Skip to main content
Geographies of Solitude film image, director Jacquelyn Mills

Geographies of Solitude

This event has passed

300 kilometres southwest of Halifax lies Sable Island, a crescent moon-shaped sliver of land that seems to have manifested from a fable. Naturalist/researcher Zoe Lucas has called Sable home for four decades, sharing the land with roaming wild horses, fluttering sparrows, and practically imperceptible invertebrates. Joining Lucas for a residency, Jacquelyn Mills, a one-person film team, fully immerses us in the natural wonders of this stunning ecosystem while allowing us to witness an uncommon friendship unfold.

Winner of multiple awards at the Berlinale and Hot Docs, the captivating Geographies of Solitude is one of the year’s most celebrated, accomplished, and innovative documentaries. Utilizing techniques like exposing her 16mm film stock to starlight and hand-processing footage in seaweed, Mills also employs homemade microphones and electrodes to elicit melodies from the island and its animal inhabitants. Sable isn’t so much captured on film as incorporated into the very fabric of this documentary. This is a cinematic experience unlike anything you’ve ever encountered.

 

Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award, Hot Docs 2022

Director
Credits
Country of Origin

Canada

Year

2022

Language

English

Film Contact
Links
18+
103 min
Award Winners Documentary Experimental & Avant Garde Women Directors

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Cowboy Bebop + The Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band
Cowboy Bebop film image; anima man aims gun into camera

Cowboy Bebop + The Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band

Dir. Shinichirō Watanabe
120 min

Here's the double whammy of the season: The Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band (led by Steven Zhu) paired with a screening of the thrilling 2001 Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.

Image: Allan Parker @adp.life

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Pather Panchali

Dir. Satyajit Ray
125 min

Satyajit Ray's first film opened eyes in the West. It's a naturalistic portrait of the childhood of a Brahman child, Apu, growing up in a village far from twentieth century technology in West Bengal.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
John Coltrane's Blue World: The Mike Allen Trio + Le chat dans le sac
Le chat dans le sac film image; woman smoking a pipe

John Coltrane's Blue World: The Mike Allen Trio + Le chat dans le sac

Dir. Gilles Groulx
73 min

Join us as we celebrate the 98th birthday of John Coltrane and the 60th Anniversary of the French Canadian new wave classic which he scored. Coltrane's music for the film was only released two years ago, as the album Blue World.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

The Night of the Hunter

Dir. Charles Laughton
92 min

One of the strangest and most beguiling movies you'll ever see, from a poetic, nightmarish novel by Davis Grubb, a fable about two children fleeing from a psychotic evangelical preacher (Robert Mitchum). Charles Laughton's only film as director.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

The Battle of Algiers

Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo
135 min

French Colonel Mathieu hunts for Algerian resistance leader Ali la Pointe in Pontecorvo's classic, which draws the battle lines between colonialists and Arab insurrectionists in a pulsating, "fly-on-the-wall" documentary style.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Playtime

Dir. Jacques Tati
152 min

Jacques Tati was modernity's clown; technology his banana skin. Here his alter-ego Monsieur Hulot navigates a sterile Paris that seems designed to thwart his every wish.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Credits

Executive Producer

Brad Mills

Producer

Rosalie Chicoine Perreault, Jacquelyn Mills

Cinematography

Jacquelyn Mills

Editor

Jacquelyn Mills

Director

Jacquelyn Mills headshot, Geographies of Solitude director

Photo by John Ratchford

Jacquelyn Mills

Jacquelyn Mills is a filmmaker from Cape Breton Island, and is based in Montreal. Her works are immersive and sensorial, often exploring an intimate and lyrical connection to the natural world. Her film In The Waves (2017) was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the New Hampshire Film Festival, Best Medium-Length Documentary at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), and Best Documentary and Best Editing at the Atlantic International Film Festival. Her most recent work, Geographies of Solitude (2022), had its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum.