Hey, the new Transformers movie opens this week. Were you thinking of seeing it? Don’t. It’s awful. See something else.
Naomi Jaye’s minimalist Holocaust drama The Pin, maybe. If you read Susan G. Cole’s review in the print edition of NOW, you may have noticed I’m doing a Q&A with writer-director Jaye after tonight’s (Friday’s) early-evening screening at the Canada Square.
The Q&A is still happening – and I’m quite looking forward to it – but an incorrect start time was printed. The show is actually starting at 6:10 pm. Maybe have dinner afterward instead.
There, that’s tonight sorted. For tomorrow (Saturday), I can recommend something along slightly similar lines: Last Poems, a screening of five short films by Sofia Bohdanowicz.
Produced between 2012 and 2013, the shorts form a delicate and affecting tribute to the life and work of Bohdanowicz’s great-grandmother, the poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa. Bohdanowiczowa’s writing is used as a jumping-off point, but Bohdanowicz puts her own feelings into the mix, fusing past and present perspectives and forming something new.
Impressionistic, moving in emotional beats rather than following a narrative structure, the five pieces form a study of memory and absence, re-creating an immigrant woman’s struggle to find a place in a new community (Dundas Street) and a widow’s attempts to stabilize her life (Prayer), capturing the filmmaker’s own sense of dislocation as she tries to memorialize and honour her departed grandmother (An Evening, Another Prayer) and ultimately move forward with her own work (Last Poem).
Last Poems screens Saturday (June 28) at 7:30 pm at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Tickets are $10 in advance (available here), or $12 at the door. Given that this screening is presented by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, I would expect an emotional evening, and no giant robots whatsoever.
