Keyboard Fantasies

This screening took place on Sunday, February 14, 2021 at 3:30 pmYukon Arts Centre

Half aural-visual history, half DIY European tour-video, this charmed documentary provides a vehicle for Canadian-American musician and newly appointed queer elder, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, to connect with youth across the globe.

As a sci-fi obsessed person living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realised far before its time. Three decades on the musician – now Glenn Copeland – began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare-record collector in Japan, a reissue of Keyboard Fantasies and subsequent plays by Four Tet, Caribou and more, the music had finally found its audience two generations down the line. This compelling character documentary sees the protagonist commit his life and music to screen for the first time - an intimate coming of age story spinning pain and the suffering of prejudice into rhythm, hope and joy.
Dir. Posey Dixon, 2020, UK, 62 min
Top twenty audience favourite, Hot Docs 2020

Screens with:

Madame Dishrags (Dir. Carmen Pollard, 2020, BC, 3 min)

A portrait of The Dishrags who formed in 1977 on Vancouver Island—Western Canada's first all-girl punk band. Part of a series on the history of music in BC produced for Knowledge Network.