Plot Summary

THE LIGHT AT WALDEN is a visual poem shot at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, interweaving pieces of Thoreau's texts and a war resister's personal journey on a wilderness island in Canada. The filmmaker, as a young man during the U.S. / Vietnam War, attempts to follow Thoreau's principles: building a cabin and living sustainably in the woods, "to front only the essential facts of life." This is one story among the nearly 125,000 war resisters in Canada.