credit: Ifanyi Bell / OPB

Filmmaker Dylan Stirewalt

Although this is Dylan Stirewalt's debut film for Oregon Lens, she is no stranger to this annual OPB series.

After taking a year of documentary film classes taught by Oregon Lens Executive Producer and Host Steve Amen, she knew she wanted to learn more about storytelling and video production. Stirewalt applied for an internship at OPB and worked with both Oregon Art Beat and Oregon Field Guide.  She also served as an associate producer for last year’s Oregon Lens.

Stirewalt is now studying film at the University of British Columbia. Her film, Sbear Some Love, chronicles the life of a homeless teddy bear. Arts & Life sat down with Stirewalt to find out more about her passion for film and opening people up to different life experiences.

Your film is very unique; can you tell me how you got your idea for it and what you want to say with it?

Everything that happened in that film, to that poor little bear, were actual circumstances that have happened to people I know who have been homeless. My mom was homeless for a lot of the time through my life. When she wasn’t on the streets, at one point she was working for Sisters of the Road. She was a floor manager there. And so I got a lot of exposure to a lot of really awesome people with really big hearts who were on the streets. A lot of that stuff I applied towards this film are experiences that actually happened to them.

You’ve done documentaries on homeless people before. What made you decide to use the teddy bear as a symbol?

The first documentary I did was on my mom and the years that she was homeless, and that was a really heavy one. I kind of wanted to do something that people could relate to but also feel sad for. When you think about something like that, putting a teddy bear in that situation just grips people so much more. I just thought it’d be an interesting kind of experiment.

Can you talk about the process of making your film?
All of it was done by puppeteer. It was usually me working as a camera [operator] and someone else would puppeteer through the whole thing. We had actors at the beginning for a little bit but usually the setting was me and a friend. We’d go out in the middle of Vancouver downtown into some of the areas where there’s a large homeless population, and in some of those areas we ended up filming. Which was kind of cool.

What do you want viewers to take away from this film?
I want people to open themselves up more to letting go of a lot of prejudices about people who are homeless. The reason I got into film was because I want to open other people up to experiences that they might not necessarily understand or have preconceived notions about.

And homelessness is one of those big ones where everyone has an opinion about it. I think it is really important to get in there, and even though with documentary everything you do is in some way biased, I want to put people in a situation where they can relate, and they can feel for people in different situations and bring voice to a minority in society.

I don’t know if that really came through with a teddy bear [laughs].

I think in a lot of ways I attribute most of my film to my mom and all the amazing experiences she has given me.