Lucia Festival \ Events
ASCOLTO
Friday 13 December, 2019
Neil Sandell
The painting
This much we know. The woman in the portrait is wearing pearls, leaning forward, smoking a cigarette. But the rest is unknown – who she was, her relationship with an unknown artist. It is open to speculation. This absence of information invites those who see her to project their own stories onto her. She is like a mirror.
Knocked off balance by the painting, the narrator ponders what lies behind his obsession with the woman in the portrait. He revisits an upheaval in his life and a stark truth that he has been avoiding.
Neil Sandell is an award-winning Canadian radio producer. In 2014 he moved to Nice, France, following a long career at CBC, including five years as senior producer of the award-winning first-person documentary program, Outfront. In 2011 he was named the Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, Canada’s most prestigious journalism fellowship. He has taught workshops at Third Coast, at the Hearsay International Audio Festival in Kilfinane, Ireland, and in Nuuk, Greenland. In 2015 he was a jury president at Prix Italia.