The Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative is delighted to invite you to this amazing storytellers event, co-presented by writer and filmmaker Kelly-Anne Riess.
Selected local writers, poets and filmmakers unite to present their latest work and share ideas on their craft.
Featured Poets for tonight are Dave Margoshes and Kathleen Wall, with featured Filmmaker: Chrystene Ells.
It is the first public screening of Ells’ film, Sisu, to be held in Saskatchewan.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
7:00pm until 10:00pm
Sisu: the death of Tom Sukanen synopsis:
On a spring morning in 1943, a Finnish shipwright wakens from deep, strange dreams in a mental hospital in North Battleford. Thus begins the final 24 hours in the life of Tom Sukanen, institutionalized after spending a decade building a ship on his prairie farm. Hovering in the dreamlike world between this life and the next, Sukanen watches his life play out on the white walls of his room, and leaves his bed to travel back in time through dusty memories. Layering surreal imagery, animation and special effects over live action footage, Sisu projects Sukanen’s poetic passion onto the stark landscape of the Depression-era Canadian prairies.
Chrystene Ells Bio:
Chrystene spent nearly 20 years working as a traditional special effects artist, fabricating creatures, models, and stop motion puppets for George Lucas’ ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) and on films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas. In 2006, Chrystene left California to go for broke in delving into her dream film project: Sisu – the death of Tom Sukanen (2009), a feature film based on a true Depression-era story set in Saskatchewan. She and her husband Raul moved to Regina, where Chrystene researched Sukanen and his world, meeting people who had known him and studying prairie culture and mythologies, completing the film on a shoestring over a three-year period. Chrystene and Raul are in the process of immigrating to Canada, and live in Regina with their two cattle dogs.
The evening will also feature new poetry from Kathleen Wall and Dave Margoshes.
Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer living in Regina whose work has been widely published in magazines, anthologies and in over a dozen books. A new book of poetry, The Horse Knows the Way, was published in 2009; another will be out in the spring.
Kathleen Wall is an award-winning professor in the English Department at the University of Regina, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction, and creative writing. She is the author of two books of poetry, Without Benefit of Words (Turnstone 1991) and Time’s Body (Hagios 2005), as well as a book of literary criticism. Her novel, Blue Duets, published by Brindle & Glass, will come out in the fall. She is working on a study of Virginia Woolf and on a second novel, whose working title is Soul Weather.
Audience members will have a chance to talk to the artists at a closing reception.
Admission is free, but donations are welcome at the door.
For details or to arrange an interview with one or more of the artists involved with A Night of Poetry and Film please contact the Filmpool.
