Do you know people so incredibly smart and creative that, every once in a while, you do a double-take and think, “Holy crap, I can’t believe this is someone I wave to on the street?”

Louise Moyes is one of those people for me. Seriously, she combines dance and documentary filmmaking (what?) to create these rich, beautiful shows about women and feminism and life and love (WHAT?).

She’s amazing. And brilliant. And it’s always enlightening to talk to her.

Lucky for me, there’s a good reason to interview her: Moyes has a new show opening at the Hall on March 6th called Moore-Gallant: A Docudance. She acts out a short story by Lisa Moore, via dance and storytelling, and then she uses three shorts films and dance to tell one of Mavis Gallant’s short stories.

She’s also going to donate proceeds from her opening night performance to the RBC Michelle Jackson Emerging Filmmaker Award. Jackie Hynes, this year’s RBC MJAward winner, will read from her script before the performance starts. Moyes also has Elisabeth de Mariaffi reading on the 7th, Sara Tilley reading on the 8th, and Wanda Nolan reading on the 9th.

I caught up with Louise to hear more.

How is all the preparation for your show going?
It’s going well, I’m at the point now that I’m really looking forward to getting in the theatre because then that conversation happens with the audience. I’m working with several different directors and outside eyes and that is a delicious relationship, but I’m looking forward to telling stories.

I just read an article about Mavis Gallant in the New Yorker, where they printed excerpts from her diary from when she was living in Paris and had no money and was so hungry, waiting desperately for this cheque to arrive from having one of her stories published.
Yeah, she was a pre-feminist feminist, she was a journalist in Montreal and she wrote short stories and she said I’m moving to Paris and I’m going to starve if I have to. She was literally starving.

She was, yeah!
And she had one of her stories published in the New Yorker and her agent had been trying to hide the fact that she’d been published and the money. So, and apparently, she has lived from her writing ever since and been the most published woman of any genre in the New Yorker.

And that’s an impressive feat.
Isn’t it?

How did you get into her?
You know, the book I have, I got at Afterwords for two dollars a long time ago.

Note the importance of the independent used book store, everybody.
[laughing] And I did English Lit at University, Canadian Lit with Noreen [Golfman]. And I was having an interesting chat with Noreen a few weeks ago and she was saying that as a young prof, it was challenging to try to present Mavis because she is so complex. We were talking about how she is so good at portraying, in very subtle ways, self deception. As a younger person, when I was 19 or 20 reading the stories, I didn’t know what self deception was, I was trying to understand myself. Now that I’ve been reading her for over 20 years, and the emotional layers of her stories become more and more revealed to me as I get older, I don’t think I understand her fully yet. But this project helps me understand her more.

Why do you think self deception in particular intrigued you?
It’s not a topic I often deal with in my shows, I tend to focus on the light and people actually gaining self-knowledge, I think. So, it’s a darker look at humans than I often take. I think we want to understand the light and the dark. And she’s got a good sense of humour about it, too. That is a lovely thing about her, is that while her characters aren’t always aware of everything she’s revealing about them, she does it with a sense of humour.

So how do you express all this through dance? How do you express Mavis and self deception and her humour through dance?

This is both dance and theatre. This story is a love triangle and it’s a series of four short stories that are connected. This man is in love with two very different women, one very exotic and very voluptuous, the other quite prim and conservative, but both equally passionate in their way. So I play the prim wife on stage, and Lisa Porter is the other woman. [Lisa Porter is shown in three short films, directed by Moyes and shot by Paul Pope. - ed]

Some sections are overt theatre where I play a character; I play the man on stage, in a theatrical way.

I would say, for the dance — I think it’s the movement that really helps me get to the layers of emotion and the self deception, it’s the body language, it’s the things that aren’t said.

Can you tell me a bit about those movements?
We set it up so that there is a prelude where I do Juliette’s Dance — she is the prim wife — to music by Duane Andrews. His music is throughout the piece, he was natural partner to work with on the composition side because his music is half Parisian. We’re working with some of the pieces he has already made and the kernel of the story he scored like a film score, so he put in sound effects and also music. And one of the pieces he had already made, called D.D.’s Blues, we use as a prologue. So, we see the movement and the emotion of Juliette and then those movements are repeated in the story and are familiar to the audience — that is the hope, anyway, that they will connect and say ‘Oh, I saw that movement before, and that’s what this movement means now.’” That they’ll connect the movement and the word.

Okay, so this is an exploration of Gallant’s work and also of Lisa Moore? How does she fit in?
I had read a story of Lisa Moore’s in a magazine that reminded me of Mavis Gallant’s work. And I had known for a while that I wanted to work with Mavis Gallant’s story, but that I needed something to balance it, and one afternoon I was in studio rehearsing to some Parisian-style music and the idea just balanced it, it was like the right hand and the left hand. I asked Lisa and she was thrilled — I hadn’t realized that Mavis is her short story heroine and when Lisa teaches writing at MUN, she works with Mavis as an example of superior short story writing style, and that she defended Mavis Gallant in Canada Reads. And Gallant has actually written to Lisa, through her agent, to say that she admired her work.

