A special screening of a new documentary, Young Hemingway & His Enduring Eden — focusing on Ernest Hemingway’s youthful summers in northern Michigan and their impact on his Nobel Prize winning career as a writer — will be held at Hotel Walloon’s Talcott events center in the Village of Walloon Lake on Friday, Feb. 16 at 7 P.M. The screening is made possible by the Wally and Margy Family Trust, also a sponsor of the documentary.
A reception sponsored by the Michigan Hemingway Society will begin the evening’s events at 6 P.M. and will feature a performance by singer/songwriter Robin Lee Berry of Boyne City who created the documentary’s theme song, “Gone Wild.”
Tickets for the event are $10 per person, but active duty military personnel and those under 18 will be admitted free of charge.
The film was produced by Starbright Media Corp, a Petoskey-based production company, for Contemporary Learning Systems, Inc., (CLS), a Walloon Lake-based non-profit corporation that supports the production and distribution of informational and educational programming for television, the classroom and the Internet. The 90-minute Young Hemingway documentary was written and directed by George A. Colburn, Ph. D., a resident of Melrose Township.
The documentary and education project began in 2012 at the international conference of the Hemingway Society which met for the first time in its history at Bay View and other Petoskey area locations. The final pre-broadcast screening of the documentary will be held in July of this year at the Society’s gathering in Paris, France at the American University.
According to Colburn, “Broadcast and Internet outlets for distribution of the documentary will be sought by CLS after the summer event in Paris. We hope it will air on public television stations nationwide in 2019.” The next step for the project is to secure funding for a series of electronic educational modules that will contain segments of the documentary,” Colburn added.
The documentary’s major funders include the Meijer Foundation, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Michigan Humanities Council, Ernest and Judith Mainland, the late Robert Jensen Dau and the late Paxson Offield.
Colburn is quick to point out that he could not have finished the program without numerous additional donations from local organizations, companies and individuals, including the Bay Harbor Foundation, the Petoskey Area Visitors Bureau, Boyne USA, and the Petoskey-Harbor Springs Area Community Foundation.
More information about the documentary may be found on the project’s website, www.HemingwaysMichigan.com, or by calling 231.535.2440.