Editor's Letter

Dear Readers,

When I was small, my grandparents maintained a small cabinet of VHS tapes that they’d recorded from television. My sisters and I were allowed to choose a few each time we visited by ‘checking them out’ via a clipboard and running log. I can still remember the thrill of Atreyu’s quest to cure the empress and the agony of losing Artax to the sadness of the swamp, a reader’s journey Bastian embarks on when his father tells him to stop fantasizing and start facing reality.

I still think about "The Neverending Story," a film Rotten Tomatoes describes as ‘the power of a young boy’s imagination to save a dying fantasyland’—a sentiment that encapsulates, for me, what all good art strives for.

This issue of IdaHome is about film, but also, more broadly, performance. It is always a fun issue to work on because it asks artists to look at art. Writers examining films which examine opera singers. Writers talking to dog owners who showcase their animals on the stage. Writers interviewing recording studio folks who are engineering sound for television and film.

This issue, especially in Idaho, becomes a sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which many of our stories are connected in a beautiful web. We look at the line between fantasy and reality, offering a healthy dose of each.

Learn about dog showing, or traverse the cinematic landscape of Craters of the Moon. Visit Treefort’s Filmfort or the Sun Valley Film Festival, which remains focused on celebrating cinema far and wide. Of course, you don’t have to head to the mountains—Idaho Film Society has plenty to celebrate in downtown Boise’s old bus depot.

Our own Karen Day has a new film out too. "Aria" profiles four opera singers who are up against an industry that can be unkind to folks who don’t quite fit the mold. Some of the film’s music was recorded at Mirror Studios, and you’ll find a story about them too.

No film would be complete without the beginnings of a hero’s journey, so we offer that too by way of an excellent story about Idaho Downwinders, a nonprofit representing people who lived in Idaho between 1951 and 1962 when nuclear weapons were being tested in Nevada.

It’s an issue getting some media attention, so dive with us into freedom of the press and an interview Benjamin Victor, a sculptor with three works in the United States Capitol. Finally, IdaHome scores an interview with Nicholas Kristof, an American journalist and political commentator.

It was striking to me to discover the myriad of ways in which all artmaking is a version of the same thing. We artists are certainly sharing the trenches, and I suspect there are more of us than we know.

See you there,

Heather Hamilton-Post

Editor in Chief