Measures for a FuneralBuilding a Home: Sofia Bohdanowicz’s openness to an inquisitive world Susana Bessa July 2025 Feature Articles Issue 114 It is mesmerizing to watch someone so absorbed in their work. (…) Her hands seem almost transparent as she touches the letters, moves them across the screen. All that evidence, turning realer and more dreamlike in the light. – Emma Healey, in Best Young Woman Job Book Concerning a voice through air it takes space to fold time in feeling – Susan Howe, in Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker What do we talk about when we talk about a filmmaker’s body of work? Especially an auteur’s. There’s an urge to itemise and recite the cumulative aspects that define the body of work. But is it only that? Is it only about how a cluster of similar characteristics can make up an identity? Or is it about something more organic of which the filmmaker her/himself might not even be completely aware? Something akin to what people call “a voice”, which begs for even more questions. Where does this “voice” come from? How is it built, or can it be built at all? And what is it made of? Being cinema’s main fabric memory and its inner-workings, it all goes back to a desire for the creation of its body while it fades and withers from our grasp as we try to touch it. This desire or aim can be found, under the surface and between the lines, in most filmmakers’ bodies of work that are undergoing investigative paths. What is singled out in Canadian Sofia Bohdanowicz’s work is that the aim is the investigation. Speaking via zoom while touring the film festival circuit with her latest feature film, Measures for a Funeral (2024), the young talented filmmaker, known as one of the icons of New Canadian Cinema, with over a decade of lauded work shown all over the world, pointed out that: (…) it’s always about the act of reaching. Your reaching is much more interesting than actually attaining the goal or the object. It’s all about effort. And the energy put into grasping that material is sometimes more interesting than the material itself. In other words, the clarity runs away from you, but it’s your undivided attempt to catch glimpses of an inner voice that is meaningful. “It’s almost, like, the effort of everything to become language”, we hear in MS Slavic 7 (2019), on its way to being knowledge. Filmmaking as an exercise in devising the future, in how it builds bridges so that it can sense things. Still, a question remains, for that to happen, should the filmmaker be aware that it is happening? “Memories are like plants, they say. Some plants need to get rid of their seeds immediately so that another one can grow Develop. Bloom a little. (…) The flower is what the seed forgets”, is one of the main takeaways from A Woman Escapes (2022), a correspondence film written in six hands by Bohdanowicz and two other filmmaker friends of hers, Blake Williams and Burak Çevik, propelled by the disintegration of physical connection during the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking over at the evolution of Sofia’s work, she wants to make flowers out of her own seeds, her family’s, or those of people with whom she has or will come into contact. The difference being she’s never had to forget them. And neither is she remembering them. Blending fact with a fictional world, they are memories being found out for the first time. All tales of grief and sorrow, Sofia’s cinema is filled with possible portraits of ladies, and the traces they’ve left for others to find and keep. Whether her subjects are family ancestors – both her grandmothers and her great-grandmother, a 77-year-old Parisian astrologer mother of Sofia’s colleague or a long forgotten Canadian classical violinist who taught her grandfather violin – she’s on a mission to be physically closer to lives on the verge of being erased from history, and to rescue them from obscurity. Which is also why formally, her films are to be discovered as ghost-hunting stories, in the sense that there’s a resurfacing of these women’s real-life essences, projected and breathed back into life through film. In her path to laying down these surfaces, Bohdanowicz is to initiate correspondence with other realms of existence, and we’ll see her arrive and depart many times from one to the other while actively doing work that is procedural, about process (the thematic dailiness of life and its doing will mirror the filmmaking procedure), eventually calling for the creation of a conduit character, a fictional alter-ego made up of the filmmaker and her friend, actress, co-writer and frequent collaborator Deragh Campbell, Audrey Benac (the name stolen from Sofia’s real-life cousin). Both Sofia, Deragh and Audrey will be driven by an academic belief in the written word, in communication that transcends speed or the very concept of space or time. Especially because in every film, archival research is intimately articulated. In the latter films it is even done in an audible way, not unlike what writing a poem in cinematic form would sound and look like. Her Polish ancestry and the immigrant experience will also come into play. Having fled Poland during the Russian invasion, her paternal great-grandmother and namesake Zofia Bohdanowiczowa lived in Europe during World War II, only to end up in Toronto in the 1960s. Third