a documentary film about people and a place

 

TCFF Streams features Love Letter to Leader

    

_{Mara Adamitz Scrupe wins Mozaik Philanthropy (Los Angeles)}

_{EcosystemX Future Art Award for Love Letter to Leader} 

   

Love Letter to Leader, written and co-directed by Mara Adamitz Scrupe and Daniel Jon Holm, is a full length documentary film about land, community, and place, inspired by the filmmaker’s return to her family’s hometown of Leader, Minnesota after living in fast-paced East Coast cities for more than three decades.

Impressed by Leader residents’ inventive self-reliance, Adamitz Scrupe, a visual artist and poet, began by writing about the experience of coming home; the resulting poem, titled Up North, became the film’s introductory sequence. From an opening poetry and image pastiche that is both elegiac and illustrative, the film proceeds to explore the Leader community, revealing the many social, political and economic pressures on rural people over the past century to the present day.

Set in a tiny northern Minnesota town, Love Letter to Leader follows the filmmaker’s extended farm family from its 19th-century immigrant beginnings, focusing on choices to leave this once-prosperous place alongside decisions to stay and create a close-knit if quirky and unconventional community. Against the backdrop of its own rich history, the people of Leader, Minnesota, define themselves through their abiding links to the land.

Love Letter to Leader is prescient in its exploration of a community dedicated to living on and from its own resources. In COVID times, as many of us are seriously reconsidering where and how we live – whether in a city or in the country, whether as consumers or contributors to the stewardship of our natural environment – the people of agrarian communities like Leader, Minnesota, are at the forefront of reinventing a way of life that is slower, greener, and wholeheartedly committed to responsibly living on the land.

Defined by its very ambiguity, the Love Letter to Leader never preaches but encourages audiences to draw their own conclusions about the many ways people live today, and the variety of intriguing relationships rural communities are forging with place, land and nature in a time when all humans are rethinking how we abide on our planet in the face of ecological and social challenges – firestorms in California and international environmental migration to name just two examples – brought on by climate change.

Love Letter to Leader also subtly but insistently allays unflattering assumptions sometimes made about why people live removed from the bustle of urban centers – cities offering opportunities for more affluent lifestyles – choosing instead to focus their time and energies not on accruing wealth and position but instead on supporting local families and building communities. Likewise, the film personifies diversity without sermonizing, from the broad ethnic background of its immigrant past to the original people who have always been at the heart of all life in the cold country of northernmost North America.

The film’s soundtrack, composed of an innovative medley of folk music from several ethnic and cultural traditions of the region including Eastern and Central European, Scandinavian, and Ojibwa, is performed by contemporary musicians – including the filmmaker on accordion – as well as featured performers from historic Alan Lomax sessions.