Pride & Prejudice

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 informal 30-minute talks, clips, 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, among others.

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.

Week 1: Intro: Pride & Prejudice
Jane Austen’s six novels have been adapted into a multitude of feature films and TV series, along with many others (Clueless, Bride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) inspired by the books or by her life. This is understandable, given her influence on the classic form of romantic comedy. In many of the more recent adaptations the feminist subtext of Austen’s concerns with the economic necessity of marriage and the conflict between ’sense’ and ’sensibility’ have emerged as contemporary themes. Joe Wright’s 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, is a prime example of the spunky updated heroine who gets both her man and her independence.

Talks run for 30 minutes with the films screening from 2:30pm.

Film studies tickets are $18 or buy the series pass for $80

One of the most delightful and heartwarming adaptations made from Austen or anybody else.

Roger Ebert

In a little more than two hours, Mr. Wright and the screenwriter, Deborah Moggach, have created as satisfyingly rich and robust a fusion of romance, historical detail and genial social satire as the time allows.

Stephen Holden, New York Times

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 released in 2025.