Wow!
Yeah, that was a really nice full circle.

So, I left a message for Lisa and she called me back, laughing, saying you won’t believe, but the Walrus magazine just phoned me and said they were reprinting a verbatim conversation from Canada Reads, which is people of all different backgrounds, and apparently there was one fella on the jury who was saying that he couldn’t read Mavis Gallant because she is too old-fashioned. Lisa said she lept across the table and pointed at him and said, “You are a lazy reader!” And the Walrus thought it was a wonderful thing, and reprinted it. So it was a lot of great happenstance.

So, when all the funding was in place, she and I met in my kitchen and she gave me a brand new story and she said, ‘I think this is a really good visual story to work with.’ And it is, I’m so happy to work with it. It’s layered in a different way than the Gallant is, this one is more layered in its ideas. It’s about a gorilla escaping from a zoo and it’s about when man and animal meet. It’s also about self deception, and there are some interesting ideas about the character’s place in the world. There are philosophical ideas, there’s biological study and there’s the emotional life of this main character, Harry.

Do you do the Gallant story first?
No, I do the Lisa Moore story first, because it’s a shorter presentation and it’s more focused. It’s really sculptural, it’s just one pool of light, and me — it’s a lot of limbs and legs, and a fake fur coat and piece of plexiglass. I learned the whole story verbatim and I’m telling the whole story, kind of like contemporary story telling.

Is there a film accompanying this one?
Nope, just a little bit of music. I think it will be a complete contrast in a satisfying way.

The evening will open with a writer, so that will set the tone of the evening. As you know, the Michelle Jackson night, March 6, Jackie Hynes will read from her screenplay, and short story writers will read on the other nights.

Tell me a bit about why you decided to donate to the RBC Michelle Jackson Emerging Filmmaker Award.
Michelle made a short film for a show that I do called Florence, and I had been doing this show this spring, so Michelle has been with me. And I love the community aspect of performing, I’m a solo performer but I’m very social and also we come from a community that does work interdisciplinarily and works together, so because there’s film in the show, too, I wanted to embrace the film community in some way and I think the award is a very important award.

Moore-Gallant: A Docudance opens on March 6th at the LSPU Hall and runs until March 9th. Tickets are available at the RCA Box Office or at the Hall.

People of a Feather will be at Empire Theatres at the Avalon Mall for one extra screening on January 17th, at 7 p.m. Don’t miss this doc!

Cross posted from The Signal blog:

Friends, there’s one other thing you should do before this storm hits: go see People of a Feather.

It’s incredible. And it’s only playing at the mall until tomorrow night.

Inspired by films like Baraka and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, People of a Feather says more with images and sound than it does with words. It’s a documentary about the Inuit of the Belcher Islands, near James Bay, and their relationship with the eider duck. Save for narration here and there, there aren’t any formal interviews or talking heads in the film; if there are voices at all, they arise through conversation and action.

But mostly, you’re pulled through a compelling narrative by time-lapse images of the Arctic. It’s an impressive accomplishment.

Eider ducks live up in Hudson Bay all year round. They mostly hang out in big gashes in the sea ice, diving down to the bottom of the ocean to grab sea urchins, which they eat. Whole. In one swallow.

Shown through (strictly non-cheesy) re-enactments, the Inuit of 100 years ago used the ducks for food and clothes — they made soft, warm jackets from the feathers to keep them warm when they hunted seal. Today, they still eat the ducks and use their down to stuff jackets. But today, the ducks aren’t as healthy or as plentiful.

That’s mostly because of hydroelectric power — specifically, a series of hydroelectric dams belonging to Quebec near the James Bay watershed. In the winter, when people in Quebec are cranking up the heat and requiring more power, the dams open up and warm fresh water gushes out, seeping out onto the sea ice. That water freezes quickly, and it freezes over the big gaps in the sea ice. The ducks wind up piling into tiny cracks, and having to dive farther and farther out to find urchins.

In one gut-wrenching underwater scene, we see a duck desperately trying to poke its head back up through ice to get some air. Exhausted, it finally dies.

The director, Joel Heath, is now working with the Arctic Eider Society to encourage the decision-makers behind Muskrat Falls to look at incorporating hydrogen fuel technology into the project. Iceland, for example, captures power at hydroelectric dams and converts it to hydrogen fuel, stored in cells. Those cells then fuel Iceland’s cargo ships.

Heath is originally from St. John’s, and he was up there doing research for his PhD on the eider ducks and the sea ice. A long-time photographer, he built a special underwater camera to take footage of the ducks diving for urchin, which the BBC wound up using. He’s been working on the doc for almost ten years and it’s paid off: it screened at HotDocs, and has won major awards for direction and cinematography.

I caught up with Heath yesterday to talk about the film. Sadly, my recorder died today (R.I.P., little guy) and I only had a small part of our conversation transcribed. Here it is, though — Joel Heath on Idle No More:

With Idle No More happening, it’s really crazy seeing underneath the layers of people’s perspectives on First Nations. So, I think it’s really important to show, as the film shows, that their culture being alive and that they have an economy and they’re living off the land, and the resources around them are really important. To show that they’re not all just drunks and staying home, they’re out there bringing back food to the community, and it’s local free-range organic food. They’re living sustainably, and we have a lot to learn about being local and sustainable from these communities, and actually having an economy that’s linked to our local resources. And their innovation, they’re such amazing craftsmen. In the film, you see them making harpoon heads, making rope out of seal — their skills are so amazing, and they’re still alive and well.

