In January 2010 I put on the Winnipeg Premiere of Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s black metal doc Until the Light Takes Us – outdoors, on a screen made of snow.
The local paper interviewed me about the screening at the time, and here are few quips from that:
“There is a thin line between fearsome and laughable. I’ve seen pictures of Satyricon and Nattefrost members that would give me nightmares, but then I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen a publicity photo of Immortal where one of them has their fly down,” Janisse remarks.
To keep the Canadian premiere suitably grim and hopeless, Janisse has arranged this unique dead-of-winter screening, with plans to project the film onto a huge frozen slab.
“The snow screen is being painstakingly created by Ricardo Alms, Andrea Roberts and some unexpected support from the city,” she says. “It’s a crazy setup, logistically. The snow screen will be in the [Lo Pub’s] courtyard and there will be some seating but if people have camping chairs it might be a good idea to bring ’em.”
Ricardo Alms built the wooden frame that we would pack the snow into in order to let it set over the course of a week and hopefully harden into a suitable screen. But the snow itself came from the City – sure, there is a ton of snow in Winnipeg for about 8 months out of the year, but in this case the Film Commissioner Kenny Boyce arranged for us to get the freshest snow possible delivered by a snow plough first thing in the morning, so that our screen wouldn’t have any dirt or leaves in it. Once the screen was set, Ricardo took the frame off and Andrea got to work carving out the film title across the top.
