Engaging Cinema. Engaging Minds.

20th Annual Powell River Film Festival.


Ammonite
Director: Francis Lee
Language: English
(117 min)

In 1840s England, acclaimed but overlooked fossil hunter Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) works alone on the rugged Southern coastline. With the days of her famed discoveries behind her, she now searches for common fossils to sell to tourists to support herself and her ailing mother. When a wealthy visitor entrusts Mary with the care of his wife Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), she cannot afford to turn his offer down.

Proud and relentlessly passionate about her work, Mary initially clashes with her unwelcome guest, but despite the distance between their social class and personalities, an intense bond begins to develop, compelling the two women to determine the true nature of their relationship.

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Falling
Director: Viggo Mortensen
Language: English
(112 min)

John (Viggo Mortensen) lives with his partner, Eric (Terry Chen), and their daughter, Monica (Gabby Velis), in California, far from the traditional rural life he left behind years ago. His father, Willis (Lance Henriksen), a headstrong man from a bygone era, lives alone on the isolated farm where John grew up. Willis’s mind is declining, so John brings him west, hoping he and his sister, Sarah (Laura Linney), can help their father find a home closer to them. Their best intentions ultimately run up against Willis’s angry refusal to change his way of life in any way. In his directorial debut, Mortensen explores the fractures and contrasts of a contemporary family. Willis’s abrasive nature, by turns caustic and funny, is aggravated by memory loss, bringing past and present into conflict. As father and son finally confront events that have torn them apart, including their differing recollections of John’s mother, Gwen (Hannah Gross), we embark on a journey from darkness to light, from rage and resentment to acceptance and hard-won grace.

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Invisible Life
Director: Karim Aïnouz
Language: Portuguese with English subtitles
(139 min)

Winner of the Un Certain Regard award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the latest feature from prolific Brazilian auteur Karim Aïnouz (Madame Satã), set in mid-century Rio de Janeiro, is a sprawling melodrama about feminine resilience. Based on Martha Batalha’s beloved novel, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão is Aïnouz’s most accessible work even as it retains the unfettered sensuality and sumptuous splendour that render all his films so uniquely transporting.

The year is 1950. Classical piano prodigy Eurídice (Carol Duarte) dreams of studying at the Vienna Conservatory. Her sister, Guida (Julia Stockler), however, is the first of the siblings to make it to Europe, albeit fleetingly: after having eloped with a Greek sailor, Guida soon returns to Rio de Janeiro pregnant and alone, unbeknownst to Eurídice. Kept apart by a terrible lie, years pass as the two sisters forge their respective paths through their city’s teeming bustle, each believing the other to be half a world away.

Complementing the seductively saturated hues of the cinematography by Hélène Louvart (Happy as Lazzaro), the film’s soundtrack features a soulful score from Benedikt Schiefer coupled with a poignant voiceover duet consisting of the sisters’ misaddressed missives. Culminating in an affecting cameo from Oscar nominee Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station), Aïnouz’s stirring epic of winding paths that fail to intersect balances cruel ironies — the black sheep finds herself truly seen, while the ostensibly good daughter becomes invisible — with carnal abandon and tenacious love.

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The Magnitude of All Things
Director: Jennifer Abbott
Language: English
(100 min)

When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown. Abbott’s new documentary The Magnitude of All Things draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief—both personal and planetary. Stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood on Ontario’s Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.

For the people featured, climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action.

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Monkey Beach
Director: Loretta S. Todd
Language: English
(105 min)

Waking up in her East Van apartment, Lisa (Grace Dove) is served notice by her cousin’s ghost (Sera-Lys McArthur), “Your family needs you.” Reunited with her Haisla kin in Kitimaat Village, she realizes that she’s meant to save her brother (Joel Oulette) from a tragic fate she’s foreseen since childhood. Of course, there’s also the matter of contending with the mystical creatures lurking in the nearby woods. And so begins a captivating allegory about learning to coexist with both the ghosts that haunt us and spirits who might enlighten us.

In bringing Eden Robinson’s beloved novel to the screen, Loretta S. Todd offers us a modern epic underpinned by themes that have long defined heroic journeys. Todd’s first feature narrative unfolds through a thrilling array of temporal shifts and stylistic flourishes. A film about reconnection with the land, its denizens and the secrets it holds, Monkey Beach is also a testament to Indigenous women’s ability to not just endure trials but emerge from them empowered.

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The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel
Director: Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott
Language: English
(106 min)

From Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, filmmakers of the multi-award-winning global hit, The Corporation , comes this hard-hitting and timely sequel.

The New Corporation reveals how the corporate takeover of society is being justified by the sly rebranding of corporations as socially conscious entities. From gatherings of corporate elites in Davos, to climate change and spiralling inequality; the rise of ultra-right leaders to Covid-19 and racial injustice, the film looks at corporations’ devastating power. Countering this is a groundswell of resistance worldwide as people take to the streets in pursuit of justice and the planet’s future.

In the face of increasing wealth disparity, climate change, and the hollowing-out of democracy The New Corporation is a cry for social justice, deeper democracy, and transformative solutions.

