Sofia Bohdanowicz’s latest pieces together the extraordinary story of real-life early 20th-century Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow—who by rights should be a household name—blending fact with a fictionalized family history.
The director’s frequent collaborator, actress Deragh Campbell, plays Audrey Benac, a woman on a single-minded mission to learn more about Parlow, who has slipped away from collective memory. Melding her own personal history into the film, Parlow was Bohdanowicz’s grandfather’s violin mentor and teacher. Parlow is the subject of Audrey’s Ph.D. thesis and her research takes her from Toronto to London to Oslo and far away from her dying mother, who is bitter that she never got to pursue her own violin dreams while her husband did, a legacy that haunts Audrey.
Discovering a once-lost composition dedicated to Parlow, Audrey shoves aside her own personal problems to restage the opus. Culminating in a beautiful final concerto that is layered in meaning and importance, this film brings to light a forgotten icon, while simultaneously reflecting on loss, regrets, and closure. More ambitious than anything Bohdanowicz has previously made, Measures for a Funeral is still very much in line with her body of work. Fans will recognize her emotional precision and collaborative spirit while also appreciating her decision to stretch herself in new directions, adding new notes to her established melodies. (TIFF)
TRT: 142 min
In person: Sofia Bohdanowicz
"Both a grand culmination of Bohdanowicz’s past decade of filmmaking and a bold leap forward." —Ryan Akler-Bishop, desistfilm
"Exquisite... Bohdanowicz has refined an already impressive gift for making the past tactile." —Stephen Saito, The Moveable Fest
"Campbell’s performance evokes something grand, mysterious, and decidedly private, and as Audrey uncovers truths about Parlow, she exposes her own wounds to the audience—a kind of puzzle box of personal and professional discovery." —Saffron Maeve, MUBI Notebook
"Across this new epic scale, Bohdanowicz loses nothing of, and in fact deepens, her fusion of the personal with the imagined to tell the story of a forgotten artist. What results is perhaps [her] most transparently self-reflexive film, one that aims a direct, unambiguous gaze at the past, and even the supernatural." —Chris Cassingham, InReviewOnline
"At once the most self-referential of the Audrey films and the most self-contained... Campbell’s translucent, reactive performance builds a bridge between antiseptic contemporary academic spaces and the precious, often dusty real-life archival material which Bohdanowicz inserts into the film, but this bridge is necessarily a swaying, temporary passage over a massive void of forgetting." —Mark Asch, Filmmaker Magazine
(Available to download after screening date)