Nicolet Live!
Arts & Speakers Series

Award-winning director and digital filming techniques pioneer Rob Nilsson returns to his hometown of Rhinelander to present his 2007 film Presque Isle, shot partially on location. Written and directed by Nilsson in atmospheric black-and-white, the film touches on themes of memory, human suffering, family reconciliation, and gives a portrait of a land neglected by American cinema.

Nilsson was the first American director to win the Camera d'Or at Cannes (for Northern Lights) and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival (for Heat and Sunlight). Presque Isle was a collaboration with the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking.

Breathtaking. Haunting. Elegant. Exquisite…All words used to describe the 6- and 12-string fingerstyle master Chris Proctor. Often compared to Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges, Chris coaxes sounds from his guitar to a near-orchestral range, illuminating the instrument's deepest voices and most sonorous qualities, in original compositions that span the traditions of folk, jazz, pop, classical and ethnic music.

With 10 CDs released on major labels – including his newest, the acclaimed Ladybug Stomp – plus DVDs, videos, magazine articles and endorsements, Chris has secured his place as one of the nation’s elite fingerstyle composers, arrangers and performers of the day.

The author of Population 485 and Truck: A Love Story is back to read from his new work, Coop. Now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse on 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, Perry tries to figure out how to raise chickens and answer his daughter’s questions about God.

He reflects on his fundamentalist Christian upbringing, his father as a farmer, and what it’s like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig. Alternately hilarious and tender, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning…and with chickens.

Sponsored by Nicolet Live, the Richard Brown Library and the Rhinelander District Library.