generation Canadian, Sofia is “to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly” (Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story), as she builds work catapulted by a yearning to resurface her foundations, determined to set the world right. Such manifestation is, of course, physical, given how we can see inside every film, as it’s being put together. Maison du Bonheur Being a filmmaker whose role is akin to a producer of infrastructures, intent on raising connections, it wouldn’t be folly to suggest that the interconnectedness she’s looking to gather in her work can be illustrated by a building, where various time frames and geographical spaces would be reanimated at the same time. In truth, taking into account how most of her films are shot in houses, and are about houses as some of the most authentic harbours for identity and cultivation, especially the ones we make for ourselves, it would make nothing but sense for her work to manifest the creation of one. Now, what kind of a building would it be? If we think of filmographies, it’s easy to conjure up old many windowed houses that couldn’t look more different from the outside to how their interior feels. In the case of Sofia, there’s a unique factor. Using one and the same timeline, most of her films are weaved together in either real life, in the fictional world created, or both. Moreover, she not only explores various formats, but her films all find themselves straddled between (auto) fiction, documentary and the cine-essay/poem, without a screenplay and mostly dependent on improvisation. I basically had these outlines or an architecture where I would say, OK, this is where we’re going to start. In the case of MS Slavic 7, Deragh presented me with an outline, and what I would do is I would go scene by scene and I would write out beats, beats and lines that certain characters have to say. And I would say, this is where it has to start. This is where it has to end. This is what you have to say. These are the beats. Therefore, ambitiously rigorous but methodically made of very blurred lines free to mould itself to the moment, distanced from the possibility to be pigeonholed. So it makes sense that her building should be connected by stairs, and be free of locking doors, or even curtains, to assure nothing can obscure what may be happening in another room, or even outside. All rooms should be separated but aware of the other. When asked if it all happened consciously, the accumulation of films that wanted to connect or even be the other’s second act, Sofia spoke of intuition, movement and gesture. Filmmaking as a way of life, not as a final destination. I think the process of making these films is always very intuitive for me. When I started making short films around my grandmother and my great-grandmother, they came from a very natural place. I was working with an incredible producer at the time, Calvin Thomas, who really encouraged me to trust myself no matter how strange the idea was, even if I couldn’t actually quite put it into words. You learn so much through movement. There’s actually this quote by Denis Lavant, where he says it’s about la beauté du geste (the beauty of the gesture). For me, filmmaking is a process to articulate what I can’t form into thought. It’s a place for me to try something out. There ought to be a final outcome. But for every film, I never knew what it was going to be like. I wasn’t really searching for anything specifically. It was always about moving through the energy of whatever that line was and seeing where I landed, and trying to be grateful about what that process was. But also just to kind of accept the film in whatever form it showed up in. Making Measures for a Funeral was different because everything was so predetermined. But for the rest of it, it was kind of like OK, I want to spend a month with an astrologer in Paris and shoot each day of this month of her life on 16mm. Or I want to make a film about my great-grandmother’s letters that were discovered in an archive in Harvard. And I only have 10 days to shoot it. You know, what will that be like? I think not having the destination in mind, just enjoying the act of filmmaking, was always what drew me to continuing, to make the work. All the while, she’s collecting inspiration. Not just by producing stories. An actual cinephilic and artistic thread courses through the veins of her films, drawing on many voices and holding them up to the light. From her great-grandmother’s poems to traces of Chantal Akerman, Robert Bresson, Susan Howe, Gillian Sze, Sarah Davachi, Hilma Af Klint, Nam June Paik, Agnès Varda, and so many others (the list is endless), these feed and nourish what a constant openness to the world can do to help complement an artist’s built-in searching quality. Sofia, and later on Audrey Benac, will reach out to them to help fill in all the blanks. Family Ties With the initial overall purpose being that of vocalising what couldn’t be articulated any other way, Sofia starts making short films about her paternal grandmother, Maria Bohdanowicz, and a trilogy (it was eventually referenced to as the Last Poems trilogy) of life, death and the otherworldly passage to mourning and memory ensues. When she started filming her grandmother in her suburban Etobicoke home, the purpose wasn’t ever that of