In January 2020, in Lytton, BC, a man named Barry Shantz was shot dead by police, as he intended. The incident raises troubling questions about response protocols (why wasn’t a mental health worker dispatched to a stand-off which lasted several hours, for example?), and about institutional accountability. But Ian Daffern’s film gives us much more than this. It is a compassionate portrait of Barry, an imperfect man, a former drug dealer, who nevertheless turned his life around and became an advocate for fellow prisoners and for the homeless, as related by his sister, Marilyn, whose own life followed a very different path. In response to the tragedy, Marilyn creates a series of art quilts called Kairos – a Greek word which means “an opportune time for action”. A Bullet Pulling Thread opens up several pathways we might usefully follow.
Screening with the short film Violet Gave Willingly (Claire Sanford, 2022, 23 mins)
Jun 11: Q&A with Marilyn Farquhar and Deborah Dumka (Violet Gave Willingly)
By combining the stories of these two siblings and the many lives that Marilyn touches along the way, A Bullet Pulling Thread captures the need to correct the ways in which public bodies, namely law enforcement, deal with issues related to mental health… Daffern addresses related social causes like housing, addiction, and the rights of incarcerated people […] It’s a striking work that conveys her loss, but also the many lives affected by that single shot.
Pat Mullen, POV Magazine
Ian Daffern
Canada
2023
English
Opening Night Film – Human Rights Film Festival, Toronto;
Human Rights Through Film Selection by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Screenwriter
Ian Daffern
Cinematography
Marina Dodis, Dennis Porter, Daniel Everitt-Lock, Steve Field, Kyle Sandilands, Tate Young
Editor
Gisela Restrepo, Eui Yong Zong
Also Playing
Samia
Despite growing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the civil war, Samia Yusuf Omar persists in her dream of becoming an Olympic athlete and competes in Beijing, 2008 -- with London, 2012 next on her agenda. Based on a true story.
Sudan, Remember Us
A portrait of young artists and activists, Meddeb's doc charts events in Khartoum between 2019 -- in the immediate wake of the revolution that deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir -- and the mood four years later, when the country has been torn apart by civil war.
Margaret
Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.
E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea
In this elegant non fiction film, actors play Irish designer Eileen Gray, her lover, the architect Jean Badovici, and modernist superstar Le Corbusier, who would become obsessed with the house on the Cote d'Azur that Eileen designed.