Passionflower (2011 film)

Passionflower
Directed by	Shelagh Carter
Written by	Shelagh Carter
Produced by	Polly Washburn
Starring	Kassidy Love Brown Kristen Harris Darcy Fehr
Release date	April 2012 (2012-04)
Running time	84 minutes
Land	Kanada
Sprache	Englisch

Passionflower is a 2011 Canadian drama film directed by Shelagh Carter and starring Kassidy Love Brown, Kristen Harris and Darcy Fehr. It has been described as a "a harrowing portrait of mental illness".

Plot

Sarah Matthews, a creative eleven-year-old girl on the brink of puberty in 1962 suburban Winnipeg, is starved for attention in the midst of her chaotic family life. With a distracted, hardworking father and a seemingly unstable mother, Sarah's loneliness leads her to make a new friend at school. But after meeting his seemingly perfect mother, her own mother's shortcomings become harder to ignore. From the erotic seduction of dinner guests to the bouts of tortured distress in the middle of the night, Sarah grows increasingly concerned and confused with her mother's erratic behavior. As the situation dramatically worsens following an emotional visit to her mentally ill grandmother, Sarah becomes painfully aware of the extent of her mother's own illness. Sarah must force her family to come to terms with her mother's increasing mental instability.

Cast

• Kassidy Love Brown as Sarah Matthews
• Kristen Harris as Beatrice Matthews
• Darcy Fehr as David Matthews

Production

Inspiration

As a child, Shelagh Carter had a troubled relationship with her mother; there is a family history of mental illness going back to Carter's grandmother. In an interview, Carter asserted that Passionflower was her own story, that her experience of her mother is "85% of what is seen on the screen":

A lot of women at the time, an era of being perfect, staying in the home, repressed their anger from not being able to express themselves. The mental health industry at the time made women the problem and treated them with electroshock therapy.

Deveopment, writing, and financing

The idea for a film started to solidify when Carter was accepted into the Canadian Film Centre's Directors Lab in Toronto in 2009.

We had to send in two feature film treatments. I had written about my mum and me and the cat... I had written it as a short film around that time, and I showed it to my friend John and he said, "Shelagh, I think this is actually a feature, for some reason." Scenes started to come to me, all kinds of scenes, they were all over the map. To the best of my ability I wrote a treatment. It was called Hello Darling at the time. I sent it in. And ... one of the advisors said, "You're not ready to do Hello Darling" and one of the other advisors, John Paizs, who I actually knew from Winnipeg, said, "Nope, I think that's the one she should do." I wrote the party scene and I did a six minute short. It was the first time that I started to think about it as a feature.

On her return to Winnipeg, Carter was introduced to producer and fellow CFC alumna Polly Washburn in November 2009, who read the treatment and said they would make the film. Washburn would talk to Telefilm Canada while she was in Vancouver for the Olympics, assuring Carter: "We're not going to worry about going into development, we're going to go straight to production." In January 2010, Carter took a screenwriting course, "got a structure going," and sent it to Washburn for editing.

I met with Telefilm in Vancouver, and they knew me from my shorts. I told them, "We're going to make this film out in the prairies, and you want to be part of it? Because we're gonna make it anyway." I happened to take some of my drawings, of the Vargas girls, and they loved the drawings. By April, we submitted it. We had three tough phone calls. By June 1, we had the go-ahead. Because I had to be back to work in September, we had to film in August, and that's what we did. It just came out of me. I was ready. I think I was the only director that showed up at the CFC where they didn't think of me as a writer. I didn't think of myself as a writer, and that was based on my mother telling me that that wasn't my thing, and me buying into it. So it was also breaking that spell.

In addition to funding from Telefilm, Carter and Washburn raised US$5,920 on crowdfunding website Indiegogo towards Passionflower, when the film's working title was still Hello, Darling.

Casting

All of the actors were from Manitoba. Carter knew she wanted Darcy Fehr, whom she had seen in several Guy Maddin films as "Guy's alter ego": "I knew he was right and I had to put my foot down. He was busy working on Keyhole and Polly said, 'Well, I don't know if we can get him' and I said, 'No, we gotta have him.'" Carter had a meeting with Kirsten Harris porch and "she talked about how much she loved the script", asked some questions and Carter made a point of telling her:

I just want you to know that this is not a hate fest, this is not Mommie Dearest – this is about the illness, this is about the truth of how it all went down – so the film has to be honest that way." My mum was a tragic figure. In the early readings, I could just feel Kristen's intelligence. She just said to me, "I'm going to ask you to trust me. If I have questions, I'll ask." We hit it off. I just tried to stay out of her way.

Several years later, after Kirsten Harris had won an award for Before Anything You Say Carter's second feature, and playing again opposite Darcy Fehr, Harris said Passionflower was one of the two most memorable roles of her career:

As a lead, I have to say Passionflower. It was the most difficult role I've played in that she was in quite a dark place mentally and emotionally throughout, so to sustain that took a bit of a toll (suffice it to say there were some late night calls to my mom!). But maybe because of that, it was also just so magical. I'll never forget it.

Filming

Principal photography took place in Winnipeg over fourteen days.

Reception

Passionflower was voted the Audience Choice Feature at the 2012 Anchorage Film Festival. It solidified her position as one of Canada's leading practitioners of "searingly glorious psychological melodrama".

External links

• Passionflower at IMDb
• Passionflower at AllMovie