Reviews

“A Woman Escapes” Review: Screen Sharing, New York Times, Nicolas Rapold

The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate yet sometimes reserved epistolary film centers on a more contemporary moment in Paris as a woman named Audrey processes the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that become lifelines out of the grief and creative block she’s feeling.

Her video and audio exchanges were made by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message here too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ predilections — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3-D.

”A Woman Escapes”: ScreenSlate, Caroline Golum

The cross-continental journey of a mysterious package inspires an epistolary exploration of time, memory, and grief in A Woman Escapes (2023). Unleashed by the newly-minted distribution arm of Prismatic Ground, Escapes is a fitting first release for the nascent festival, which rapidly attained prominence for its unique curatorial approach to experimental documentary.

This cinematic exquisite corpse, from filmmaking trio Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, begins with a simple and now familiar premise: in March 2020, Paris resident Audrey (frequent Bohdanowicz collaborator Deragh Campbell) is adrift in Montmartre. Staring down an indeterminate period of isolation, Audrey is grieving the loss of friend and mentor Juliane—the real-life star of Bohdanowicz’s 2017 documentary Maison du Bonheur—against the backdrop of an increasingly visible public health crisis. When a parcel from Blake arrives on her doorstep, containing a Fuji digital 3D camera, Audrey seizes the opportunity to translate her ennui into a revealing sequence of lush images.

Shooting Yourself: Film Diaries, POV, Justine Smith

With the advent of new filming technologies and new platforms to share our daily lives, many of us have taken our private lives and made them public. We’ve gone to Twitter to confess our sins; we’ve posted birthday pies on Instagram. Even the moderate social media user has likely made thousands of posts over the past decade. As many of us lived more of our lives online, it began to take on more of the shape of a diary. We all became filmers.

What does it mean to make a diary film in the 21st century? Have the conditions of contemporary life rendered the form obsolete, or conversely, more important than ever? Looking at filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Sofia Bohdanowicz, Kirsten Johnson, and RaMell Ross (among others), the contemporary diary film begins to take shape, and a project of discovery begins.

Alter Ego: On “A Woman Escapes”, Cinema Scope, Josh Cabrita

Festival reviewers who labeled A Woman Escapes an “Audrey movie”—that is, a continuation of the autobiographical series that Bohdanowicz has explored across four other works—have read the film almost entirely in this way, assuming that its narrative-driven sections provide the overarching relational structure that makes its other individual passages intelligible. But suppose we stop giving primacy to the “Audrey” frame and grant equal credence to the other two paradigms. The trouble then becomes to coherently unify stylistic modes that otherwise exclude each other. What could link these three representational systems together if adopting the parameters of one prevents the possibility of using devices endemic to another? Is there a way out of this bind without having recourse to the arbitrariness of the omnibus or the flattening-out of the framing device? Can there be an organizational pattern that allows all the modes to exist in the confines of a single work while still encouraging genuine experimentation between them?A Woman Escapes navigates these problems in a genuinely ingenious way. Rather than trying to find a structure that could unite all the modes together under one banner, the co-directors allow their contributions to open directly onto each other.

Best Undistributed Films of 2022, Film Comment, Simran Hans

Co-directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, A Woman Escapes is a collaborative work of autofiction—and possibly the world’s first 3D breakup movie. Fittingly, I watched it in the futuristic Cinéma Artplexe, a newly built multiplex that looks like a spaceship crash-landed on Marseille’s historic La Canebière. The film follows the newly heartbroken filmmaker Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) in Paris as her friends Burak and Blake attempt to lift her out of an emotional and creative funk through a series of video letters. Çevik and Williams shoot and narrate their own letters, while Bohdanowicz films Audrey in fuzzy-edged 16mm as the character wanders the apartment that belonged to her late friend, an astrologer named Juliane. Audrey is a kind of avatar for Bohdanowicz—she appears in four of the director’s other films, essayed each time by Campbell. (The character of Juliane is drawn from Bohdanowicz’s life, too—she was a real-life friend and collaborator who passed away shortly before the pandemic.)

