BY KAREN BOSSICK

Learn the lost story of the first wolf pack to repatriate Yellowstone National Park when the Sun Valley Film Festival shows “Mollie’s Pack.”

The film will be shown at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23, at The Argyros in Ketchum. Filmmaker Thomas Winston will field questions following the screening.

The IMAX original documentary film follows Mollie Beattie, the first female director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as she carried the first Canadian-born wolf into the park’s experimental acclimation enclosure on Jan. 12, 1995, when wolves were returned to Yellowstone fifty years after their extirpation.

From that day, Beattie and Alpha Female Wolf No. 5’s lives would be forever connected.

Beattie, whose mother Pat was a longtime Sun Valley resident first in Greenhorn and then at the Twin Bridges Ranch near Copper Basin, shepherded the wolf reintroduction project through tricky political terrain with such tenacity that one of the wolfpacks was named in her honor. The documentary shares the nail-biting process of returning the solves to their natural habitat and explains how essential the animals are to the ecosystem.

Winston is an EMMY-award winning filmmaker and founder of Grizzly Creek Films, an independent production company headquartered in Montana.

He and his team have created several films for The Smithsonian Channel, National Geographic, The History Channel, Amazon and PBS. Among them, “Path of the Panther,” “American Horses, “Chasing Ghosts” and “Epic Yellowstone.”

Tickets are available at https://svffmonthlymovies.eventive.org/schedule/677c5594e589c8e406ef2c4d.