Reviews
Overview
Circling around two figures -- a New England housewife, the wisher -- and a character in a more mythic waiting space, perhaps collecting all the wishes -- the film considers the potential power in the wishes of those waiting for the war to end. Created with support from Smithsonian Folkways, it is an imaginative exploration into how we engage with the dreams of the past. "In 1941, Vermonter Helen Hartness Flanders visited the home of Margaret Shipman, an octogenarian living with her sisters in the small town of Lee, MA to ask her to sing any old songs she knew, for her recording machine. Margaret, a woman with a beautiful, understated voice, delivered a song with a simply voiced wish for the end of all wars -- “Oh, if i were queen of france, or still better pope of rome I’d have no fighting men abroad, nor weeping maids at home All the world should be at peace and the might should be the right I’d have those that made the quarrelling, the only ones to fight”
