A First Look: Adapting The Long Walk Home for film

We are making a film!

This spring marked an important milestone in the development of our adaptation of The Long Walk Home, a song cycle by composer Peter Tiefenbach and librettist James Ostime.

After months of preparation and pre-production with choreographer and director Jennifer Nichols, assistant director Patrick Hagarty, and producer Lawrence Wiliford, the Canadian Art Song Project spent an intensive and inspiring week in April filming at the Sheridan College Screen Industries Research and Training Centre (SIRT). This phase of the project brought together our featured artist, Nathan Keoughan, alongside additional performers, dancers, and a remarkable creative and technical team to begin shaping the work’s cinematic language.

Working in collaboration with SIRT, we explored how The Long Walk Home—a narrative song cycle—could be translated into cinematic form through the integration of performance, movement, and digitally created environments. Using emerging virtual production techniques, the SIRT team developed evocative, Toronto-based settings that reflect the emotional landscape of the work, expanding the possibilities for storytelling through art song beyond the recital stage.

Our initial filming phase focused on capturing selected sections of the narrative set on cold winter city streets. It represents an exciting first step in a larger process as we continue to develop the full film.

We are deeply grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for its support of the rehearsal and pre-production phase, and to the entire team at SIRT for their creative partnership, technical expertise, and generosity in helping bring this vision to life. Together, this past year has brought together an extraordinary group of artists whose contributions have been central to advancing the project, and we look forward to continuing that work in the months ahead.

We can’t wait to share more as this project continues to take shape.