Notebook's 15th Writers Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2022, David Hudson

Two collaborative projects borne of loss and grief embrace and even thrive on the differences between the stylistic approaches of each of their contributors. One of the astonishments of A Woman Escapes is the way that contrasting textures—16mm, 4K video, 3D—evoke the shifting feelings of isolation and abandonment as well as the yearning for at least a virtual connection that most of us felt at the height of the pandemic. Germany in Autumn, bookended by funerals, peaks early with Fassbinder’s segment, in which he rants and rails and reaches over and again for the telephone so that he can rant and rail some more. Even at his most repugnant and brutal, his charisma is electric.

Dear Grief, SquareEyes Films, Savina Petkova

On very rare occasions, I dream of films I haven’t seen. In these dreams, I am watching a sequence I know to be of that film, despite my steering away from any trailers, stills, or reviews, and that sequence is always of little narrative importance. Instead, it conveys the mood less with dialogue than with a distinct oneiric expression – of vibrant colours, protracted movements, and the inimitable conviction that everything – then and there – makes perfect sense. A Woman Escapes is one of those very few dream-guests, as I watched a 3D sequence from the side in the first row, in an auditorium so big that the pulsations of the screen felt both ominous and inviting. I had forgotten this, until the film itself made me remember.

Unstable Objects: FIDMarseille 2022, FilmComment, Simran Hans

Co-directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, A Woman Escapes is a collaborative work of autofiction—and possibly the world’s first 3D breakup movie. Fittingly, I watched it in the futuristic Cinéma Artplexe, a newly built multiplex that looks like a spaceship crash-landed on Marseille’s historic La Canebière. The film follows the newly heartbroken filmmaker Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) in Paris as her friends Burak and Blake attempt to lift her out of an emotional and creative funk through a series of video letters. Çevik and Williams shoot and narrate their own letters, while Bohdanowicz films Audrey in fuzzy-edged 16mm as the character wanders the apartment that belonged to her late friend, an astrologer named Juliane. Audrey is a kind of avatar for Bohdanowicz—she appears in four of the director’s other films, essayed each time by Campbell. (The character of Juliane is drawn from Bohdanowicz’s life, too—she was a real-life friend and collaborator who passed away shortly before the pandemic.)

Nothing will be left but memories, Senses of Cinema, Sofie Cato Maas

The Dutch writer W.F. Hermans asked how often it happens that we love a photograph of ourselves more than our own reflections? The character in his novel believes never, “for the camera never lies, meaning that whatever self-doubt there already was, it has now developed into desperation.”2 This notion of the camera as the ultimate conveyer of unadulterated true reflection becomes interesting in relation to the concept of a cinematic alter-ego of the filmmaker and once again the notion of re-enactment in cinema, because it indicates an irrevocable disconnection and discrepancy between the idealised image we have of ourselves and the objective image the camera shows us instead. This divergence between our self-image and an image-of-self on the camera is made concrete by Bohdanowicz through the use of her cinematic alter-ego, ultimately a warped form of self-observation while simultaneously the ultimate loss of self. A fragmentation of the individual that could either have created a more clouded view of reality and its representation, but that in A Woman Escapes seems to be the perfect way to portray and explore the incomprehensibility of loss, of grief, of what happens to us in that process, and the emotions that arise from it. Highlighting how cinema can be used as a tool to restage past (traumatic) events, find alternative representations of our memories, and perhaps, through that process, another form of self-awareness. The title of the film corroborates this, as it is a reference to Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), a film about the perseverance of belief in life in the face of complete hopelessness.

Trailer Premiere: A Woman Escapes, Criterion Daily, David Hudson

FIDMarseille’s thirty-third edition, running from July 5 through 11, will feature a program of thirteen short films by Ukrainian artists and filmmakers made between 2014—the year that fighting between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists began—and the present. Mati Diop, whose A Thousand Suns premiered at FIDMarseille in 2013, will preside over this year’s international competition jury, which includes Ted Fendt, Patrick Holzapfel, Bani Khoshnoudi, and João Pedro Rodriques.