making a film, as such. But another example of the habit she had formed of communicating visually. After having suffered froma fear of public speaking when she was a teenager, stemming from the anxiety surrounding her presentations as a classically trained pianist (“no matter how much prep I did and how much work I did, it was never exactly the way that I wanted it to be”), she discovered filmmaking to be an art form “where you had control of the output. And my father had a camcorder when I was a kid that I used all the time to film little short films. Instead of doing presentations for the class, I would show a short film.” What first appear to be seemingly just moments on film of Maria’s daily housework (making the bed, cooking and eating, cleaning dishes and doing the laundry, talking on the phone and gardening) in the first instalment of her 2013 trilogy, Modlitwa (A Prayer), quickly turns into a spiritual hymn when the images of everydayness are placed underneath a recording of one of Sofia’s great-grandmother’s poems. ’Be kind to those who suffer, oh good lord / To those who labor through life toward death’, it is heard. Holding hands with the gesture Chantal Akerman so diligently initiated in Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and later developed, the woman’s state is that of activeness, not necessarily presence. By tapping into the rhythms of domestic life for an elderly matriarch, the undoneness of life’s labour, and how her time filled with this undoneness moves toward death, the short film pinpoints the heroism of the one who lives and their countless limitations. At the same time, it is also just about Sofia recording her grandmother for posterity under the soft natural light of a sunny afternoon in a house she seems to associate with a home. By which I mean, a place to always go back to. Highly sentimental in tone, the film’s images precede Maria’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, from which she passes away soon after. Behind Modlitwa (A Prayer) is a grieving granddaughter. Wieczór (An Evening) Dalsza Modlitwa (Another Prayer) Wieczór (An Evening) (2013), made after Maria’s death, is more obviously elegiac in tone, tinted of life’s ephemerality in the way it tracks a day turning into night inside the same house without Maria, but not at all devoid of her presence. Blanketed in soundtrack and brought about by another poem of Zofia Bohdanowiczowa – “Shadows play hide and seek / As dusk turns into night” – this second act swells and fully envelops the desolation of mourning for a loved one, and the responsibility felt in honouring their life. Sofia starts by filming the snowy house, the details behind its corridors and windows, and then zooms in on the objects left as they were by her grandmother, touched by fading light. A piece of undergarment hanging in the basement, a yellowed old photo framed and hanging on the wall, a notepad sitting on the table with ‘Cancel the nurse’ written down, the texture of her blue quilt. And then a hand holding a medallion with Maria’s photograph eternalises the sentiment, bittersweet and throbbing. Even so, it wasn’t enough to feel Maria’s physical absence, her house existing without her. The homage wouldn’t be complete without a way to bring her back, project the memory and use film as a tool for resurrection. Back to Maria’s house, Dalsza Modlitwa (Another Prayer) projects the same images of her grandmother seen in Modlitwa (A Prayer) life-sized on the walls, on the sink, on top of the washing machine, in the kitchen, on the houses’ curtains. Memory latching onto fabric, leaving its inscription on the body. It is displayed as an act of phantasmagoria, brimming with poignancy, the closest we can go to touching memory, corresponding the films to each other. Life’s dance with immortality. From here on after, Bohdanowicz will have her intentions mapped out, well-rooted. Both the more and less conscious ones. The acts she would soon seek out again (the display and the resurrection), the sensorial documenting of a sense of truth and the phantoms that surround it as we enter History for the first time, like we do a door. Was she exploring her family’s legacy in order to only arrive at herself? I think it was about representation and manipulation as well and really wanting to output my interior desires and longings to the world in a way that was very thought out, she said. A more definite, infinitely controllable formalisation of feelings in a visual sphere that soars like literature. It’s entangled in a self-referential cycle of lyricism that wears words out and moves them around in a way that brings into consciousness more words, more and more tactile power. Three years later, in 2016, another short film, A Drownful Brilliance of Wings, by Sofia and the Canadian poet Gillian Sze, induces the same meditative ritualistic -ing of life, the repetitive doing, making, cooking, pouring in order to promptly establish relationships with place and situate generational memory. In a woman’s lyrical monologue, her late father’s stamp collection takes her back to China, a place both real and unreal to her, preserved only by memory, family ties, and although not felt, transported by her body. Like Sofia, she has in her possession one of the keys that unlocks the archive. Herself. The film leaves us with a