The Circle Education celebrates International Women’s Day 2026 with the showing of Between the Mountain and the Sky. Local filmmaker Piet Suess, who also volunteered in our Pass it On Boys program, worked as one of the film editors on this documentary. He will be in attendance on Friday, March 6th, at Art Spring, and we would like to introduce him here first.
Piet Suess has been a filmmaker since he was young. At age fourteen, he started experimenting with filmmaking. “I was introduced to a lot of cinema as a kid, and at my dad’s co-op, there was a media/editing room in the basement with two VCR’s and some simple analog editing tools. I was tirelessly compiling short films and school projects with my friends – from Kung-Fu movies to sci-fi epics and documentaries about my family. I have always felt that filmmaking chose me, rather than the other way around”, Suess says.
Suess was born on Salt Spring Island and moved to Vancouver at the age of six. After high school, he earned a scholarship to the Vancouver Film School, and during this immersive 10-month program, he was introduced to digital editing, 3D, visual effects, audio, and web design. “I didn’t have a plan or future goals in mind when I started the program,” Suess looks back. “I just had fun creating things.”
After finishing the program, he moved to New York with a suitcase and 300 dollars, stayed there with family and found an internship with an animation studio/multimedia company. He taught himself editing with the newest digital software before returning to Canada shortly after 9/11. Back in Vancouver, he started touring around the world with Somali-Canadian rapper and singer-songwriter K’naan to document his music tour and worked on several other projects.
At age 30, Suess moved to Los Angeles, the heart of the film industry, though he wasn’t overly invested in mainstream film entertainment. “I worked mostly for NGO’s, artists and cause-based projects that continued to take me to different places, following what I felt aligned with”, he says, looking back.
There have been a couple of times that Suess tried to step away from filmmaking. “I don’t really enjoy spending a ton of time behind my computer. It doesn’t always feel meaningful. But no matter how hard I tried, I always seem to get dragged back in”.
In 2015, Suess returned to Salt Spring Island, after spending most of his life in big cities, he felt that this was the community he was most connected with. In one of those ‘stepping away from filmmaking moments’, he took on a job as manager of the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga and volunteered in our Pass it On Boys program, a free after-school cross-peer mentorship program designed for kids in high school that supports mental well-being and healthy relationships. “I wanted to be more engaged with our community, I wanted to make an impact and see impact,” he says about his motivation to join our Pass it On Boys program.
His participation and insights helped in reshaping the program. He also introduced the ‘Mannenball’ game, a ball game which became an important pillar in the Pass it On Boys program. “It’s a game my friends and I made up in high school, with a similar feel to hackey sack, but originally with a volleyball, which you have to pass around your body or part of your body, before passing it on. The object of the game is continuous flow, and can get quite fast-paced and skilled. It requires full attention and focus, and is used in the program as a way to allow everyone to arrive in the circle together at the start.”
Off and on, Suess worked for almost five years as an editor on Between the Mountain and the Sky, a documentary about Maggie Doyne, who started an orphanage in Nepal at age nineteen and became guardian to fifty orphans. He travelled to Nepal to edit on site with the film director at the children’s home and lived about a month there with the kids, teaching them yoga, capoeira, kirtan, a call-and-response style song or chant, and playing the harmonium.
Suess is looking forward to the screening of Between the Mountain and the Sky at Art Spring for International Women’s Day. “I worked quite a few years on this documentary,” he says. “My friends have seen me post about it on social media, and I think it is great that they now get to see it in a theatrical setting.”
Piet Suess will be answering questions on March 6th at Art Spring about his work on Between the Mountain and the Sky. If you have a question already, you can email us and we will ask the question for you. [email protected]
