THE FILM

WINTERSONG
a film on dakota suite

Music documentary, CH 2005, English (optional German or French subtitles), DVCAM (DVCAM, 16mm, Super8, Photography), 51 minutes

Synopsis
A grey sky, a deserted stadium, switched off floodlights, a tender melody. Chris Hooson strides through gaping stands. While going through hard times he dedicated a gentle hymn to Everton FC. The audience follows Hooson and his band, Dakota Suite, through the cites of his past, from his youth in Holland to the sparse Northwest coast of England, and ends up in the musician’s living room. Hooson’s haunting past makes him pick up his guitar again and again and what emerges is as fragile as life itself. We see Dakota Suite recording piano fragments at a chapel in their hometown of Leeds, and drum parts in Chris Hooson’s house. In WINTERSONG, the songwriter talks about his family, his musical work, and his day job as a social worker dealing with imprisoned offenders. The mournful music and the melancholic lyrics of Chris Hooson are combined with rich imagery, creating space for the music to rise in and flood through organically. The film shows the close relationship of art to every day life. WINTERSONG is a compelling, lyrical music documentary, which delivers an insight into the source of inspiration of an exceptional musician.

Background Information
Since the middle of the nineties the Leeds (UK) based band DAKOTA SUITE have been making music in random formations and releasing records. Chris Hooson mainly shapes the woeful music, which is also influenced by Jazz and Chamber Music. In WINTERSONG the audience learns unexpected things about the equally talented and unusual musician and lyricist Hooson. As a starting point for our work we filmed Hooson in his living room, playing some of his songs to us. Besides this we also captured a drum and a piano recording session of the band. In WINTERSONG Chris Hooson and his most important musical collaborators of the present speak about their project.

At the beginning of the shooting we found visual and acoustical analogies and contrasts for the moods and topics of the songs of DAKOTA SUITE. Equipped with a Super8 and a Video camera we started our journey across the Scottish Highlands and along the cleft of the Northwest coast.

What are the roots of the inspiration for the compositions and the lyrics of Chris Hooson? This question stayed with us and we delve into this matter from various perspectives. With Hooson we visited different places that are of great importance to his musical work of him and talked there with the musician. As an example we accompanied Hooson to Liverpool into the stadium of Everton FC, where he has attended football matches since his childhood. We also went to the city of Preston, to a place called RIVERSIDE, which was used as a song title by DAKOTA SUITE. Hooson tells the story about that particular song, personal relationships and his day job, dealing with imprisoned offenders, are as much inspirational sources for Hooson as the football matches of Everton FC. In the former industrial areas and in the rough winterly landscapes of Northern England we found visual metaphors for the music of DAKOTA SUITE. We were looking for the origins of Hooson’s music in the Dutch city of Groningen, where the musician grew up.

We were interested how Chris Hooson developed Sounds out of the Silence, so we started to search for the influences and conditions that lead the musician to create his music.

WINTERSONG centers on the elegiac, cinematic Folk-Rock and the melancholic lyrics of Chris Hooson the singer and songwriter of the English band DAKOTA SUITE. Our artistic comment to the work of DAKOTA SUITE allows the audience a lot of space for their own associations.

We made this film in the second year of our film studies at the University of Art and Design Zurich.