Engaging Cinema. Engaging Minds.
The Patricia Theatre
PRFF + VIFF 2022
To pre-purchase tickets for the festival, please visit our online ticket sales via Eventbrite.
Doors open 1 hr before screening for ticket sales and entry. Limited tickets will be available at the door 30 minutes before screening.
All films are $12 adult and $10 senior
Memberships $5
Important Note:
· Powell River Film Society 2022 Membership required to attend PRFF+VIFF films
Bones of Crows
September 30 @ 7:00 pm
Director: Marie Clements
Language: In English, Cree, ʔayʔajuθəm, and Italian with English subtitles
(2 hr 7 min)
Content Warning: Residential Schools, Sexual Violence, Child Abuse, Racial Discrimination
Cast: Grace Dove, Phillip Forest Lewitski, Alyssa Wapanatâhk, Michelle Thrush, Gail Maurice, Carla Rae
In these troubled and lopsided times, we need our storytellers to help us understand our inheritance, be it pain or privilege, and to lay the intellectual and emotional groundwork not only for reconciliation, but for reparation and restoration. Vancouver-born Métis Dene writer-director Marie Clements (whose previous films The Road Forward and Red Snow have been part of VIFF’s year-round and festival programming) squares up to the challenge with this bold, necessarily harrowing tale of oppression and resilience which spans the greater part of the 20th century.
Aline Spears (played at different ages by Grace Dove, Summer Testawich, and Carla Rae) is a happy, gifted child, until she and her siblings are removed to a residential school. The scars of that experience will run deep through the remainder of their days, though it will not be the only time that official government policy will act as an instrument of abuse and trauma. Despite this, Aline enlists in WWII, where, ironically, her fluency in Cree becomes a national asset. The reward for her service is yet more anguish and struggle.
This is a tough film, but it has epic ambition, deep-rooted conviction, anger, and urgency. Clements is not afraid to make provocative and important connections, and she marshals an outstanding cast of Indigenous actors with care and compassion.
This program contains scenes that may distress some viewers, especially those who have experienced harm, abuse, violence, and/or intergenerational trauma due to colonial practices.
Support is available 24 hours a day for anyone affected by their experience at residential schools and for those who may be triggered by content dealing with residential schools, child abuse, emotional trauma, and racism. The national Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available at 1-866-925-4419.
Read more about the film > here
Ever Deadly
October 1 @ 1:30 pm
Director: Chelsea McMullan, Tanya Tagaq
Language: In English, and Inuktitut with English subtitles
(1 hr 30 min)
Cast: Tanya Tagaq, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Mary Gillis, Inuuja Gillis, Lucas Kalluk
Ever Deadly is a portrait of the acclaimed Inuk throat singer and author Tanya Tagaq. Co-directed by Tagaq and Canadian documentary filmmaker Chelsea McMullan (who directed the award-winning My Prairie Home in 2013), this beautifully crafted documentary combines exceptional performance recordings with interviews, verité camerawork, archival material, and hand-drawn animation.
Intimate cinematography and crisp sound captures Tagaq’s innovative and experimental throat singing from the film’s incredible opening scene onwards. Loving moments with Tagaq and her children are filmed on location in Nunavut, and words from her novel Split Tooth provide poetry and rhythm to the film. Painful memories are recounted of Tagaq’s mother and her family being forced to relocate due to racist colonial policies, which allows us to appreciate Tagaq’s exploration of her Inuk artistic practice as an act of healing and resistance.
View trailer > here
Emily
October 1 @ 7:00 pm
Director: Frances O’Connor
Language: English
(2 hr 10 min)
Cast: Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Adrian Dunbar, Amelia Gething, Gemma Jones
Sex Education discovery Emma Mackey makes a sensational big screen debut as Emily Brontë in this imaginative biopic from writer-director Frances O’Connor (best known for acting in Mansfield Park and Spielberg’s A.I.). Readers have always been fascinated by how the shy, demure Yorkshire preacher’s daughter could have created something as wildly, dangerously romantic as Wuthering Heights. It’s an open question because most of the relatively little that we know about the writer comes filtered through what her sister Charlotte considered appropriate to share.
O’Connor suggests a sibling rivalry at work, and conceives of a secret liaison with a curate, Weightman, in the employ of the sisters’ father, and even a semblance of a love triangle with Emily’s brother, Branwell. That may sound scurrilous, but this serious, well-directed movie doesn’t lack for nuance or sensitivity; it has smart things to say about how a mixture of conviction, self-belief and mortification can feed creativity, and how Emily’s horizons weren’t curtailed by her remote, rural homestead. In fact, these things may have liberated her.