Among the contending features are A Tale of Filipino Violence, the latest film by Lav Diaz—and yes, it’s long, coming in just a few minutes short of seven hours—and A Woman Escapes, an intriguing collaboration between three filmmakers many might not immediately associate with each other—Sofia Bohdanowicz, filming in 16 mm; Burak Çevik, working with 4K video; and Blake Williams, shooting in 3D.

The 22 most influential people in Canadian film, Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

Speaking of Anne at 13,000 ft.: If this country currently has an “It” actress, it absolutely must be Deragh Campbell, that film’s CSA nominated star. A fearless performer with a courageous track record of speaking out against the industry’s many pretzel-logic inconsistencies, Campbell has shifted expectations of just what kind of films can break out beyond our borders. This includes her own work behind the camera on the acclaimed MS Slavic 7, which she co-directed with regular collaborator Sofia Bohdanowicz. Together, the pair have made a series of deeply affecting short and feature-length works (Veslemøy’s Song, Never Eat Alone, Point and Line to Plane) that deftly blend documentary and fiction, and have their own delightful meta-canon way built a share Canadian cinematic universe. Take that, Marvel.

Tony Pipolo on the Currents section of the Fifty-Eighth New York Film Festival, Tony Pipolo, Art Forum

In a completely different vein, Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Point and Line to Plane is a soft, imaginatively rendered elegy in which the narrator dwells on the death of a close friend, possibly her lover. While his premature loss goes unexplained, the tone and words of her reminiscences suggest she failed to grasp what she meant to him and is left contemplating the art and music they shared as the only avenues of connection. This is captured in the last things we see: a painting by Kandinsky, the colors and forms of which transfix while remaining unfathomable.

10 must-see shorts from the Toronto International Film Festival 2020, Little White Lies, Hannah Woodhead

The title of Sofia Bohdanowicz’s short comes from Kandinsky’s art theory book of the same name, and the film concerns a young woman recovering from the death of a close friend. She attempts to find meaning through the art that they both adored, recalling small details and reflecting on her forever-changed worldview. The dreamy visuals of Bohdanowicz match perfectly with Deragh Campbell’s soothing monologue; the effect is a melancholy but beautiful mediation on grief and seeing.

Our Favorite Experimental Films From the Toronto International Film Festival, Serena Scateni, Hyperallergic

Death, art, and performance likewise collide in Point and Line to Plane (2020), the latest installment in the fruitful collaboration between filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz and actor Deragh Campbell. Campbell plays a young woman — Bohdanowicz’s fictional stand-in — grieving the sudden death of a friend. A visual poem touching on the emotional exhaustion of grappling with someone’s loss, Point and Line to Plane looks for answers in disparate objects — books, Mozartkugel ( a confection made of pistachio marzipan and nougat, coated in dark chocolate), the paintings of Kandinsky and Hilma Af Klint — and the shared dates of birth and death that eerily connect Bohdanowicz’s friend with both Mozart and af Klint. And yet, despite these impermanent threads, death is an inescapable condition. We can look to the sky or mountains for solace, but the absence spurred remains confounding.

Lest We Forget: the 31st FID Marseille, Leo Goi, Senses of Cinema

The greatest discovery of my three days at FID: Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Point and Line to Plane (2020). It was one of two films Bohdanowicz brought to Marseille, the other being MS Slavic 7 (2019), the final chapter of her “Audrey trilogy”, a triptych that follows the director’s fictional alter-ego (played in all three installments by Deragh Campbell, also credited as co-director of this last chapter) through tales loosely connected by their shared interest in unearthing the past – whether this is part of a family history (MS Slavic 7 and the 2016 Never Eat Alone) or an effort to salvage the legacy of forgotten artists (as in Veslemøy’s Song, 2018 – though family memoirs and artists’ archives are, all through Bohdanowicz’s filmography, intimately linked objects of pursuit). And even if Point and Line to Plane doesn’t fit within that trilogy, it still responds to similar preoccupations: a struggle to rescue someone’s memory from oblivion, and the role that art can play in the quest.

