The first person I met on the first day was the 90-year-old Kit from Florida. She attended a puppet festival here some twenty years ago and she continues to write and perform her shadow puppet plays in the schools! Next I met Kathleen from California, who is a psychologist planning on using puppets in her work with ambulatory schizophrenics. She was attending with her husband and two children who help out with her puppet shows. Then there was the woman from Japan sitting alone who handed me a letter of introduction in English when I joined her – she was looking for someone who spoke Japanese! I would help, I told her -- help find someone who spoke Japanese that is – and I was hooked on this festival thing. The stereotypes I had of who goes to a puppet festival were washed away by the time our boat docked at Tillicum Island for their famous salmon dinner and show that first evening. And by the end of the week, I had over fifteen hours of footage, which I safely stored in order to prepare and present my own work, SOUPTALKS SEATTLE in November 2001.

Almost two years later, when I began logging the footage, I was pleasantly surprised with how good the images still looked! Consequently, my first edit on paper would have meant a three-hour movie! I realize then that I could not do justice to the festival in only thirty minutes and worked instead to keep it all under one hour in length. I failed by 13 minutes! Thanks to the adventurous programming by Chris and Stephen, we were given a wide variety of performances using all styles of puppetry and from all over the world. My friends Deb Chase and Paul Mesner allowed me to capture their shows from backstage, as did the hand puppet master from China, Yang Feng and his daughter Zheng Xie -- a view I've always wanted to experience. My favorite though is the performance by Mr. Huang from China, who inspired all of us with his marionette mastery and youthful smile of 72 years - seen in both performance and workshop settings.

All of the artists featured in this documentary talked with me about their work, answering questions I would never have asked without the camera and so it became a rented passport for crossing borders of the imagination and I returned with this intimate, backstage [video] report from Seattle's Festival of the Millennium. But my intention was to produce more than a personal, entertaining record of this incredible event. My aim also, especially as a former college teacher of theater arts, was to provide compelling examples of a carefully selected range of puppet theater styles and forms. And for the general public, I offer a window on the fantastic world of puppetry...or as Ulla Backhausen from Denmark put it for my camera, "Puppetry gives your life more poetry and a smile behind what you see."