Rae Spoon finds Sundance solace

PARK CITY, UTAH — “They’ve been open to my pronoun,” says Rae Spoon, summing up the love and tolerance they’ve been receiving since arriving at the Sundance Film Festival with My Prairie Home, the only Canadian film in feature competition here in Park City.

Spoon uses the pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she,” which often spirals into a grammatical debate, but so far so good, they say: “There haven’t been any grammar discussions yet.” Moreover, the overall reception of the National Film Board documentary about Spoon, directed by Chelsea McMullan, has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Not only did the movie land a spot in Sundance senior programmer Caroline Libresco’s top five picks of the festival, Spoon also landed a slot in the prestigious musical component of the festival, the ASCAP café.

“There was a lot of embracing,” says Spoon, sitting down for a chat before sound check. “For a long time, it felt like there wasn’t really room for me in the mainstream, so this all feels pretty good.”

Because Spoon refuses to put themselves in a gender box, life has always been something of a challenge. But as McMullan shows us in her “musical documentary” about the Alberta-raised, Montreal-based singer-songwriter, they found solace as well as community through art.

A musician, writer and performance artist who not only wrote original songs for the documentary, they wrote a book of memoirs as part of the process as well. They say the memoirs, the movie and the forthcoming collaboration with Vancouver writer Ivan Coyote called Gender Failure have all gone a long way toward building a new sense of purpose as well as artistic freedom.

My Prairie Home is competing in the world documentary program at the Sundance Film Festival, which runs to Sunday.