I imagine you’re pretty close with a lot of the Inuit people in your film after working with them for so long. How do they feel about Idle No More? From my perspective, it seems like it could be revolutionary, and really bring about a lot of change. Do they feel that way?

I think so. There has been some good coverage, they’re really getting the word out, but the amazing thing has been all the ignorant and racist comments coming back on everything. But that shows how people in Canada just really don’t have any idea about what’s going on. So that’s why I think it’s really important to get a film like this out there, and show the other side, because people only see the bad news.

Here‘s a link to an article in The Telegram with more information and here is the Facebook event page for the St. John’s screenings.

We sure had some gorgeous guests at our Opening Night screening of Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, including Mehta herself. Luckily, David Howells was there to capture it all. Here are just some of his pictures. We’ve posted a lot more on our Facebook page.

Shannon Nering, producer of The Real Housewives of Vancouver and author of the book and the blog Reality Jane, sat down with Nancy Franklin, Margot Daly and Angela Antle to discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of reality TV. Here are the tweets from that conversation.

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Rina Fraticelli from Women in View unveiled her first annual report looking at the representation of women and visible minorities in Canadian feature films at the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival on October 18th, 2012. The report was followed by a panel discussion with Jordan Canning, Barbara Doran, Susan Alexander, Kay Armitage and Rina Fraticelli.

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On Monday, October 15th and Tuesday, October 16th, Anita Ondine will be at the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival offering a two-day workshop in transmedia storytelling. Sarah Smellie will be live tweeting it.

Here are the tweets from Day One:

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Fresh in our hands after a hugely successful run at Hot Docs and Tribeca, The World Before Her follows a girl training to become a Hindu fundamentalist and a girl training to become the next Miss India.

Here’s a great quote from an article about this startling film in the Gulf News:

“On the surface, the worlds of a Miss India hopeful and an aggressive Hindu fundamentalist militant are radically different. While contestant Ruhi from a small town in Jaipur is vying for the Miss India World crown, there’s the tomboyish twenty-something Prachi teaching young Hindu girls to hate girls like Ruhi. But after 90 minutes of Nisha Pahuja’s documentary, The World Before Her, you may change your perception.”

This multi-award-winning documentary screens on Thursday, October 18th, at the LSPU Hall, at 9:30 p.m.

Here is Noreen Golfman’s write-up:

After screening in Hot Docs and Tribeca, this smart feature film graces our screen with a compelling look at the rapidly changing faces of women in India. The filmmaker focuses on two parallel universes, one in which twenty hand-picked contestants for the Miss India pageant go to beauty boot camp and another in which young women attend a military camp for fundamentalist Hindus. Implicitly, one wants to ask—which of these, if either, is more empowering? This intimate, fascinating exploration of these two worlds generates many more questions about the clash of old and emerging values, of Eastern and Western cultures, and of patriarchal and modern practices. These oppositional tensions are current and inevitable. Change is definitely in the air, though, and women are seeking ways to express and assert themselves throughout India. We are fortunate that Pahuja is able to take us deep into the corners of the country to see where and how such passages to India are forming.

Oscar nominated Deepa Metha is the director of 11 feature length films including this year’s SJIWFF festival opener “Midnight’s Children.” Metha has won Genie Awards, the Cannes Camera D’Or, a Hugo Award and others. She’s also Salman Rushdie’s new BFF. Join the founder of the St, John’s Women’s Film Festival Noreen Golfman as she interviews Deepa Metha about the challenges of making films. Lunc is provided by the Indian community. Tickets are $20.

MEET THE FILMMAKER LUNCHEON with Deepa Mehta – Wednesday, October 17th, Masonic Temple – 12pm – 2 pm

Email forum@womensfilmfestival.comto reserve your spot.

It’s a funny thing about documentaries: the more mundane the subject is, the more unusual and intriguing the documentary winds up being. Like Helvetica, the documentary about, well, Helvetica. The font.

In that same tradition, Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo is about indigo. And it’s fascinating — certainly one of the best docs we received this year.

Blue Alchemy, directed by Mary Lance, is screening at the Quidi Vidi Village Plantation on Wednesday, October 17th at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 and available at the venue.

Noreen Golfman’s write-up about the film follows the trailer.

We fell in love with the sensuous feature doc about indigo, the time-honoured blue dye that connects cultures and people across the globe. This gorgeously shot doc draws you deep into the impressive history of indigo while reinforcing its undisputed symbolic and spiritual function in almost all of our lives, whether we realize it or not. The film also answers a question you probably never thought to ask: why are our jeans blue? Today, as the film shows, indigo is part of an ambitious cultural project, as communities aim to revive its function as a significant element of social economy. Anyone who owns denim needs to see this beautiful example of just how extraordinarily meaningful colour is to human civilization.