pulsar, “Here can’t be found on a map”. Creating Audrey Benac That doesn’t mean one must stop trying to connect the dots. From the more matter-of-fact physical traces of the found archive to the more abstract of investigations, based on plainly intuitive forces, Sofia will first present us with many interactions, but overly failed attempts at two-sided communication, reminiscent of Akerman’s Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, a film to refer back to again and again. Never Eat Alone Starting in 2016, her first feature film Never Eat Alone chronicles the filmmaker’s now maternal grandmother’s lonely everydayness, Joan Benac, playing herself, and her granddaughter’s quest to find footage of a television program she was in with a love interest, Don Radovich (played by George Radovich), in the early 1950s. This will mark the start of the hybridity of the Audrey Benac films and the work developed alongside Deragh Campbell, one of the most cerebral actresses of her generation, known for her improvisational skills, with whom Sofia went to a cheese club once a week after having met in the midst of the Toronto cinephile community watching cinema curated by Medium Density Fibreboard Films (MDFF), run by Dan Montgomery and fellow Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski I started thinking about putting her in a film that I’ve been working on called Never Eat Alone, which had my grandmother and my producer’s grandfather, and we were kind of pitting them against each other as long lost loves. I had her living in my cousin Grace’s apartment. She was wearing my clothing, some of my grandfather’s clothing. Audrey is really a character who’s like an amalgamation of myself and a lot of Deragh’s considerations in terms of how she approaches life. And that’s when I invited her to improvise in this film alongside my grandmother, which was shot in my grandmother’s condominium in Toronto. And then after that, we just started getting more ideas for more films as we uncovered different facets or parts of my family’s history. There are two Audreys in my family. There’s my cousin Audrey, but there’s also this co-created character who I really feel like has become a part of the fold. It’s art being made of real life’s own fabric. Audrey as a study tool, wearing the skin of the investigator, looking to reduce the always parallel and contrapuntal positions presented in every film. In Never Eat Alone, for example, Joan and Don never get to meet, but they do share the screen again via the broadcasting of that old television program. More important than that, hunched over old letters with Joan in her apartment’s closet, Audrey gets a clear glimpse of her grandmother as a person inhabiting the world, besides gaining access to memories about herself she otherwise wouldn’t have. Veslemøy’s Song We’ll see Joan again two years later in Veslemøy’s Song, the end result of Sofia’s MA at York University, when Audrey uncovers in her grandmother’s storage locker a biographical book about Kathleen Parlow (1890-1963), once famous and billed as “The Canadian Violinist”, now overdue for a place in the history books. She had been her grandfather Andrew Benac’s violin teacher and mentor. In hand-processed 16mm black-and-white, this is where the pursuit of intellectual field work in academic spaces will start in Sofia’s filmography. After going through her grandfather’s journals, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to what’s left of the rare recording of Parlow’s soloist performance at the National Theatre in 1909 of the concerto written by Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen. Recreating Sofia’s initial real-life contact, Audrey won’t be able to hear the full recording, and thus will start her quest into getting more temporary library cards, going into listening and reading rooms with nothing but a notebook and a pencil, no water and bags allowed, and many other frustrations any archivist faces when making a foray into the past in order to alter it in the present. A certain level of wit will be necessary to follow through. In this case, a bad egg salad sandwich is all there is waiting for Audrey, even if in the company of birdsong. For Veslemøy’s Song, I just wrote the narration very quickly after I had been to the New York Public Library and I had taken field notes. That’s something that I learned from my supervisor Brenda Longfellow. She said go to the library and take a bunch of notes. What you experience in the real world and what you’re paying attention to will always be much more interesting than anything you could ever fabricate. And so the visit that’s documented to the New York Public Library is pretty much how it was, and it was like what I wrote down, Sofia explained. In another room of Sofia’s house, a nest is to be found in a place previously darkened by bitter experiences. “I want to create new memories”, we hear her say in French. And so it begins; Maison du bonheur (same title as Sofia’s production company) with Sofia this time around, not Audrey. Without knowing Juliane Sellam or having ever spoken to her, she travels to Paris and stays with this elderly astrologer for a month during the summer in her beautiful apartment in Montmartre, iconised by a perch overflowing with geraniums, where the woman has lived for 50 years. Another