Covid was as hard on artists as on any other group, yet many managed to continue their work despite the limitations imposed by the pandemic.
This was the case for Louise Abbott, one of the area’s best-known artists, who has recently made two films that will likely be of interest to Townshippers.
While the two films share similarities—both are documentaries that run less than half an hour and list some of the same names in the credits (Vito DeFilippo and Niels Jensen)—they are quite different in subject matter.
The Sugarmakers traces a century-old, springtime ritual on the Holmes family farm in Way’s Mills. Erin Holmes and her older brother, Stanley Holmes Jr., provide the narrative voices that take the viewer through the labour-intensive, two-month period that results in the creation of one of the very rare foods that is both healthy and sweet—maple sugar.
It was the siblings’ great-grandfather who bought the farm in 1897 and continued a sugaring operation that was already established. The Holmes family now tap some 10 000 sugar maples and use both pipeline and buckets to collect sap, each method having its advantages and disadvantages.
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