Jennifer Geens
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 12/04) - It's puppets galore this weekend at the Snow King's castle.

But before the Royal Puppet Theatre Company presents this year's puppet show Saturday and Sunday, the weekend begins with the Yellowknife premiere of a film about giant puppets called "It's Larger than Life" tonight.

The eight minute documentary about last year's Open Sky Festival in Fort Simpson is part of Western Arctic Moving Picture's fourth annual Frozen Dog Film Festival. (Note to the SPCA: no dogs will be frozen at the festival -- the name came from the founders of the Dog Island Film Society.) The show starts at the snow castle at 8 p.m.

Last year at the Open Sky Festival, Odette Laramee of Nanaimo, B.C., came North to help the 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.

Photographer and now film maker Tracy Kovalench was working at the festival in Fort Simpson and she shot eight or nine hours of footage of the giant puppet project.

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

She 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.

But "It's Larger Than Life" is about more than just the curiosity of giant puppets. 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.

In the play, 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.

Also premiering at the film festival will be a music video for a song from Jesse James' album Father, directed by James. The rest of the line-up includes Yellowknife-made shorts, though there might be one or two from the south.

"It's some old, some new, and some stuff thrown in just for the fun of it," said Paul Gordon of WAMP. "There might even be an excerpt from Baghdad or Bust (Gordon, Matt Frame and Adam Bowick's humorous documentary about the war in Iraq)."

Also on the bill will be some footage Diane Boudreau shot in past years of previous snow castles, all projected onto a wall of snow.

"It's a unique event," said Gordon. "This doesn't happen in too many places."

Though the show is only about an hour and a half long, the Snow King recommends dressing very warmly and bringing a blanket. There will be insulated seating available (i.e. pieces of styrofoam) and some benches.