Fiddelity Chosen for Montreal Independent Film Fesitval

I am honoured that my first film, Fiddelity, was jury selected for the Montreal Independent Film Festival. I received notification today, November 7, 2020. Fiddelity, was originally to be performed as a one-hour, on-stage monologue this past spring (2020). However, the covid restrictions on live performances put an end (temporarily one hopes) to that plan. I then decided to produce the play as an audio play and created my first podcast. This received favourable reviews. Over the past summer, when hopes of performing the play live remained unrealized, the play grew. It is the story of a fiddle and the lives it affected over several generations of one Cape Breton Island family's life.

 What had been a one-hour monologue became a one and a half hour "chorus of monologues" with three of the characters featured in the original script expressing their own voices on the play's events. I conducted a workshop with three actors in my home village of Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia to see if the expanded script worked. It did.

It was suggested to me that the play would make an excellent stage to screen project. I had never made a feature film before; but he took up the challenge.

The film is more "no budget" than "low budget. I estimate that the project has cost me about $250 out-of-pocket. It is filmed with very basic equipment. But one thing I have learned after going to Cuba for more than thirty years, is that if one wants to do something creative or functional, but lacks the materials or money to do it, one can still do it. The Cubans are masters of "make-do" with what one has. They are masters of imagination and creativity.

I worked as a professional actor through the 1970s. However, I went off to law school at the age of thirty-two in the early 1980's and with few exceptions stopped performing - on stage at least. When I retired in 2015, I returned to my first love of theatre. I decided to perform challenging monologues, initially by Alan Bennett and Micheal macLiamoire. This was in part to keep an ageing mind active and vital and also for the purpose of raising money for various charitable and non-profit causes. 

Monologues were something that could travel easily and inexpensively. I performed in England, Ontario and Nova Scotia. When finding new scripts that suited me became increasingly difficult, I undertook to write one. The Lace was performed in several locations in Nova Scotia and received favourable reviews from these audiences. Fiddelity is my second recent monologue. (I had written and performed another in 1990 as a benefit for a fledgling AIDS organization.) 

After surviving cancer at the age of fifty, my motto is Seize the Day. One is never too old to undertake new challenges. And life is too short and unpredictable to ignore them.