Northern Light
"Shot mostly in 1973-74. Indoor scenes shot in Chicago at 116 W. Hubbard St. include my rescue cat at the time, White Paws, whose coat was in part immaculately snowy white. Exterior landscape (excluding lake footage) shot from a cousin's backyard in Port Hope, ON, Canada (the town where I was born), looking toward lines of cars heading west at dusk on distant highway 401 (the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway). Lake footage shot at Ashby Lake, aka Thirty Islands Lake, near Denbigh, ON, Canada. I was interested at the time in landscape scale and in parallels between outdoor landscape and body forms, and including the way a small furry domestic animal like a cat could inhabit an imaginary landscape winter created through light, bedding shapes and human body forms. Other than White Paws, I am the participating human.
NORTHERN LIGHT received a small (very small) production grant from the Illinois Arts Council. It was exhibited at Chicago Filmmakers, the Funnel Co-op in Toronto, and as part of a sidebar program at the Big Muddy Film Festival at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL."
— Barbara Scharres, Filmmaker