Tim Trainor

Catherine Kuehn is one of the most impressive people I’ve met in Redmond. A whole new audience will get to meet her this week at the Bend Film Festival.

I connected with Catherine back in November 2022 and wrote a feature about her that ran in the Spokesman. At the time, she was 94 years old and gearing up to set a weightlifting record for her age group — 104 pounds of steel pulled clean off the mat.

“Most people her age have a hard time lifting their keys,” her Redmond-based trainer Dean Munsey told me at the time. “What she’s doing is extraordinary.”

Her story caught a little buzz. It was republished in Bend and in other Oregon newspapers. A national magazine picked it up. Readers got excited to root for Catherine, who was building back her strength after losing her beloved husband and being left isolated by COVID.

Catherine is now 95 and her weightlifting journey is still going strong. Portland-area filmmakers Cecilia Brown and Winslow Crane-Murdoch spent time with Catherine over the past year to document the highs and lows of that journey. The couple produced a 15-minute short film titled ”Strong Grandma,” which has now been accepted to numerous film festivals across the country.

The film will be shown twice in Bend as part of a series of shorts, first at 4 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13 and then again at 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14. Both showings are at Open Space Event Studios. According to Brown, “Strong Grandma” will be shown in Washington, D.C., in Cleveland and in the Austin Film Festival, among many others.

Cecilia is an old classmate of mine who has done wonderful, heart-aching work for This American Life and has had her films play at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. Winslow is a talented documentarian in his own right, having done his own award-winning work.

I figured they’d do Catherine right in telling her story. I won’t give away the ending to “Strong Grandma” but you’ll definitely be lifted by the piece. Catherine is definitely pumped up about it and plans to attend the Oct. 13 show. I’ll be there, too.

If you’re a long time Redmondite who remembers the Kuehns fondly, feel free to meet us in Bend when Catherine’s story graces the big screen. It’ll be a fitting tribute to Redmond’s strongest grandma.