Arwen Curry’s documentary ‘Worlds of Urusula K. Le Guin’ took a decade to make, but the wait was well worth it.
On January 22, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in her home in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 88. She left behind three children, her husband, and a prolific body of fiction from a six decade career as a groundbreaking American writer. Yet an author can never be reduced to their work and obituary writers were tasked with answering a nearly impossible question: Who was Ursula K. Le Guin?
This is the question haunting Arwen Curry’s new documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, which premiered last weekend at the Sheffield Doc Fest in England. While making no pretensions to any definitive answer, Curry’s hour-long film orbits this question like a moon around one of the innumerable alien world’s conjured by Le Guin in her fiction.
