The greatest love story you've never heard is a tale of grief — and a fairy-tale palace

Director Shannon Walsh calls it the greatest love story she'd never heard of. Once upon a time in small-town Illinois, there lived a couple named Alan and Adrianne St. George. For more than 30 years, they lived on a hill, transforming a turn-of-the-century house into a palace, an estate they dubbed Havencrest Castle. 

The pair added lavish rooms and gardens and even a grotto fit for a goddess, designing a home that doubled as a monument to their love — a romance that first blossomed in their teens. But every love story eventually turns bittersweet, and in 2006, Adrianne died, leaving Alan alone at Havencrest. 

In the years since Adrianne's death, Alan has opened the castle as a seasonal tourist attraction, which is how its story reached Walsh, a B.C. filmmaker who received the Governor General's Award in 2023. Her latest project, Adrienne & the Castle, will have its Canadian premiere this week at the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival before opening the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver May 4. (An hour-long version will air on the 2024/2025 season of CBC's The Passionate Eye.) 

The castle alone is a DIY wonder, filled with paintings, sculptures, stained glass — assorted tributes to the St. Georges' devotion to one another. Alan, a trained artist and founder of a 52-year-old mascot company, created just about everything inside, and in its heyday, the estate hosted parties and performances — original productions starring the grand and glamorous Adrianne. As part of the public tour, Havencrest displays selections from Adrianne's collection of custom gowns and voluminous wigs — a wardrobe that belongs in a bodice-ripper..

Before Walsh began production on the film, she was hungry to know more about the place and the lives of the people who built it. 

"I thought it was very intriguing, but I wasn't sure if there was a story to tell," says the director, whose past projects include The Gig is Up (2021). She wasn't interested in digging through the history of the place, even if there was enough material to produce a few dozen features. "As a filmmaker, I'm often looking for stories that are happening in the present," she says. But in getting to know Alan — talking with him for hours over Zoom — an idea began to emerge. Here was a man living with grief, 15 years after the death of his wife. He'd lost his greatest love and his greatest passion. What happens to a person as they reckon with that reality?

"I think we're in a world right now where we carry a lot of grief, not only about loved ones we've lost, but about the world around us," says Walsh. Love and grief: "those two feelings are not that far apart," she says, "and that feels really important to bring to audiences."

"It felt, to me, like there was a real journey we could take with Alan," says Walsh. "It's a love story with a person who's not there," she says. And in making the film, she set out to collaborate with her subject — to help him tell his own story and relive the memories he holds on to in his grief.

For that reason, the film has a distinctly meta feel. Within the first two minutes of the picture, Walsh appears on screen, and she's present throughout the documentary, working alongside Alan as they discuss how to make the movie. 

The question of how they'll portray Adrianne is their first big challenge. Initially, Alan's opposed to hiring an actor, but he eventually warms to the idea, and as the film progresses, Walsh stages a series of dramatic reenactments. 

Young actors play Alan and Adrienne in their teens, and the performers recreate the couple's first meeting. In each dramatization, Alan is on set to give his feedback, sometimes playing a silent character in the scene. The exercise always prompts an emotional response from Alan, which he unpacks on camera. By the film's surprising final act, he's on stage singing with a cast of costumed performers — a sequence that combines home videos and original music by Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire.  

This interpretive approach to Alan's story makes the documentary irresistibly unique, and Walsh's decision to involve Alan in the creative process is a similarly experimental choice. For Walsh, it felt like the right move. "This is what that journey called for because of the kind of person he [Alan] is and the kind of world he likes to live in." 

Walsh also credits Alan for creating some of the documentary's more surreal sequences. In one scene, he walks through an airport dressed as Havencrest Castle. Alan built his own costume, Walsh explains, and the idea was inspired by one of their conversations. "He said on the phone once, 'If I ever left Havencrest, I'd have to carry the house on my back,'" she says. 

It's a thought-provoking confession in a documentary that's full of them. During the interview portions, Alan drops several dramatic details that remain a mystery to the viewer. For example, he says that he felt like Rip Van Winkle after Adrianne's death, and at one point in the doc, he shares a story about visiting Walmart for the first time in his life — a dizzying experience that left him marvelling at the bounty of frozen pizzas and breakfast cereals available. Did the couple never leave Havencrest? Why? And why were they disowned from their families, as Alan reveals in the film?

Is it true or not true? I don't know. Does it matter? Reality is for those who lack imagination.- Shannon Walsh, Director of

"I think it comes back to the kind of collaborative and trusting relationship that I was building with Alan," says Walsh. "There were boundaries to their story."

There's a phrase that's repeated in the film — a quote that Adrianne is said to have lived by: "Reality is for those who lack imagination." 

"I think that became the saying for the film, as well," says Walsh. "We kind of used that as a guide."

As she sees it, Alan and Adrianne spent much of their marriage writing a fairy tale that became their lives, a story that's been preserved in the castle itself. "Is it true or not true? I don't know. Does it matter? Reality is for those who lack imagination," she says.

"But can you build a castle of love and live in it? Yeah, actually," she says, laughing. "And that's some kind of magic. They manifested a world in which they told the story. They control the narrative, and it worked."