Twenty Years with Wolves: The Last Howl and the Brothers Who Raised Them

In 2004, Alberta wildlife filmmaker Matthew Todd Paproski and his younger brother Troy began raising wolves. What started as a behind-the-scenes look at documentary filmmaking — a first wolf pup for the first season of their television series Wildlife Wranglers — became a twenty-year commitment. The Last Howl, Paproski’s 2025 documentary, is the record of that journey, and it is now streaming in Canada on The Green Channel.

The film is, in The Green Channel catalogue’s words, “an adventure, an exposé, and an empowering heartfelt message about the bonds of family, by blood or by choice.” That description holds up. The Last Howl works on two levels at once: it is a travelogue about wolf conservation across Canada, and it is a family story about two brothers who have spent twenty years with the animals.

Two brothers on the road

Paproski, who is based in Drumheller, Alberta, where he runs Starland Studios, produces, directs, writes and hosts the film. Troy Paproski, his younger brother and co-host, travels with him. Troy uses a wheelchair, and the film treats that as a fact of the journey rather than its subject — the brothers are on the road together, interviewing experts, visiting sanctuaries and communities, and the camera follows what they do. Paproski has described the result as “a unique story meshing the importance of both wildlife conservation and inclusiveness of people with disabilities,” and that framing is the film’s own, not a label applied from outside.

The route runs through the places the brothers know best and some they travelled to for the film: the Alberta badlands around Drumheller, Starland County and Kneehill County; Thompson, Manitoba, and the Spirit Way trail there; Rosetown, Saskatchewan; and, in the film’s most outward-looking stretch, Washington, D.C., where the brothers joined a rally at the U.S. Capitol to speak for wolves. The wolves at the centre of it are Aurora, Timber and Willow, with wolf dogs Summer and Bentley alongside them.

What the camera finds

The Last Howl is not a gentle nature film. It is structured as an exposé as much as an adventure, and it spends much of its time with the people who study and manage wolves: mammalian ecologist Dr. Stan Boutin of the University of Alberta; conservation specialist Devon Earl; former Grand Chief Arlen Dumas; and Oswald Sawh of the Thompson Humane Society, among others. The conversations cover wolf culling — including culls carried out in the name of protecting caribou herds — the effects of industrial development on wolf numbers, and the trade in wolf hunt farms.

The film’s position is not hidden: it is an argument for wolves, made by people who have lived with them. But it makes that argument through the experts it interviews rather than through narration alone, and it leaves the policy questions where they belong — with the viewer. That matters, because the film arrives at a moment when wolf policy is actively contested south of the border.

A soundtrack with a story of its own

One of the film’s most talked-about features is its music. Los Lobos’ “Will the Wolf Survive” — a song that has shadowed wolf conservation for decades — is in the film, alongside an unreleased acoustic version of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” and original compositions by Ron Riddle, Blue Öyster Cult’s former drummer. The soundtrack is not decoration; it is part of how the film signals its lineage, connecting a small Alberta production to a much longer cultural conversation about wolves.

The film was previously known as How Will Wolves Survive, a title that still describes its central question. It was made with a largely Alberta crew — editor and co-writer Nicholas Friesen, director of photography David Copithorne — and with support from Alberta film and cultural bodies, filmed on location in Alberta and across Western Canada.

Why it is streaming now

The Last Howl began streaming on The Green Channel in Canada on September 9, 2026, five days after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Interior Department to decide whether gray wolves and Mexican gray wolves should come off the federal endangered species list. Paproski has not treated the timing as a coincidence, and The Green Channel’s own account of the release notes it plainly. But the film was shot in Canada, and it does not settle the policy question; what it offers instead is twenty years of watching wolves closely, presented at the moment the question is loudest.

That timing is also why the film’s festival run matters. The Last Howl had its world premiere at the Calgary Justice Film Festival in 2025, and has since won Best Nature/Wildlife Film and Best Director Documentary Feature at the Cannes World Film Festival, a Special Jury Award at the Los Angeles Film Awards, and a win at the San Diego Independent Cinema Awards.

Where to watch it

The Last Howl is streaming now in Canada on The Green Channel. For viewers who know wolves mainly from headlines about culls and delisting, it is a useful corrective: a film that spends its time with the animals and the people who live alongside them, made by a filmmaker who has done exactly that for twenty years. The howl of the title is, in the end, the sound the brothers have been listening to since 2004 — and the film’s argument is that it is worth hearing out.

Watch on The Green Channel

• The Last Howl

Sources

1. The Green Channel catalogue: The Last Howl
2. The Green Channel: The Last Howl, Twenty Years with Wolves, Now Streaming
3. Travel Drumheller: The Last Howl press kit
4. Wildlife Film News, September 2025: The Last Howl wins Special Jury Award

This article was written with the help of AI and submitted through The Green Channel’s AI Publishing programme. Please check the sources listed above.