intricate film about a house, we dive deep into the -ing of life, its immediate doing (the coffee making and baking, the putting on makeup, going to the hairdresser and eating), as we witness Sofia’s compilation of how objecthood defines identity – Juliane’s regular ritual of baking loaves of challah bread for Shabbat speaks for her Judaism, for one. A most definite record of the way people have found their life, Maison du Bonheur is shot in grainy 16mm, encased in a layer of sweetness, supported in part by a milky voiceover that logs the daily investigative adventures in vignettes, not shying away from even the quirkiest of moments like that of biting into a bad eclair after much anticipation. Maison du Bonheur In this light, the more the film moves, the more it sways and bends towards the diaristic work of poetry found in the stringing together of a film as it’s being made. A musical pattern put in place in most of Sofia’s films. “All of these memories, sounds, and colours. Would they form a story? A confession? A diary? A portrait? A travel log? Or an experience? Does this film resemble Juliane? Do we resemble each other?”, the filmmaker wonders at the film’s closing scene. It takes one back to that Jonas Mekas home movie energy, not really knowing what it will turn into, and yet always giving light its own dimension when working on a nostalgic framing of objects as landscape from behind the Bolex. The film also evokes the same Agnès Varda sly humour and keen eye to any and everything life gives us, approaching home not as landmark or location, not even as space per say, but instead as an idea elasticised enough by experience on its way to gain access to our own self. That’s also why it doesn’t quite amount to a portrait of either Juliane or Sofia’s inner lives (so much is only hinted at and inferred). Better yet, it invites these women’s receptiveness to the eye and language of the other on them, both unafraid to embrace being there to see life unfold. We’ll come back to the Maison du Bonheur in 2022. It won’t be Sofia then but Andrey (Deragh Campbell) who will take her place, looking over the house when Juliane passes away years later in A Woman Escapes. In mourning for her friend and having only that July in Paris as a hanging memory over her, Audrey will spend the covid-19 pandemic confinement periods in Juliane’s house while receiving video-letters from two friends (also the filmmakers’ fictional personas) almost as if trying to keep the house breathing, baking the same loaf of challah bread, as in “keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive to keep them with us”, as Joan Didion accurately put it. The correspondence between the three people and their wish to locate a presence in absence, a nowness in 4K and 3D, being cognitively here and there for the others during such an impossible time for physical proximity will create an enlightened essay about reaching another dimension where the same dream is shared by all (at one point, Zen On Film by Nam June Paik and boredom as an aesthetic tool that re-designs an intimate interaction with reality are mentioned). Scored by Sarah Davachi’s atmospheric cloud, it’s a film of pregnant silences, depths and textures, and the exerting of the visual muscles necessary while cocooned indoors, carefully breathing in and out in an effort to carry on, to heal together while alone. A Woman Escapes Maison du Bonheur Entangled in these same musings on death and the overwhelming waves of grief, Point and Line to Plane (2020) compliments A Woman Escapes in how astutely intelligent it is as a sensorial radar of the recently bereaved. Going back to Joan Didion and The Year of Magical Thinking, “These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead.” This is exactly how we find Audrey, devastated after the loss of her close friend. Another detective story, in Sofia’s metaphysical relation to the world, striving to “depict the invisible” in what it finds (presence in absence), Point and Line to Plane builds a lingering skeleton of sorrow. Through the work of Kandinsky, Hilma Af Klint, and even Mozart, it caresses the idea that no matter where you are, you’ll find that person in everything you see, all the nooks and folds of all the places you’ll be in, looking to stuff a body that has radically thinned out of meaning with coincidences and Viennese Mozart chocolate balls and supernatural beliefs that may guarantee you will lose control of life’s despair and be under the guise of feverish more powerful forces. Shot in pieces gradually along the way in Sofia’s travels for work (some of the footage at the Guggenheim of Kandisky’s and Af Klint’s work was shot on an iPhone in 4K, later re-filmed on 16mm and put together with the rest of the Bolex sequences), Point and Line to Plane holds the same potency as the veiny Jorge Jácome purification journeys. No scale or measuring unit can withstand Audrey’s lasting request: “I said, If you can hear me, answer with the sound of colour. I want to know what form you chose to be.” Image Point and Line to Plane An answer to the question is to be found in Sofia’s second feature film, first co-directed with Deragh Campbell, MS Slavic 7 (2019) which will appoint Audrey as the literary executor of her great-grandmother Zofia’s estate, and the film will try to find Zofia in the translation