**Join us for the Toronto premiere of Sundance-selected MY PRAIRIE HOME featuring a special performance by Rae Spoon, and a Q&A; with director Chelsea McMullan and producer Lea Marin. This event is co-presented with the National Film Board of Canada, and is organized in collaboration with Inside Out LGBT Film Festival, Egale Canada, Exclaim! and Point of View Magazine. As usual, this screening is BY DONATION & there are no tickets!

MY PRAIRIE HOME

Chelsea McMullan / CA / 2013 / 76 ' / English

A true Canadian iconoclast, acclaimed transgender country/electro-pop artist Rae Spoon revisits the stretches of rural Alberta that once constituted “home” and confronts memories of growing up queer in an abusive, evangelical household. Part travelogue, part character study, Chelsea McMullan’s singular film unfolds in coffee shops, bus stations, bars and recreation centres, with her camera finding odd angles from which to examine these communities that have arisen in the middle of nowhere.

The vérité vignettes and emotional reminiscences frequently cede to fantastical performance sequences in which Spoon gives voice to an impeccably crafted, disarmingly confessional song cycle that represents the culmination of years of rumination and writing (and has been collected on the gorgeous My Prairie Home album released by Saved By Radio). For these reflective compositions, Spoon—who explored more electric avenues on the recent I Can’t Keep All of Our Secrets—fittingly returns to the country/folk influences found on earlier records.

Lyrical and alluring, McMullan’s documentary-musical hybrid calls into question our traditional definition of “home,” and celebrates the places in between, be they in music, geography or gender.

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