because she's very vocal about being from a rez and all that stuff."

2023 was the 50th edition of the tour, but based on the doc, the appetite for wrestling in these communities is as strong as it ever was. Indeed, in a lot of places, it's become kind of a tradition that unites generations.

"People are like, 'I came to watch wrestling when I was a kid, and I dropped off my kid to go watch it as well,'" says Ballantyne. "One of the people we met in the film, his grandfather was also one of the people who would watch the wrestling, because he loved it. It's a multi-generational thing."