My Prairie Home (film)

Last updated
My Prairie Home
My Prairie Home poster.jpg
Promotional poster
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Written byChelsea McMullan
Produced byLea Marin
Starring Rae Spoon
Cinematography Maya Bankovic
Derek Howard
Edited byAvril Jacobson
Music byRae Spoon
Production
company
Release date
Running time
77 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

My Prairie Home is a 2013 Canadian documentary film about transgender singer/songwriter Rae Spoon, directed by Chelsea McMullan. It features musical performances and interviews about Spoon's troubled childhood, raised by Pentecostal parents obsessed with the Rapture and an abusive father, as well as Spoon's past experiences with gender dysphoria. The film was shot in the Canadian Prairies, including the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller. My Prairie Home was produced by Lea Marin for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). [1] [2] [3] [4]

Contents

McMullan has said she first found out about Spoon around 2007, when she was making a western-themed NFB film set in the B.C. Interior. She was searching for "subversive" country-folk soundtrack music when someone suggested Spoon. [5] According to Spoon, the idea for the documentary came out of a discussion with McMullan in 2010 about the musician's perceived lack of marketability, a criticism Spoon sometimes receives when applying for music video funding. [2]

Spoon has stated that it had initially been difficult for to open up so much about personal details, so McMullan suggested writing it down before they talked. Spoon did so, and ended up writing the book First Spring Grass Fire, which was published in the fall of 2012. [4] The book was a nominee for the 2013 Lambda Literary Awards in the Transgender Fiction category, [6] and Spoon was awarded an Honour of Distinction from the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers in 2014. [7]

Release

My Prairie Home premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in September 2013 and began a Canadian theatrical run in November of that same year. [2] The documentary debuted in the US at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. [8] During its Sundance run, the National Film Board also made the film available for free streaming to Canadian audiences. [9]

The film was a shortlisted nominee for the Canadian Screen Award for Best Feature Length Documentary at the 2nd Canadian Screen Awards. [10]

The film was accompanied by a soundtrack album, also titled My Prairie Home , which was a longlisted nominee for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tanya Tagaq</span> Canadian Inuk throat singer

Tanya Tagaq, also credited as Tagaq, is a Canadian Inuk throat singer, songwriter, novelist, actor, and visual artist from Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq), Nunavut, Canada, on the south coast of Victoria Island.

C.E. "Chris" Gatchalian is a Canadian author who writes in multiple genres. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia to Filipino parents, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from the University of British Columbia. His play Motifs & Repetitions aired on Bravo! (Canada) in 1997 and on the Knowledge in 1998. His other produced plays include Claire, Crossing, Broken and People Like Vince, a play for young audiences about mental health. His latest play, Falling in Time, had its world premiere in Vancouver in November 2011 and was published by Scirocco Drama in 2012. In 2013, he won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, a prize presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an openly LGBT writer. In 2019, his memoir Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man was published by Arsenal Pulp Press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rae Spoon</span> Canadian singer-songwriter

Rae Spoon is a Canadian musician and writer. Their musical style has varied from country to electronic-influenced indie rock and folk punk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zoe Whittall</span> Canadian poet, novelist and TV writer

Zoe Whittall is a Canadian poet, novelist and TV writer. She has published five novels and three poetry collections to date.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivek Shraya</span> Musical artist

Vivek Shraya is a Canadian musician, writer, and visual artist. She is a seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and is considered a Great Canadian Filmmaker of the Future by CBC Arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elisapie</span> Canadian musician

Elisapie Isaac is a Canadian Inuk musician, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker, activist, and actress. She spent her childhood in Salluit, Nunavik, Quebec, and moved to Montreal in 1999 to pursue communication studies in order to become a journalist.

