Movie: "Letters From the Big Man" opens at the IFC Center in Manhattan this Friday [VIDEO]

“Letters From the Big Man,” with Isaac C. Singleton Jr. (in character as a sasquatch).

"Letters From the Big Man" is an independent film that's opening at the IFC Center in Manhattan this Friday. It's a story about the deepening relationship between a young woman and a sasquatch. What makes this film different from other Bigfoot flicks is rather than focusing on horror and terror, it focuses on the deep, ancient and spiritual beauty of a region and “people” unaffected by the last ice age, and what we might gain by their example.

The film follows Sarah, an artist and hydrologist, as she surveys the old growth forests of the Klamath wilderness (captured majestically by cinematographer Rob Sweeney) for the Oregon forest service. She is embroiled in a number of intrigues: the politics of deforestation, a break up, a burgeoning love, metaphysical communication with a missing link.

Here's what the NYTimes wrote about the film's Director Christopher Munich:

Mr. Munch’s wholehearted commitment to eccentric material has never been clearer than in his new film, “Letters From the Big Man,” a parable about man and nature in the form of a beauty-and-the-beast tale, involving a forestry worker (Lily Rabe) and a sasquatch (Isaac C. Singleton Jr. in a hairy bodysuit and face makeup).

“Letters,” which opens at the IFC Center in Manhattan this Friday, grew out of Mr. Munch’s desire to make a movie in the Klamath-Siskiyou eco-region of southwestern Oregon. “Connection with landscape is a fundamental thing for me,” he said over Skype recently from a cabin he was renting in rural Oregon, not far from where he shot the film. “It’s always a way in — to understand a physical geography and to feel close to aspects of a place.”

This expanse of Pacific Northwest wilderness, with its green mountain ridges and crystalline rivers, is also a repository of sasquatch lore. Mr. Munch’s views on the phenomenon changed as he researched it. As recently as six or seven years ago, he said, “it was not something I had any sense about.” Looking at depictions in popular culture, he found only jokey curios: B movies with titles like “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” But the more time Mr. Munch spent in the region the more determined he was to make a film that aligned with the view of indigenous cultures in which, he said, the “sasquatch is honored and sought out for his wisdom.”

“Letters From the Big Man” started as a broader story that played out against the backdrop of the controversial salvage logging operation that followed a devastating wildfire in 2002. But after trying unsuccessfully to finance the film as a larger project, Mr. Munch narrowed the scope to focus on Ms. Rabe’s character, Sarah, an artist and hydrologist. Getting over a breakup, she takes on an assignment to do field research for the Forest Service on stream life in a burn zone.

Even though Mr. Munch had traversed the area extensively on foot for months before shooting, there was only so much planning he could do. His regular cinematographer, Rob Sweeney, said that several locations required fairly long hikes. “Often finding a place to shoot a scene, securing it and getting our crew there, figuring out how to stage and light it — that would all happen in one day,” Mr. Sweeney said.

[via: www.nytimes.com]