Shut Up and Say Something
Sea to Sky | Youth | BC Spotlight
There are those among us who still tremble at the memory of the school-yard threat: "You die at four." Internationally acclaimed spoken word artist Shane Koyczan gives a poignant and powerful voice to the inaudible and the imperceptible: the bullied, the awkward, the visibly different. In her entrancing and engrossing documentary, Melanie Wood reveals a conflicted man; a bashful alchemist who creates explosive rhetorical fireworks from the stuff of daily life.
Working with Shane’s longtime friend and collaborator, filmmaker Stuart Gillies, Wood brings us an intimate and honest portrait of the man who rocked the opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics with the mind-blowing poem "We Are More (Define Canada)." With lucid candour, Yellowknife-born, Penticton-based Koyczan allows us to join him on a deeply personal and momentous journey to finally meet his long-estranged father. The result is his most important and most difficult poem yet; an ode to the parent he never, and yet always, had. The best indicator that we’re dealing with someone extraordinary is that the more intimate his words are, the more universal the truths they expose become…