Never Eat Alone

December 6, 2016 · The Pilot Light · 7:30 p.m.

Note: Our screening of Never Eat Alone will be preceded by a short film, Shade.

Toronto’s Casa Loma, a present-day landmark, is here configured as a metaphorical cage of memories, captured on film in the 1950s for a live televised melodrama. One of its stars, now in her mid-80s and widowed and lonely, is wondering what ever happened to that charming baritone she performed with, the one who fancied her and even asked her not to go through with her wedding—before disappearing from her life forever. Her granddaughter Audrey finds the show in the CBC archives and attempts to track down this would-be lover.

“It’s a found-footage film, using bits and pieces of the past to build a collage of a fictionalized history, an alternate reality version of her family’s history. ” — Seattle Screen Scene

“But the film isn’t as concerned with narrative incident as it is with the minutiae of daily life—a frozen lemon loaf, slides of vacation photos, a stack of dusty, handwritten letters—and the near-imperceptible accretion of memory and experience that occurs over time. It’s a film more content to observe a grandmother passing on her wardrobe to her granddaughter than with tracking the arc of a conventional (non-)romance. And in its understated elegance, it becomes all the more poignant for it.” — MUBI’s Notebook

About the Filmmaker

Sofia Bohdanowicz is a Toronto-based filmmaker. She is currently in post-production on her second feature film, Maison du bonheur. She won the Emerging Canadian Director award at the 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival for her first feature, Never Eat Alone.