From the cover: Why is it that fly fishing generates such passion, such loyalty and such dedication among people who do it -- people who fish with flies made from fur and feathers, tinsel and yarn? See and hear from a variety of participants who show and tell us what they love about their sport.
"...Why Fly Fishing must be the most competent, professionally produced piece of fly-fishing film since Robert Redford was handed three Academy Award nominations.
The idea for the film came from an executive at the Yale Peabody Museum, who when visiting the American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vermont, dared to ask the obvious: Why fly fishing? Gardner Grant, a trustee of the museum and former director of Trout Unlimited, wondered Why indeed? Jeffrey Pill, with a long history of success in the film and television industry, including his current position as executive producer, director and writer of a series of documentary outdoor programs for Miracle Productions, was tasked to answer the question.
The economical, brilliantly compiled result begins with angling icon Flip Pallot attempting to express the reasons he first fell in love with the sport and how it manages to grow within its devotees from a modest ambition to unrelenting passion. "Fly-fishing has no season," he says. "Fly-fishing has no geography."
Celebrated author John Gierach goes a step further, noting the sport's "insidious nature." You can come to fly-fishing from any direction in life, and go anywhere with it, both seem to say, and then, as Gierach notes, "Thirty years later, you wake up and find out you re still learning."
Accompanied by a beautiful, wholly appropriate score, the film moves seamlessly between brief scenes on the water and a range of personal interviews conducted with some of the sport's leading personalities. Joan Wulff, the so-called first lady of fly-fishing, expounds upon the grace of casting. Nick Lyons highlights angling's literary appeal, which has done much to preserve the traditions that serve as headwaters for the sport. And before it all gets too heavy, too proud of itself -- always a danger when the topic is fly-fishing -- there's Gierach again to provide some of his patented levity: "There's something about catching small fish on hugely expensive tackle that sort of keeps you humble."
Humility, in the end, might be the film's greatest quality, for while it treats the subject seriously, there is none of the patronizing high-mindedness that occasionally marks these ventures. Instead it simply lets the sport, and a few people who ve clearly fallen in love with it, do all the talking."
--Big Sky Journal Magazine
by Troy Letherman
Run Time: 31 minutes
