Last Songbird PRODUCTIONS

Last Songbird Productions is a Vancouver-based film production company founded by award-winning filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow Shannon Walsh, in collaboration with Laurel Sprengelmeyer.  The company develops and produces documentary and fiction features, short films, VR works, and music videos, with a focus on innovative storytelling and bold, underrepresented voices. Current projects include the fiction feature Without Witness, short fiction film Intimacies, the animated short documentary Mayisela, and music videos. Previous works include the feature documentary Illusions of Control (2019), VR short Disappearance: Hong Kong Stories (2018), and the short documentary Matsutake Hunters (2019) and music videos by the artist Little Scream.

MAYISELA is a hybrid, neo-noir 2D animated documentary about South African whistleblower Simphiwe Mayisela, whose courage exposed corruption at the highest levels of power and nearly cost him everything.

Based on the graphic novel of the same name, the film uses hand-drawn 2D animation and re-imagined scenes to render an intimate portrait of conscience under pressure. At once a personal reckoning and a political indictment, MAYISELA asks what it costs to tell the truth in a system built to punish it.

In July 2026, the Public Investment Corporation once again suspended its CEO following a new whistleblower report. Once again, half of the Isibaya Fund’s supposed “empowerment” deals have failed, wiping out billions in pension money. Mayisela’s sacrifice proved that one man can expose the machine. What will it take to stop it?

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Adapted from the graphic novel “Mayisela”
Written by Heinrich Bohmke & Daniel Sheldon / Illustrated by Daniel Sheldon

Documentary Feature. 2019

Who stands up when everything falls apart?

Illusions of Control follows five stories of people who have lived through a major crisis that provoked them to create surprising new communities in the ruins.

Produced by What Escapes Production and Last Songbird Productions

With the support of Telefilm Canada‘s Feature Documentary Fund, TELUS, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, University of British Columbia

Photos by Eugene Arries

Tweets by IllusionsDoc

Short Documentary, 2019

in partnership with TELUS, produced by Last Songbird Productions & What Escapes Production

The forest holds many mysteries. We follow an unlikely group of foragers as they hunt for the elusive and highly prized Japanese Matsutake mushroom, also known as the Pine Mushroom, in Northern British Columbia.

An unlikely community gather to forage for a highly prized wild mushroom that thrives in second-growth forests. While clear-cuts are often seen as dead landscapes, surprisingly, it is on such formerly human-disturbed territory that the rare and prized Matsutake mushroom flourishes. Because of their high value in Japan, an entirely new human ecosystem, and economy, has emerged, as have new ways of profiting off human damaged landscapes.

This little fungus can teach us a great deal about what it means to co-exist on a damaged planet. The Matsutake, called the Pine Mushroom in BC, lives in a symbiotic relationship with its ‘host’ tree, and once it grows, an unlikely cast of characters converge around it: migrant foragers, First Nations, and a range of outsiders. Colliding, intersecting worlds, both human and nonhuman, converge around this little fungus.