A Look at Short Cuts Programme 02 | TIFF 2020, Andrew Parker, The Gate

Sofia Bohdanowicz – one of Canada’s finest cinematic artists of the moment – returns to the festival alongside frequent collaborator and star Deragh Campbell with Point and Line to Plane. Shot in Bohdanowicz’s now somewhat trademark 16mm style, Point and Line to Plane is a rumination on ways of connecting art and movement to some of our hardest to express feelings. Talks of Mozart, Klimt, and Kandinsky link up with poignant examinations of loss, cyclical thinking, and other intrusive, ineffable feelings. Point and Line to Plane slots nicely alongside Bohdanowicz and Campbell’s other collaborations, offering up a nice continuation of the work the filmmaker has been putting out for the past several years. It will make one consider the question of why an artist’s work lasts long after they’ve died.

Point and Line to Plane, Lawrence Garcia, In Review

Bohdanowicz’s resourceful practice has often managed to maintain a distanced, but emotionally acute perspective on her subjects, and this film especially recognizes the extent to which meaning — of a painting, of a person’s death — derives from the associations that we are able to form, while also pointing up to the contingency of such connections. Like the picture frame that Audrey knocks over while house-sitting for a friend, our points of view are more unstable than we might know. So perhaps a person’s death is, in the end, the loss of both a life and a form of life. For to lose someone is to lose not just the sight of them, but also their way of seeing.

10 must-see Canadian short films at TIFF 2020, Norm Wilner, NOW Magazine

Toronto director Sofia Bohdanowicz and actor Deragh Campbell have worked together for years. Here, they continue their remarkable collaboration with a pointed meditation on loss, loneliness and the stifled legacy of the abstract artist Hilma Af Klint.

TIFF 2020: Point and Line to Plane, Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope

The sterile, corkscrew expanse of the Guggenheim is a concrete geometric presence in Point and Line to Plane, which takes its title from a 1947 book of art theory by Wassily Kandinsky and is punctuated by images of his abstract canvases, as well as those of his lesser-known predecessor Hilma af Klint. Adrift in New York and stung by the unexpected death of a friend, Audrey Benac (played once again by Deragh Campbell, as ever a hybrid subject, star, and surrogate for director Sofia Bohdanowicz) botches the dates for an af Klint exhibition and balefully watches the paintings being installed from the sidelines.

Dispatch from the Avant-Garde: Joshua Previews the Currents Section at NYFF 2020, Criterion Cast, Joshua Brunsting

Shorts are also incredibly important with regards to this collection of films, as there are eight separate programs pertaining to everything from stories about New York like Ricky D’Ambrose’s incredible and poignant Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday to a series called “Code Unknown,” led by the latest collaboration from director Sofia Bohdanowicz and star Deragh Campbell (MS Slavic 7). In this gorgeously shot 18 minute feature (shot brilliantly on 16mm) Point and Line To Plane draws its title from an essay penned by painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose paintings provide part of the backdrop to this devastating story of loss and memory through art.

New York Film Festival – Critic’s Choices, The Independent, Kurt Brokaw

Director Bohdanowicz, who also shot and edited this most complex of all the festival’s shorts, chooses to withhold any final information. She won’t venture beyond the tantalizing matching images that began her subject’s search. It’s a daring artistic decision, what’s more commonly derided as an artistic conceit, but in its own surprisingly magical way, it works.

