Filmmaker Aisling Walsh is not a native Canadian — she's a Dubliner who has pursued most of her career in England. But Walsh fell in love with Nova Scotia after learning about Maud Lewis (1903-70), the beloved folk artist who spent her life in and around the province's southern town of Digby.
"The landscape was breathtaking, but very rugged and forbidding," Walsh says. "To think that Maud lived and worked here, in these surroundings, was incredibly moving. She had such a hard life, full of pain from arthritis that she contracted as a child. And then there was her house, which is so very tiny — nothing more than a shed, really. It struck me as the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen."
The result of Walsh's interest in Lewis is "Maudie," which debuted overseas in 2016 and is only now seeing a Japan release under the title "Shiawase no Enogu." Shot in the Canadian province of Newfoundland (Walsh says she couldn't get permission to film in Nova Scotia), the film is an ode to the painter — played wonderfully by Sally Hawkins, who also gave an Oscar-worthy performance in "The Shape of Water" — who defied the odds to make art in her own little corner of the world. Among her clients was U.S. President Richard Nixon, who bought two of her pieces to hang in the White House after her death in 1970.