and localisation of a series of letters found in the Houghton Library in Harvard, exchanged between her and the fellow Polish author Jósef Wittlin between the years of 1957 and 1964, after their displacement from Poland during World War II. When we reach this phase in Sofia’s filmography, we encounter a life-sized embodiment of action. In a mixture of external and internal (monologue and subtitle-only) enchanted speech, vocalised to better break down and conceive of ideas, it exposes that rebound effect between two people in a conversation, instrumental to produce the movement of naturally giving rise to a concept, force it to reach the surface in real time and catch it before it races ahead. It’s a lot like arriving somewhere in the form of a flood, usually at an unnatural and impossible to replicate pace. If the title didn’t suggest it already, the baroque organ score does. The feeling this time around is a laboratorial one, icy but vibrating even when outside the lines, and the best showcase of the importance of Audrey as a conduit into the fragments of Sofia’s family history. She’s someone who shares her DNA, but is distanced enough for the investigation to be treated as assemblage of academic work. Much like we’d seen back in Veslemøy’s Song and will be present for in Measures for a Funeral, we’re back to moving through the hoops of academic research. Travelling with a carry-on, staying in liminal spaces like hotels where the shower head is different and the coffee machine doesn’t seem to work, getting more library cards, checking coats and bags, going into reading rooms and using specific pencils (never pens) to take notes down. Except unlike what we’d seen with Point and Line to Plane, a very free piece of cinema, one quilt built out of various sewed patches over time, open to whatever would catch Sofia’s eye, MS Slavic 7 feels structurally bulky, overthought and edited with precision, and much more evolved in its hybridity. It is once again fascinated by objecthood, in this case the concept of the letter itself, as well as its intentions as a history binding artefact capable of travelling far and wide while sheltering what can only be described as someone’s aura inside. Between the sanitised whitish-blue of the hotel and reading room and the remaining very detached digitally-shot spaces, Deragh Campbell’s crystalline and hyperactive delivery of wholly improvised scenes actualises the film’s bouts of connection with other films. This shall be its ember of truth. Veslemøy’s Song’s birdsong finds itself in Zofia’s poetic bird flight poem. And a parallel is created with the upcoming Measures for a Funeral in both of the films’ frustration with the narrowing quality of academic work (“I worry that if I put her in an academic paper, I’m just rearranging things or burying them deeper”) and its relation with Audrey’s existential crisis. But before that, we’ll find Audrey surprisingly sound asleep in MS Slavic 7, as she was at the end of Never Eat Alone with her great-grandmother’s letters printed on paper on top of her, mirroring Anna and the tray of food in Akerman’s Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna. Long after the screen goes black, Audrey’s words will linger and open another realm into Sofia’s construction of her house: discursive poetry as the process of moving things into the world, by getting hold not of reality or documented reality but of unreality as such. The feeling of grasping something and then losing it is basically a feeling of unreality. And this feeling of unreality is what exists between all lines of poetry. Basically it’s the feeling that you feel most immediately after any amount of euphoria, of the feeling of life, or like a feeling of a moment. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna MS Slavic 7 Factual Telepathy Unreality it is. Susan Howe has a term for poetry in her pamphlet about Chris Marker, Sorting Facts. After reciting an Antonin Artaud quote that exposes a desire to encase soul in body without turning it into body (“I want soul to be body”), Howe states “non-fiction filmmakers sometimes work intuitively by factual telepathy. I call poetry factual telepathy”. Further on, she will affirm she works “in the poetic documentary form”. Inquisitive wandering opens the door to poetry. But does poetry open the door to documentary? Can all this mean that a filmmaker like Sofia, completely entranced by the world, and for that removed from its “reality” – mostly living outside it looking in – is a poet? Is French choreographer Mathilde Monnier a poet when she says, in Claire Denis’ Vers Mathilde: “Whenever you make an incursion into a space, that space is altered. I like this idea of leaving a scratch, because that space is altered by that scratch after.”