Production of Light
Credit: Juliette Turcot

Winner of the Best Composer Award at the Venice Shorts Film Festival, 2023.

Winner of the Best Composer Award at the Cannes Arts Film Fest, 2023.

Light is a hybrid opera-film adaptation of Klara du Plessis’ narrative long poem, Hell Light Flesh (Palimpsest Press, 2020). It is produced and composed as opera by Jimmie LeBlanc and directed as film by Michael Hidetoshi Mori. This interdisciplinary work hinges thematically on a legacy of violence within the home space, one which is distinguished from, overlaps, and frays with the oasis and pleasure of artmaking. While it explores stereotypical hardness and lack of affect associated with “masculinity” by speaking through the disciplinary relationship of a father and son, it more fully augments the roles of mother and daughter as being both complicit through evasion in this structure of violence and struggling to extricate themselves from it through the dynamic alternative of creative expression. As such, Light also includes strands of intimacy and belonging. Light develops a psychological web between past and present. Its narrative is detailed through the memory and perception of the daughter as an adult writer figure. Significantly, both mother and adult daughter are enacted by soprano Xin Wang, embodying the interconnection between characters and their contextual interrelation. Guitar: Rob MacDonald. Director of photography: Xavier Madore.

Premiered at the International Festival of Films on Art (FiFA), Montreal, 15 March 2023