Tessa Mitchell never knew her grandfather but he has cast a long shadow.
Her film I Am a Dark River is about Bob Lowry - that creative and some would say sometimes outrageous grandfather. It's been released this month for you to watch on the RNZ website after premiering last year at the New Zealand International Film Festival.
We don't always get to know our grandparents. We don't always get to take up the offer of that special personal journey into an era before our own. And which ultimately brings us back to ourselves. Tessa Mitchell found her own way to do this. 25 years ago she filmed hours of interviews with Bob Lowry's family and friends as she created a theatre show about him.
Watching I am A Dark River Bob Lowry comes across as the stuff of arts bohemian legend. A charismatic modernist printer and publisher, Lowry trailblazed across our nascent literary and radical cultural scene from the 1930s through to the 60s. Friend and collaborator of formative writers like Denis Glover, Allan Curnow, Hone Tuwhare and Frank Sargeson, James K Baxter said of Lowry that "the country spoke through him."
The film's title 'I Am A Dark River' comes from a Baxter poem and alludes to another side of Lowry's life. Lowry's final years were, as the producers put it, "plagued by alcoholism and mental torment, before he took his own life in 1963." In the film Mitchell and other family members ponder whether the cycle of idealism and despair that comes through in people's memories of him suggested manic depression.
As narrator Tessa Mitchell asks, "Does the dark river that flowed through Bob flow through me?"
Tessa is an actor, theatremaker and drama teacher known for own innovative work. Incorporating great poetry, her own performance and partner Ben Holmes music I Am a Dark River is described as a performance documentary.
A warning that this story makes reference to suicide.