Family Archives: Close-Up on “MS Slavic 7”, Madeleine Wall, MUBI Notebook

It’s odd, the places we find the dead. Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) is at the Harvard archives looking for letters written by her great-grandmother, the poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa. Having become the literary executor of the great-grandmother’s estate, Audrey’s quest to put her family’s affairs in order ends up more complicated than anticipated. MS Slavic 7, the third collaboration of Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell (though the first where they’re credited as co-directors), is a kind of archival detective film, looking for one’s family among the fragments. Through shorts and features Bohdanowicz has created a body of work which is well aware that no letter is ever just a letter. The ones in MS Slavic 7 are part of a correspondence with Polish poet Jozef Wittlin, and are held in his archive (under the titular call number MS Slavic 7), in a country Bohdanowiczowa never lived in. What few items Audrey has of her great-grandmother belong to someone else now, her poetry forgotten, letters held underneath another man’s name, and her whole work absorbed into someone else. For Audrey, being a literary executor is something she approaches with a single-minded focus. Her work is solitary, alone in a hotel room and archive, but through this process her great-grandmother becomes more than just a text.

Berlinale 2019 Dispatch: Jordan Cronk , Film Comment

Toronto-based filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz has herself been building an intelligent and highly personal filmography over the last decade. MS Slavic 7, her latest feature and perhaps the strongest of this quartet of Forum premieres, finds her again exploring her family history through a fictionalized framework that draws equally from the archive as it does the well of first-hand experience. Co-directed by and starring Bohdanowicz’s frequent lead Deragh Campbell, the film follows Campbell’s Audrey (a character first introduced in Bohdanowicz’s 2016 feature Never Eat Alone) as she researches letters sent by her great-grandmother, a Polish poet, to author Józef Wittlin while the two lived in exile in North America. These letters, written by Bohdanowicz’s real-life great-grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, form the backbone of the story; seen variously on the page, translated on screen as subtitles, or projected on the wall of Harvard’s Houghton Library (the film’s title refers to the reference number of the correspondence), the words and their material record become a powerful conduit of memories and emotions. 

MS Slavic 7 Grapples with the Existential in the Simplest of Ways:  Carson Lund, Slant Magazine

For a film shot on the intangible medium of digital video, writer-directors Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s micro-budget investigative drama MS Slavic 7 is remarkably preoccupied with what its protagonist repeatedly describes as “objecthood,” or the value that archived materials carry beyond their ostensible content. In her repeated trips to a Harvard University library, Audrey (Campbell) obsesses over her deceased great-grandmother’s letters and poems, in which she hopes to find deeper traces of a woman she never knew, such as the nature of her relationship with the male poet with whom she regularly corresponded. However, her painstaking attention to primary sources, which the film dryly dramatizes in real-time passages of reading, photocopying and exegesis, seems as much an archaeological exercise as a literary study—a pursuit analogous to that of a film archivist, who can discern the life cycle of a reel through its permutations of decay.

Berlinale first look: MS Slavic 7 draws strength from the written word: Ian Mantgani, BFI

Sofia Bohdanowicz is a Torontonian whose slender films walk the lines between amateur and professional, fiction and documentary, and which share a common theme of youngsters calling back to previous generations in a quest for nourishment. Her most well-known previous movie, 2017’s Maison du bonheur, was a 62-minute tour of pleasures shot on warm 16mm, in which Bohdanowicz herself visited a friend’s septuagenarian aunt in Paris and basked in the contact high of her hortensia garden, challah dough and pearls of wisdom.

’Maison du Bonheur,’ a Beguiling Portrait of a Woman in Paris: Glenn Kenny, New York Times

The Paris apartment where Ms. Sellam has lived for 50 years becomes, for Ms. Bohdanowicz, the place of the title, which translates as “Home of Happiness.” Ms. Sellam, cheerful and garrulous, eagerly gives accounts of both her biography and her surroundings. The lovely balcony of her apartment is festooned with geraniums, which, Ms. Sellam notes, repel mosquitoes. She walks the filmmaker through her beauty regimen and discusses how she became a professional astrologer. She’s a profound delight.

