Sofia Bohdanowicz
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Resurrecting Kathleen Parlow: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Her TIFF-Premiering Measures for a Funeral
Around a decade ago, Sofia Bohdanowicz began what would become a cycle of films, encompassing the features Never Eat Alone, MS Slavic 7 and A Woman Escaped (co-directed by Blake Williams and Burak Çevik) and the shorts Veslemøy’s Song and Point and Line to Plane, starring Deragh Campbell (who is often credited as cowriter or codirector) as Audrey Benac, a sort of fictional alter-ego who has encounters with art, and in particular with the artistic legacy of Bohdanowicz’s forbears. In Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to a haunting vintage […]
by Mark Asch on Sep 7, 2024 -
Online Premiere: Sofia Bohdanowicz’s The Hardest Working Cat in Showbiz
In work like her narrative feature MS Slavic 7 (titled after a library call number) and nonfiction short Veslemoy’s Song, Toronto-based filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz has dived into archives, examining their possibilities as a path to various revelations and/or frustrations. Both are encountered in this short film, in which Bohdanowicz adapts Dan Sallitt’s essay “The Hardest Work Cat in Show Biz,” expanding the text with illustrations of feline actor Orangey in action across his career. It begins with Sallitt and his cat Jasper at home before diving into the main line of argument, connecting many dots along the way while finding an entirely […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 27, 2020 -
“No One’s Going to Knock at Your Door and Say ‘I Want to Hire You to Be a Filmmaker'”: Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell on MS Slavic 7
As codirector Sofia Bohdanowicz has delightedly noted, MS Slavic 7 has caused a minor flutter of interest among the Extremely Online Librarian community, amazed that anyone would make a film titled after a call number at Harvard’s Houghton Library. That collection, from the papers of the Nobel-nominated poet Józef Wittlin, includes two dozen-odd letters sent to him by his fellow poet and fellow Polish exile Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, Bohdanowicz’s great-grandmother and namesake. Within the world of MS Slavic 7, though, Bohdanowiczowa is the grandmother of Audrey, the character played by Deragh Campbell. Audrey is a recurring character in what now must […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 1, 2019 -
Beyond Telefilm Canada: Curating the Future of Canadian Film at VIFF’s “Future//Present”
What does a Canadian film look like? This could be construed as a bad joke with limitless punch lines, the film equivalent of “a man walks into a bar…” But this query isn’t meant to drag my own national cinema, which has produced great filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin, David Cronenberg and Michael Snow. Instead of a set-up to a gag, this line of questioning opens a conversation about the future of Canadian cinema, especially when it comes to funding. This topic was front of mind at the Vancouver International Film Festival this year, which debuted a new program, curated by […]
by Kiva Reardon on Oct 27, 2016
