What, you might ask, connects the solitary acts of watching a film and doing a crossword puzzle? The answer: the nine-minute short Dear Araucaria, which is currently being shown for the first time at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto.
Dear Araucaria is about the Rev John Graham, the celebrated Guardian crossword setter better known as Araucaria, who announced that he was dying of cancer through a crossword published in December 2012. As reported in these pages, he wrote his own last chapter using clues with answers such as “cancer”, “oesophagus”, “palliative” and “care” in the format he had championed for more than 50 years.
The 29-year-old London-based film-maker Matt Houghton immediately recognised the possibilities of retelling Araucaria’s dramatic announcement. “It struck me how people could connect emotionally to a setter through his crossword,” Houghton says. “It was a unique, interesting human story.”
Houghton interviewed and filmed Araucaria – the name comes from Latin for monkey-puzzle tree – in 2013, in the months leading up to his death in November of that year. In partnership with the Guardian’s multimedia department, the director completed the film and submitted it to Hot Docs. It will also be launched on the Guardian website in June.
“It blew us away,” says Hot Docs programmer Charlotte Cook, who happens to be an avid puzzler herself. “It’s an incredibly beautiful film.”
Cook, who grew up in Salisbury, has lived in Canada since 2011, and says that outside of her family, one of the things she misses most from her homeland is curling up with a puzzle. When she returns to the UK, she tries to do the crossword with her best friend over Sunday lunch. Cook’s parents are also regular puzzlers, who make a copy of each crossword, which inevitably leads to some bickering about who gets to do the original.
Cook says that four programmers had already “fallen in love with the film” before it was brought to her attention, and that it was accepted on its own merits – not because of her personal passion.
Houghton is not actually a puzzler himself – he was more into sports as a boy, and as an adult he’s just into “film, film, film” – but he’s hoping the piece will have a universal appeal. He had been “on the lookout for a long time” for a good subject for a film, and so he quickly contacted Araucaria after reading about his cryptic goodbye.
Houghton says Araucaria didn’t feel he warranted being the subject of a documentary; but he agreed, and he was “extremely welcoming and very warm”, with Houghton and his crew, who spent a weekend in his home village of Somersham in Cambridgeshire, while filming the 92-year-old former clergyman taking walks, penning a puzzle and praying in church.
The film has a lyrical quality, with Araucaria reflecting on his life and illness and narrating what the letters from fans meant to him. The shots are interlaced with imagery of children playing, papers taking flight and individuals writing letters to the setter after completing his announcement crossword.
Houghton says he had to “puzzle out how to best tell the story. I made a conscious decision not to force a form or structure on to the film. And it became clear that it needed to be informed by crosswords. I came up with a clues structure. In the film, there’s a slow transmission of meaning in the same way one does a cryptic puzzle. It was a personally enriching experience.”
• Dear Araucaria premieres in the UK at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in June 2015. It is a Guardian Films production