? Point and Line to Plane Tuning into the incomplete frequencies of MS Slavic 7, Measures for a Funeral is Veslemøy’s Song’s masterful 142-min second act and a definite step-up in Sofia’s body of work, the end result all the other films that came before appeared to be gesturing at, adding more and more to it so that when its time came it would perfectly sink into its modelled structure. Which explains why the film feels like an odyssey in weight, depth and density, and even more so in its ability to take shape, to give it freedom without constraining it. Out of all of Sofia’s films, it’s the most epically solemn, supernaturally-coded piece of filmmaking (the colder MS Slavic 7 had been nothing but a harbinger). It’s also a bigger production with a bigger budget, shot in over 30 locations – “we were shooting in a different place every day” – and the only film so far that began with a screenplay and a lot of backstory in all that pertains Audrey (based off of Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood). Very propulsive in its self-containment, the film finds the graduate student Audrey in the same archivist of Veslemøy’s Song, researching the life and career of Kathleen Parlow. We meet up with her in Toronto when her dying mother, a failed musician herself, makes her promise something that will throw her off the rails. Circularly presented, we’ll travel with a grieving Audrey from Toronto to London to Meldreth to Oslo while she runs away from her mother’s final demand and does the impossible to bring Kathleen back to the collective memory she silently slipped from (“I want soul to be body”) by restaging the once presumed lost Johan Halvorsen’s concerto Opus 28, found by an archivist at the University of Toronto back in 2015 (before Sofia’s Veslemøy’s Song). All the while, carrying with her her father’s violin, Sofia’s last missing piece to put the puzzle together. This will be Bohdanowicz’s ultimate resurrecting act. And the one where Audrey finds closure by putting everything in place for Sofia to start again, having now completed the three-act cycle. Under the same commands of uncertainty her procedural films are tainted with: “Sometimes I feel so close to something, but when I try to describe it, I lose it again.” … “Sometimes I see a path ahead of me, but then I lose the feeling and I don’t know how to call myself back to it.” … “I thought making a decision would feel like more.” Sofia ventures in Measures for a Funeral into a multi-layered film that delivers Kathleen and Audrey to the world. Is this to be Audrey’s last film? We’ve filmed Audrey in every format. This film was shot on an Alexa with TLS remounted lenses. We’ve shot her on mini TV. We’ve shot her in 3D. We’ve shot her on 16mm in colour, in black-and-white, on a digital SLR camera. We’ve done it all, even on a cell phone, cell phone transfer to film. So I think that this really does complete the journey, but also most importantly, Audrey accomplishes a task. She follows through on a great desire, but also I think she is finally able to hear something that she’s been burning to hear, which is Kathleen Parlow, not just Opus 28, but to really hear her voice, which had yet to happen with any of her films. Can the film be considered a séance then? Oh, I mean, definitely. It’s a great word to describe it, because that’s how I actually introduced the film at TIFF in September. We really tried to find different ways to tease out Kathleen’s voice. First, I had Melanie (Scheiner) in the film, Audrey’s best friend and my best friend in real life. She experienced the whole journey of me making this film. Having her in the film as a real object and artefact and person who really saw it all, it’s very special. Also, we filmed in the archive where Opus 28 was discovered. That room where Audrey is studying at her desk and she has a conversation with her thesis supervisor, that is exactly where the concerto was discovered. She takes a little shoebox off a shelf at the beginning, and that’s where the archivist found Opus 28. And we also filmed in Kathleen Parlow’s real home in Meldreth, which took a lot of work because the house was owned by a liver surgeon who was really difficult with us, and then when the day came to shoot, he didn’t give us access to the house. We had to break in. And then also having María Dueñas in the film was really big because her biography and career really runs in tandem with Kathleen’s. They’re playing almost in the same model of Guarnerius ‘Del Gesu’. María also tours a lot with her mother as Kathleen. Maria’s mother made a lot of her dresses and so did Kathleen’s mom. They both had their debuts in San Francisco and they both actually had really important, significant pieces of music dedicated to them at 17. So I think that having María in the film, we have this incredible reincarnation of Kathleen. She told me after the performance she felt like someone was standing beside her the entire time. And I think that feeling that she had was due to the fact that everyone in the crew really was trying to channel Kathleen. We also had very strange things happen to us. When we were in London location scouting, I realised that I needed a gramophone player. So I reached out and I wrote to this gramophone society after googling around for a while. And I just wrote, I’m making a film about Kathleen Parlow. I’d love to use your gramophone machine for this scene that I’m shooting in the British Library. Could you help me out? And the man wrote me back right away and said he had a bunch of Kathleen Parlow’s cylinders. ‘I’ll drive the phonograph to you.’ And he did. And it was really incredible because one thing that he asked us to do in exchange was to bring the Ambrose cylinder machine to Kathleen Parlow’s house and to play the cylinder so that, in his words, she would appear. It was so moving because throughout the production of the film, we kept encountering people with this extreme level of generosity, who really understood what we were trying to accomplish. If you think of the definition of a séance, it’s a bunch of people sitting at a table coordinating their energy so that one person can operate. I think that that definitely happened with this film. Veslemøy’s Song Measures for a Funeral More than that, Measures for a Funeral is evidence in a way the other films never were. We get close to Audrey in a way we never had, because we get a window into her relationship with her mother and the curse the latter throws at her at the beginning of the film. Along with more comparisons to Akerman’s Les Rendezvous d’Anna and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (“where you have Genjuro who kind of runs into the arms of a ghost, Lady Wakasa, and then kind of comes back to ashes metaphorically”), the film is taken by its immediate audience to be about fixation, there were even comments surrounding Audrey’s possible neurodiversity given her blocky austere body language, when in fact Sofia is giving us the privilege to be close to her as a person, to witness her “psychological torment and turmoil”. “For a person who’s been emotionally abused their entire life, they do have trouble connecting”, Sofia pointed out, referring to a past experience in her own life she gave to Audrey. And that’s the thing that I’m trying to really talk about in the film. It’s a very strange situation that Audrey’s in. Of course she goes on this very strange course. And of course she has a hard time connecting with people because when you are a person who’s abused, you have a huge fear of connection. Why? Because you’re afraid that when you get close to a person, you’re going to get hurt again. But I think Audrey really does find a way to digest it and to break that curse to do something beautiful out of a really painful and difficult situation. Does that mean Audrey has become her own person now? “She’s her own person, she has her own life. Walked out of the auditorium and we don’t know where she is now.” After nine years since the first Audrey film (Never Eat Alone), Audrey has honed to Sofia’s essayism – the object and the content – her preference for a “very improvised way of working” (in lieu of what happened with Measures for a Funeral), especially given how prolific she’s known to be, always working and thinking about more than one film at a time. The experience of making Point and Line to Plane was very singular, but I just seem to download the films. If you put an antenna out and have the intention and the gesture and you’re really present and you’re listening, but also if you’re reading the right things and you’re watching the right things, it just kind of comes to you. For me, it’s never eventual or gradual. It’s always a flood. A lot of those films and what I wrote came from living in the real world, paying attention, being really patient, writing about what I was curious about, whether it was a smashed margarita glass or a greenhouse in Westmount or a windowpane in Russia. You know, I’m always trying to gravitate towards things that are discarded to breathe new life into them. It’s about the facts. But it is also, and in equal measure about everything that surrounds them, about how everything coincides with everything else. An artist’s openness to an account of life. So is the beauty of living life poetically, hungry for connection, even in the most indirect of ways. “I definitely need that kind of energy interaction, those textures, those sounds, those smells, the stimulation. It’s essential”, Sofia said when we ended up touching on the power of living in the city. A chapter has closed down for Audrey, but not for Parlow, not for Juliane or any other of Sofia’s subjects. She has, in her ever-present correspondence with the surrounding world, found her ‘voice’ in being an agent of real-life change, carrying with her the responsibility of these women’s legacies. There’s so much more that can be said about her. And I think this film only really scratches the surface, but I do really resent films that use a historical character as a way to get funding or as an excuse to make a movie. What I hope is that people years from now who want to know something about Kathleen Parlow and really study something about her can watch the movie and use it as a reference and they’ll be able to cite it, but also to have something that is real and true and interactive. Audrey really goes to the ends of the earth and to the nether regions in such a special, acute and meaningful way, Sofia concluded. Measures for a Funeral Fully present even in absence, in its distillation of archive into artefact, with the help of fiction, Sofia’s body of work is soul that has left body, and is no longer seeking truth. Now she’s changing the history path. With Audrey’s mission completed awarding her her freedom, Sofia’s house is not only finished as much as it has freed itself of any and all structural limitations on its way to being a home, where no map is needed. It just needs to be summoned and it’ll be there for anyone. The aim continues to be the investigation, even more so from now on, with any sense of completeness misusing the inflection of her ‘voice’. Turns out Anne Boyer was right. “Poetry made, and continues to make, all prose possible.”
