Shut Up And Say Something (ALFF Opening Gala)

This screening took place on Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 6:30 pmYukon Arts Centre

Shut Up And Say Something (86 minutes) + Dear Hatetts (6 minutes) Internationally acclaimed spoken word artist Shane Koyczan gives a poignant and powerful voice to the inaudible and the imperceptible: the bullied, the awkward, the visibly different. In her entrancing and engrossing documentary, Melanie Wood reveals a conflicted man. Working with Shane’s longtime friend and collaborator, filmmaker Stuart Gillies, Wood brings us an intimate and honest portrait of the man who rocked the opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics with the mind-blowing poem "We Are More (Define Canada)." With lucid candour, Yellowknife-born, Penticton-based Koyczan allows us to join him on a deeply personal and momentous journey to finally meet his long-estranged father. The result is his most important and most difficult poem yet; an ode to the parent he never, and yet always, had. Shane Koyczan and Len Koyczan in attendance along with director, Melanie Wood and executive producer, Murray Battle. The film will be preceded by Yukoner Kerry Barber's short documentary, Dear Hatetts, a personal account of a relationship torn apart by a suspected lie. Told in the form of a letter to a family, it is accompanied by documentary images from the filmmaker’s life. Opening remarks by: Mr. Claude Joli-Coeur, Government of Canada Film Commissioner and Chairperson of the NFB; Nils Clarke, Yukon Government MLA and speaker of the Yukon legislative assembly; Nathalie Clermont, Director of Program Management, Canada Media Fund; Murray Battle, Executive Producer with Knowledge Network

Shut Up And Say Something - Trailer from Stranger Productions on Vimeo.