In the first Film Studies series of 2025, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben – founder of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters – unpacks different approaches to writing for the screen, focusing here on adaptation from literary sources. In this six-week course, combining 30-minute talks, film screenings and group discussion, Patricia examines how Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf have been translated to the screen, and shows works by film giants like Stanley Kubrick, Atom Egoyan and Akira Kurosawa.
Tickets: $18
Virtually all narrative films are adaptations to begin with, since they start with the words of their screenplays. Beyond those fundamentals, films adapted from novels, plays or nonfiction may take creative liberties with conventional dramatic structure, or modernize historical texts with fresh cultural or political relevance. These six films approach the puzzle of adaptation in unique and inventive ways – from the feminist update but relatively classical Pride and Prejudice to the radical and bold approach to the Frankenstein myth in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things – meeting the challenge of adaptation by creating new cinematic forms and contexts.
Talks will start at 2:00 pm. Film screenings start at 2:30 pm.
Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her new feature film Heart of Gold will be streaming in 2025.
Pride & Prejudice
In the first of a new six-week series on Monday afternoons, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben looks at different approaches to literary adaptation to the screen, beginning with Joe Wright's 2005 film of Pride & Prejudice.
Throne of Blood
In this week's Film Studies talk, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben considers how Shakespeare's dramas have been translated to feudal Japan (in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood), New York gangs in the 1950s, and to occupied Kashmir, among other examples.
The Hours
Patricia Gruben leads us on an investigation into translating interior monologue to the screen, taking the case study of how Virginia Woolf inspired the Academy Award winning film The Hours by way of Michael Cunningham's best-selling novel.
The Sweet Hereafter
Patricia Gruben traces the history of Atom Egoyan's acclaimed movie back through Russell Banks' novel, all the way to its source in a real-life tragedy.
Full Metal Jacket
Kubrick's famous Vietnam war film was inspired by two sources, Gustav Hasford's semi-autobiographical novella The Short-Timers, and Dispatches, a nonfiction account by Michael Herr. Both writers worked separately on the script, which Kubrick consolidated.
Poor Things
Patricia Gruben wraps up our Film Studies series on the art of screen adaptation with this carnivalesque feminist take on the Frankenstein myth, Tony McNamara and Yorgos Lanthimos's film of Alasdair Gray's novel.