"Maison du Bonheur” Isn’t Just a Doc About Life With a Charming Parisian — It’s a Vacation: Alan Scherstuhl, The Village Voice

The film is a portrait of a woman, 77 at the time of filming, and her home, dedicated to processes — behold Sellam’s recipe for bread for Shabbat — and striking still-life shots. Here are fruit and herbs in bowls before an open window, a breeze easing through them; here are the fashionable Sellam’s pumps and heels, a collection Galapagan in abundance and variety. Sellam speaks with enthusiasm as she waters her flowers, bakes a cake, gets her nails and hair done, or gives Bohdanowicz an astrological reading. She explains about how she refuses to leave the apartment without makeup, how much she loves not having had plastic surgery, how her late husband would buy her three or four pairs of shoes at a time. We see old photographs of Sellam in smashing gowns and watch her snack with her sister, both of whom must be gently told, when toasting each other for Bohdanowicz, not to look at the camera. (That camera: a hand-cranked Bolex.)

HOT DOCS 2017: “MAISON DU BONHEUR”: Matt Fagerholm, RogerEbert.com

The final film I caught at the festival was the enchanting “Maison du Bonheur,” directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, who is earning a well-deserved reputation as the Agnès Varda of Toronto. Bohdanowicz has actually met Varda and was inspired by her 1976 classic, “Daguerréotypes,” where the iconic filmmaker observed the lives of people in the shops of the Rue Daguerre. Varda’s home was located in the same neighborhood, and when she found herself unable to plug in an electrical cord at the shops, she had to run the 90 meter cable from her home to the shooting locations, thus giving her an “umbilical cord.” The magic that Varda was able to conjure within these limitations inspired Bohdanowicz to embark on a project confined largely within an apartment in Paris where her subject, astrologist Juliane Sellam, has resided for the past 50 years.

Having just turned 30, Bohdanowicz was grappling with her own sense of direction, and reflected on how she had once dreamed of living in Paris. So when one of her colleagues suggested that she spend a month with her Parisian mother, the opportunity was impossible for the filmmaker to resist. Yet rather than utilize the digital technology that Varda has famously embraced, Bohdanowicz instead chose a Bolex camera with 30 rolls of film allowing for a mere 90 minutes of potential footage. This audacious move required the director to recreate the majority of the film’s sound effects in post. So precise was her attention to detail that she even recorded the whirring of her Bolex.

"Maison du Bonheur": Chelsea-Phillips Carr, POV Magazine

A symbiotic relationship is formed between director and subject. Sellam lends herself to Bohdanowicz’s film, while the director presents herself as author: allowing us to hear her daily filming logs and directorial instructions, it is impossible to forget who is the creative agent. But despite Bohdanowicz’s leading role, she takes direction from the older woman. Nearing the end of the film, Sellam guides Bohdanowicz by reading her astrological chart.

Bohdanowicz has her own influences: it is impossible to watch this film without recalling the earlier work of Agnès Varda, especially the 1967 film Le Bonheur with its own still shots of everyday beauty and focus on women’s domestic work. Within a film where she never gives up her own creative agency, Bohdanowicz allows herself to be guided by an older generation of women, personally and cinematically, allowing their influences to enrich her work, in the same way that astrological knowledge is presented as enriching character. With absorbing narrative variety paired with great aesthetic unity, Maison du Bonheur reverentially depicts the significance of a feminine legacy.

The Hottest Docs of Hot Docs 2017: Corey Atad, Vice Magazine

Of the many films to show at Hot Docs, a few in particular stood out. Maison du bonheur, directed by Toronto filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz, broke the mold for what most would expect from a documentary. The doc moves much more like an essay—or a meditation, even, as it follows a month during which Bohdanowicz lived in Paris with a 77-year-old woman named Juliane Sellam. There's no story to speak of—only segments detailing aspects of Juliane's life and her daily routines. Shot on beautiful 16mm and constructed with marvelous subtlety, Maison du bonheur is a work of empathic delight, conveying the feeling of a life lived while providing only a glimpse at it.

