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ROPEd
Canada | 2016 | 18 min • narrative short
To Keep The Light
Harkins Sedona 6 - Theatre 2
Sun, Feb 19, 2017 3:10 PM
Inspired by true stories, a lighthouse keeper’s wife struggles with her work and her sanity as she cares for her sick husband in 19th century Maine. When a mysterious stranger washes up on shore, secrets buried in deep waters come to light, and she is forced to confront both her past and her future.
Mining stories of the lives of women lighthouse keepers, "Abbie" is a composite character giving voice to their largely unknown experience. Working in isolation and under extreme conditions, these women — who inherited their jobs from infirm or deceased husbands or fathers — were trailblazers, embodying feminism long before the word existed and far afield from the urban, intellectual circles that spawned the women's rights movement.
Shot off the coast of northern Maine, "To Keep the Light" paints a landscape of stark, aching beauty, and reveals the inner life of a woman who is, literally and figuratively, at the edge of society.
To Keep The Light
Harkins Sedona 6 - Theatre 6
Tue, Feb 21, 2017 9:20 AM
Inspired by true stories, a lighthouse keeper’s wife struggles with her work and her sanity as she cares for her sick husband in 19th century Maine. When a mysterious stranger washes up on shore, secrets buried in deep waters come to light, and she is forced to confront both her past and her future.
Mining stories of the lives of women lighthouse keepers, "Abbie" is a composite character giving voice to their largely unknown experience. Working in isolation and under extreme conditions, these women — who inherited their jobs from infirm or deceased husbands or fathers — were trailblazers, embodying feminism long before the word existed and far afield from the urban, intellectual circles that spawned the women's rights movement.
Shot off the coast of northern Maine, "To Keep the Light" paints a landscape of stark, aching beauty, and reveals the inner life of a woman who is, literally and figuratively, at the edge of society.
Based on Margaret Atwood’s poem “Half-hanged Mary” and on true events that took place in 1685, in Hadley, Massachusetts, "ROPEd" is a short dramatic film about a fiercely independent woman, a healer by trade and a landowner, who is condemned by her neighbors to die by hanging. That Mary Webster was acquitted of the most serious charges of witchcraft in a Boston court holds no sway over the vindictive townspeople out to rid her from their community. A calm evening seeing her tend to her day’s end chores turns deadly, after men turn up to forcibly take her. They march her out to a field, where a full lynch mob awaits, and promptly hang her from a tree, leaving her there to die. However, the rope’s knot, being a crude improvisation, fails to immediately do the trick, and Mary fights on, one raspy breath at a time, to save her life, as night settles and a storm approaches. In the morning, the townspeople gather to take Mary down from the tree, only to make a startling discovery, one that will haunt them to their graves.
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