Jeffrey Round is a Canadian writer, director, playwright, publisher, and songwriter, who has encouraged the development of LGBT literature, particularly in Canada. His published work includes literary fiction, plays, poetry and mystery novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Coyote</span> Canadian spoken word performer and writer

Ivan E. Coyote is a Canadian spoken word performer, writer, and LGBT advocate. Coyote has won many accolades for their collections of short stories, novels, and films. They also visit schools to tell stories and give writing workshops. The CBC has called Coyote a "gender-bending author who loves telling stories and performing in front of a live audience." Coyote is non-binary and uses singular they pronouns. Many of Coyote's stories are about gender, identity, and social justice. Coyote currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Farzana Doctor</span> Canadian novelist and social worker

Farzana Doctor is a Canadian novelist and social worker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amber Dawn</span> Canadian writer

Amber Dawn is a Canadian writer, who won the 2012 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kamal Al-Solaylee</span> Canadian journalist (born 1964)

Kamal Al-Solaylee is a Canadian journalist, who published his debut book, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, in 2012. He is currently director of the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at Canada's University of British Columbia.

<i>Highrise</i> (documentary) Multimedia documentary project about life in residential highrises

Highrise is a multi-year, multimedia documentary project about life in residential highrises, directed by Katerina Cizek and produced by Gerry Flahive for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The project, which began in 2009, includes five web documentaries—The Thousandth Tower, Out My Window, One Millionth Tower, A Short History of the Highrise and Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise—as well as more than 20 derivative projects such as public art exhibits and live performances.

Barry Webster is a Canadian writer. Originally from Toronto, Ontario, he is currently based in Montreal, Quebec.

Chelsea McMullan is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, best known for their 2013 film My Prairie Home, a film about transgender musician Rae Spoon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2014 Polaris Music Prize</span>

The 2014 edition of the Canadian Polaris Music Prize was presented on September 22, 2014, at The Carlu event theatre in Toronto, Ontario. Actor Jay Baruchel was the host of the ceremony.

<i>My Prairie Home</i> (album) 2013 studio album by Rae Spoon

My Prairie Home is an album by Canadian singer-songwriter Rae Spoon, released in 2013. Written and recorded as a soundtrack to the documentary film My Prairie Home, the album was a longlisted nominee for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize.

Alex Leslie is a Canadian writer, who won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers from the Writers Trust of Canada in 2015. Leslie's work has won a National Magazine Award, the CBC Literary Award for fiction, the Western Canadian Jewish Book Award and has been shortlisted for the BC Book Prize for fiction and the Kobzar Prize for contributions to Ukrainian Canadian culture, as one of the prize's only Jewish nominees.

Ben Ladouceur is a Canadian writer, whose poetry collection Otter was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry at the 28th Lambda Literary Awards and won the Gerald Lampert Award in 2016.

Leah Horlick is a Canadian poet, who won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender writers in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Whitehead</span> Two spirit poet and novelist

Joshua Whitehead is a Canadian First Nations, two spirit poet and novelist.

References

  1. ↑ Lederman, Marsha (28 September 2013). "My Prairie Home". The Globe and Mail . Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 Gillis, Carla (12–19 September 2013). "A revealing NFB doc and a heartbreakingly honest album explore an artist's roots and embrace new ideas about gender". Now . Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  3. ↑ McSorley, Tim (21 October 2013). "A beautiful, sometimes haunting, home on the prairies: Rae Spoon's My Prairie Home". The Media Coop. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  4. 1 2 Kelly, Brendan (13 December 2013). "Rae Spoon is different by nature, and proud of it". Montreal Gazette . Retrieved 13 December 2013.
  5. ↑ Takeuchi, Craig (27 September 2013). "My Prairie Home director finds a sense of place in Rae Spoon's music". Georgia Straight . Retrieved 13 November 2013.
  6. ↑ "Rae Spoon, Kamal Al-Solaylee among Canadian Lambda nominees" Archived 2014-01-06 at the Wayback Machine . Quill & Quire , March 6, 2013.
  7. ↑ Dayne Ogilvie Prize, Writers' Trust of Canada.
  8. ↑ Shelley, Darrell (4 December 2013). "Rae Spoon My Prairie Home". The Scene Magazine.
  9. ↑ "My Prairie Home at Sundance—and in your living room!". National Film Board, January 23, 2014.
  10. ↑ "Canadian Screen Awards: Orphan Black, Less Than Kind, Enemy nominated". CBC News, January 13, 2014.
  11. ↑ "Polaris Music Prize announces 2014 long list" Archived 2014-07-03 at the Wayback Machine . Aux , June 19, 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.