Maison du bonheur: Norm Wilner, NOW Magazine

The first feature documentary by Sofia Bohdanowicz lands somewhere between portraiture and character study, as the Toronto filmmaker spends a month in Paris with 77-year-old Juliane Lumbroso-Sellam. Lumbroso-Sellam is a great subject, telling lively stories about her childhood and her career as an astrologer. She's also more than eager to play life coach to Bohdanowicz whenever the opportunity arises, which lets her guest add a layer of self-reflection to the piece.

It's entirely in line with the director's body of short films - images of calm rooms and cafés are have with a melancholy undercurrent, a meditation on the gap between the young and old. At a point where documentaries are becoming increasingly flashy and frantic, watching Maison Du Bonheur feels like arriving at an oasis.

Women to Watch: Sofia Bohdanowicz: Kiva Reardon, cléo - a journal of film and feminism

Firsts are often thought to belong to the young: first steps, first word, first day of school, first kiss, first heartbreak. In this way, firsts are synonymous with novelty, momentous events that become less and less frequent—or at least less publicly lauded—as time passes. It’s a logic that emphasizes youth and calcifies the assumption that as we age, we cease to experience wonder, surprise or adventure. The films of Sofia Bohdanowicz subvert the dominant logic: focusing on the lives of elderly matriarchs, the filmmaker challenges such conventional thinking and makes the case for never-ending novelty despite our years.

Older women have largely proven to be an impossibility of the imagination on screen. Battling both sexism and ageism, the demographic faces a doubled erasure as though their inner lives cease to exist once past the years of the doe-eyed ingénue, the love interest or the doting wife and mother. Bodhanowicz undermines this trope by turning to the matriarchs in her own life, her paternal and maternal grandmothers, and in doing so paints complex portraits of women who continue to live long after mainstream culture ceases to showcase them.

Towards a Canadian Cinema: Future//Present and VIFF 2016: Josh Cabrita, MUBI

Of Future//Present’s world premieres, Sofia Bohdanowicz is the greatest discovery. Without any wide recognition, the Toronto-based filmmaker has built a distinct and impressive body of work. She is, as section programmer Adam Cook once described her, Canada’s Chantal Akerman, who works on the margins with no support from Telefilm and little help from Canadian festivals. From inside a national cinema that privileges men, Bohdanowicz’s films celebrate the un-represented matriarchy.

Considering the invisible misogyny throughout Telefilm, an organization that relegates female filmmakers into gendered positions, Bohdanowicz’s films are opposed to the institutional form that critics celebrate, curators program and Telefilm funds. According to an article in the Toronto Now discussing the funding body’s lack of female representation, between 2013-2014 women directed a mere 4 percent of all films that received an investment above 1 million dollars (the alarmingly few indigenous filmmakers supported by the agency is also disconcerting, but deserves its own space in a separate article). Working at the lower levels isn’t much easier for women, and although Bohdanowicz’s cinema doesn’t directly deal with this issue in particular, it does so implicitly by revealing the patriarchal system that deletes women from families and Canadian histories.

VIFF 2016: Never Eat Alone (Sofia Bohdanowicz, 2016): Sean Gilman, Seattle Screen Scene

Of the three films in VIFF’s new Future // Present series that I’ve seen thus far, the program Sunday night of Toronto filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz’s new feature paired with three of her short films is the standout. The feature is a fictionalization of the story of her maternal grandmother, Joan Benac, playing herself, who in the early 1950s, appeared as a singer and actress on a kitschy television show. Remembering this in a dream, she tasks her granddaughter Audrey (played by Deragh Campbell, in one of her three films at VIFF this year) with finding the show and tracking down the boy she co-starred with and had dated briefly...

Even more astonishing though, are the three short films paired with the feature, chronicling Bohdanowicz’s paternal grandmother. The first, A Prayer, is a short documentary, following said grandmother around her house has she does various chores (and eats a meal, alone, naturally). The second, An Evening, is something special: a tour of the grandmother’s house shortly after her death, patiently documenting its spaces while one of her records plays on the stereo, intermittently marred by a broken needle, from late afternoon until the space disappears into the darkness of night. It’s a film Chantal Akerman would be proud of. The third, Another Prayer, replays the first short, but superimposed over the now empty spaces of the woman’s home, completely silent. Each film is prefaced by a poem composed by Bohdanowicz’s great-grandmother, and the cumulative effect of the trilogy together is devastating.

