Mar 31, 2020
“Tolkien & Lewis”
On a dreary September evening in 1931, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their friend and fellow scholar, Hugo Dyson, met for dinner in Lewis’s Magdalen College dormitory in Oxford, England. More than eight hours later, Lewis emerged a changed man. His transformation from atheist to theist to Christian was based on the insights of Tolkien and Dyson as they engaged in deep conversation about mythology, reality, ritual, imagination and faith. Tolkien and Lewis went on to become two of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century. The outcome of the discussion and related ideas and insights appear in their fictional work and in many of their non-fiction essays.
This one-hour public television film digs into the topics that Tolkien and Lewis may have discussed on that September evening. Because Lewis likely argued against Tolkien and Dyson for much of the evening, the film engages scholars from various spiritual and academic viewpoints while challenging viewers to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of life and the role that mythology and imagination play in determining belief.
Just how local is a local filmmaker? Milwaukee’s Chip Duncan and his colleagues at The Duncan Entertainment Group are celebrating 35 years of international production with distribution outlets that include PBS, HBO, CBS, Lifetime, and Discovery – among others. The Duncan Entertainment team is responsible for more than forty long form productions created in over forty countries around the world. Duncan is also a noted author and still photographer with recent publications that include the short story collection HALF A REASON TO DIE (Select Books, NYC, 2017) and the coffee table photography book INSPIRING CHANGE (2019). Duncan’s photographic work has been displayed at the Council on Foreign Relations (NYC), the O Street Museum (Washington DC), the World Peace Festival (Berlin), the Kenosha Public Museum, Milwaukee’s Charles Allis Museum, and is part of numerous private collections. For more information, please visit www.DuncanEntertainment.com.