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Prayer for a Lost Mitten
Director: Jean-François Lesage
Language: French, English, Haitian Creole with English subtitles
(79 min)

Jean-François Lesage’s latest documentary (winner of Hot Docs’ Best Canadian feature) takes us to snowy Montreal, where transit riders file into the metro system’s lost and found center to rummage for lost hand-knit tuques and missing house keys, or inquire after photos of departed loved ones tucked into missing bus pass sleeves.

Lesage’s interviews prompt these Montrealers to reflect on their deepest losses, including a loss of career whilst contending with chronic illness, families being displaced and torn apart by the Haiti earthquake, or an artist’s loss of his home, job, and lover to the AIDS crisis. Through crisp black-and-white photography and a jazzy, clarinet-infused soundtrack, Lesage paints a nostalgic picture of Montreal, detailing lives moved not only by sorrow, but also by longing and joy. An empathetic community portrait to warm us through the coming winter.

“Shot in velvety black and white with a looping jazz sax score, Lesage’s film [is] light, soft and wafting with poetic nostalgia.” – Stephanie Bunbury, The Age

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Race to Alaska
Director: Zach Carver
Language: English
(97 min)

Zach Carver’s film documents a boating race that pushes its contestants to the edge of endurance. The titular competition, also known as R2AK, takes contestants from Port Townsend, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska. Participants must traverse 750 miles of dangerous waters – the Inside Passage – without using motors of any kind, and without any outside support – that means no sponsors, no dockside repair teams, and nobody but the Coast Guard to offer help out there in the treacherous waters.

It’s a challenge many mariners would run from; those who take it on are varied in their experience and motivations, but they share a strength of spirit that viewers may look at with awe and envy. It’s a joy to see these folks in action, and Carver’s doc jumps from boat to boat as it spans the five years from R2AK’s inception to its most recent edition. The footage is interwoven with post-race reminiscences, background info, and commentary from the competition’s organizers. Bracing, immersive and wonderfully congenial, this film is a tribute to the spirit of adventure.

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The Reason I Jump
Director: Jerry Rothwell
Language: English
(82 min)

A Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winner at Sundance, Jerry Rothwell’s film is a revelatory work of education, a vital act of advocacy and an adventure for the senses. The subject is autism, and the source material is a book by Naoki Higashida, who lives with the condition and who, at age 13, wrote a groundbreaking account of it. Rothwell gives us excerpts from the book in voiceover while profiling Ben, Emma, Jestina, Joss, and Amrit, all of whom share with Naoki a neurological difference that has been much misunderstood by society at large.

Each of these individuals is unique in the challenges they face, and each makes for a powerful screen presence. Like Naoki, they’re obstructed by severe verbal challenges; also like him, they’re endowed with rich and intense inner lives. Rothwell experiments with sound and image to convey those lives; the results are at times jarring and at times intoxicating. The director’s aim is to bridge the gaps that circumstance has placed between the neurotypical and the autistic, and in this sense, his film is a resounding triumph.

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The Story of Plastic
Director: Deia Schlosberg
Language: English
(95 min)

The Story of Plastic is a searing expose, uncovering the ugly truth behind plastic pollution and the false solution of plastic recycling. Different from every other plastic documentary you’ve seen, THE STORY OF PLASTIC presents a cohesive timeline of how we got to our current global plastic pollution crisis and how the oil and gas industry has successfully manipulated the narrative around it. From the extraction of fossil fuels and plastic disposal to the global resistance fighting back, THE STORY OF PLASTIC is a life changing film depicting one of the world’s most pressing environmental issues.

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There is No Evil
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof
Language: Persian with English subtitles
(150 min)

Working in defiance of a lifelong ban on filmmaking, dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof delivers a piercing drama about a subject he knows well: the costs of living under a repressive, brutal government. Winner of the Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, There Is No Evil is a film of four chapters; each tells a different story related to the death penalty in contemporary Iran.

The first story concerns a family man who, as we come to see, pays a grave moral price for his comfortable middle-class life. The second and third chapters portray conscripted soldiers; in Iran, it is they who are often forced to perform executions, and both segments explore the tension and turmoil that can come with such harsh coercion. The final section involves a family secret, and it brings the film to a powerful conclusion. Suspenseful, mysterious and shot through with a sense of urgency, Rasoulof’s work bears the mark of an artist who sets his own terms – and who knows just how to captivate an audience.

“Brilliant… maintains [an] enthralling rhythm.” – Eric Kohn, Indiewire

Golden Bear, Berlin 2020

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Zappa
Director: Alex Winter
Language: English
(128 min)

With unfettered access to the Zappa family trust and all archival footage, ZAPPA explores the private life behind the mammoth musical career that never shied away from the political turbulence of its time. Alex Winter’s assembly features appearances by Frank’s widow Gail Zappa and several of Frank’s musical collaborators including Mike Keneally, Ian Underwood, Steve Vai, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, David Harrington, Scott Thunes, Ruth Underwood, Ray White and others.

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