Fort Simpson (Mar 22/04) - Giant puppets from Fort Simpson are the focus of a new film.

Photographer and now filmmaker Tracy Kovalench was at the Open Sky Festival in Fort Simpson last year when she shot eight or nine hours of footage of the construction of the puppets for a play.

But "It's Larger Than Life" is about more than just the curiosity of giant puppets and the making of a play. It's about life in a Deh Cho community.

"It's about Fort Simpson, what it's like to come of age as a Dene woman," said Kovalench.

Artist Odette Laramee of Nanaimo, BC, had come to the festival to help the Fort Simpson community create giant puppets for a play about four generations of Dene women. Two puppets were made in the recreation centre, three at the elementary school and one at the high school.

In the play the puppets were part of, a teenage Dene girl gets her first period and her grandmother takes her on a journey through a forest, where the giant puppets appear -- animals such as a fox, a bear, a raven and a fish and two other puppets representing the legacy of residential schools.

Kovalench said the entire Fort Simpson community came together in the course of the play's production.

"We had little girls five years old all the way up to old, old men," she said of the participants in the project.

Kovalench's love affair with the Deh Cho began when she attended a friend's wedding in Fort Simpson in 1997. She returned from July to September of 2002 to capture the region on 35 mm film, and brought "Presence," an exhibit of her photos, back to display at the Deh Cho Friendship Centre last spring, and then again at the Open Sky Festival, with the help of a contribution from the NWT Arts Council.

"It's my first film ever," said Kovalench.

The eight minute documentary was part of Western Arctic Moving Picture's fourth annual Frozen Dog Film Festival in Yellowknife earlier this month. Kovalench also showed the film in Fort Simpson last September.

Kovalench had previously filmed the entire process of preparing a moosehide, all the way from the hunt to the final product, but since she's still working on editing that footage, it will technically be her second movie.