View trailer > here
Unarchived
October 2 @ 1:30 pm
Director: Hayley Gray, Elad Tzadok
Language: English
(1 hr 24 min)
Content Warning: Gender or Sexual Discrimination
For too long, the past has been the exclusive domain of the white colonial power structure. The good news is, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in consciousness when it comes to appreciating history from multiple viewpoints. In this zippy NFB documentary, Hayley Gray and Elad Tzadok survey the inspiring work of a handful of community archives across British Columbia. It’s an important and timely reminder that the model of a centralized repository of records and artifacts is highly problematic—indeed, the official version of our history as presented by the Royal Museum of BC, for example, has consciously or not served to propagate a white supremacist narrative.
In contrast, Gray and Tzadok talk to curators and archivists from groups traditionally marginalized or excluded communities: Indigenous, Queer, Trans, the Chinese Canadian Museum, the Tahltan Nation, the South Asian Legacy Project, and others. Along the way, we learn the secret, neglected, and untold histories of this place we only think we know.
Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W. Bush
October 2 @ 7:00 pm
Director: Andreas Dresen
Language: In German, Turkish, and English with English subtitles
(1 hr 59 min)
Cast: Meltem Kaptan, Alexander Scheer, Charly Hübner, Nazmi Kirik, Sevda Polat
In December 2001, 19 year-old Murat Kurnaz is arrested while on a pilgrimage in Pakistan. His mother, Rabiye Kurnaz (Meltem Kaptan, Best Leading Performance at Berlinale)—a feisty housewife of Turkish descent living in Bremen, Germany—is desperate to track him down. In February 2002, she discovers that Murat is being detained indefinitely in Guantánamo Bay. Rabiye enlists the help of a human rights lawyer, Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer), to petition for his release.
For her voice to be heard, Rabiye must cut through red tape, international political tensions, and language barriers. With Bernhard as her ally and translator, she travels to Washington to appeal to the press, and eventually, the Supreme Court. While the odds against Murat may seem insurmountable, hope persists for Rabiye in the form of her quirky, budding friendship with Bernhard. Brimming with charm, tenderness, and unexpected levity, Andreas Dresen’s Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush weaves a true story of courage and determination to speak truth to power.
View Trailer > here
Call Jane
October 3 @ 7:00 pm
Director: Phyllis Nagy
Language: English
(2 hr 1 min)
Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Mara, Chris Messina, Wunmi Mosaku, Cory Michael Smith, Grace Edwards
A privileged housewife in 1968 Chicago finds herself at odds with the patriarchal medical establishment when she requires a life-saving termination of pregnancy. Joy (Elizabeth Banks, in a charming and nuanced performance) encounters an underground organization called Jane Collective that provides safe abortions to women, and eventually becomes an integral part in this necessary fight.
Directed by Phyllis Nagy, Call Jane deftly balances light and dark in exploring the stories of desperate women who require abortions and the women who risk their lives for them. A timely and relevant film about reproductive justice in the year that Roe v. Wade was overturned, the film is accessible, passionate, and hugely entertaining.
View Trailer > here
The Klabona Keepers
October 4 @ 7:00 pm
Director: Tamo Campos, Jasper Snow-Rosen
Language: English
(1 hr 9 min)
Content Warning: Residential Schools, Drug & Alcohol Abuse
The Klabona Keepers is a fierce account of the Tahltan Nation’s struggle to protect the Klabona Sacred Headwaters, an important natural habitat in northwest British Columbia, from commercial mining. The documentary, which premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival this year, intersperses verité cinematography with intimate interviews. It is an in-depth account of the different methods of resistance used by Indigenous elders, which include blockades and tense stand-offs with police and mining industry workers. Powerful moments of reflection are felt throughout the film as the trauma of residential schools and forced relocations are brought to light.
In an ongoing struggle against colonization, the film is continuing a long tradition of filmmakers who have documented Indigenous land defenders, such as Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, and Nettie Wild’s Blockade. The project is a collaboration between non-Indigenous filmmakers and Indigenous elders, who were given ownership of the intellectual property, with all proceeds from the film going towards youth programming at the Klabona Sacred Headwaters.
View Trailer > here