VIFF's absolute beginners: Our top picks for debut features at this year's fest: Adrian Mack, The Georgia Straight

Sofia Bohdanowicz is the “future of Canadian cinema”, according to Future//Present programmer Adam Cook. “She’s our Chantal Akerman. Her cinema is already complete and extraordinary, and I imagine that her name is one we will study.” Yowza! A widow in her 80s wonders about the fate of an almost-flame she met on the set of a live TV musical in the ’50s. Her granddaughter tracks down the tape, and more. On this slim premise, presented with docu-like realism, Bohdanowicz builds an acutely observed poem to ordinary life that somehow also contains an outlandish gimmick (though that’s hardly the right word) best saved for discovery inside the theatre.

First Look 2015, Canadian Filmmakers: Adam Nayman, Reverse Shot

...the three shorts at First Look by Sofia Bohdanowicz are explicitly connected: the Toronto-based experimental filmmaker intended Modlitwa (A Prayer), Wieczór (An Evening), and Dalsza Modlitwa (Another Prayer) (all 2013) as a trilogy. Modlitwa, which was shot at the Etobicoke home of the filmmaker’s grandmother Maria is a lovely domestic study—an old woman’s solo household rituals overlaid with poetry—that unexpectedly became a memorial when its subject passed away a few weeks after filming.

Bohdanowicz returned to the house twice more for a pair of companion shorts. Wieczór surveys the now empty dwelling over the course of an evening in increasingly dim light, with Maria as a deeply felt structuring absence (one possible reference point for this film of rooms and objects would the montage at the end of Antonioni’s L’eclisse). The ingenious Dalsza Modlitwa literally combines its predecessors, with the first film and its images of Maria projected against the interiors of her home, a superimposition that feels at once like a haunting and a resurrection. It’s a dexterous formal maneuver that points to cinema’s capacity to illuminate while still acknowledging that darkness is the prerequisite of that process.

Rep Cinema This Week: i hate myself :), Last Poems, and Uvanga: Angelo Murreda, Torontoist

“We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here,” Margaret Atwood wrote of Canada in her afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie, an observation translated and imbued with understated beauty by the short films of Sofia Bohdanowicz. Bohdanowicz’s screening series Last Poems animates the filmmaker’s generational history of migration and settlement by adapting the poetry of her great-grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, who came to Toronto from Poland in the 1960s, and grieving her grandmother, whose presence haunts the spaces she’s left behind.

The first thing one notices about Bohdanowicz’s films is her keen eye for detail, from the artfully displayed storefronts of Dundas Street, narrated by an elderly immigrant woman attempting to adjust to her newly urban surroundings, to the inventory of gardening gloves, notes, and abandoned household items that populate Modlitwa, Wieczór, and Dalsza Modlitwa, a trilogy devoted to the filmmaker’s grandmother, profiled at work in her home in the first film and treated as a haunting absence in the final two. Wieczór especially is a stunning achievement, matching the imagistic riches of the other instalments with a haunting score that pairs Rodgers and Hammerstein with a niggling scraping sound. Even more than by their personal resonance and emotional depth, one is impressed by the films’ carefully wrought design, evident in everything from the deliberate pacing to the assured use of onscreen text.

The series is rounded out by the titular short, a delicate coda that documents Bohdanowicz’s trip to Iceland and fleeting bond with Toby, a fellow filmmaker and German hostel-mate who hopes to shoot a music video as Bohdanowicz documents the countryside. Gorgeous as it is, in a primal sort of way, the frosty environment proves unyielding to both filmmakers’ quixotic goals.

The Old Ways: Norm Wilner, NOW Toronto

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).