My Mother’s Garden
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 – 7:30 PM Vancouver Premiere!
USA 2007. Director: Cynthia Lester
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Michael Passmore and Dr. Ingrid Sochting
As a child growing up in suburban Granada Hills, California, the first time filmmaker Cynthia Lester realized something was really wrong with her mother was when school friends said they had seen her in the alley going through their dumpster. Born in Poland in 1944, and raised by her Aunt, an Auschwitz survivor, Eugenia Lester grew up in an austere communist society. She immigrated to America in 1974, and faced poverty and depression while struggling to raise a family as a single mother.
Earning well over $1 million in Quebec, this certifiable box office smash in la belle province has yet to make it to English Canada in any significant way. And that’s a real shame, for Lyne Charlebois’ debut feature film is a stunner – a compelling, visually striking film featuring a standout, fearless performance from Isabelle Blais.
For the forty children who call it home, the Mulberry Bush School is their last chance. Excluded from school for extreme behaviour, and often having suffered severe emotional trauma, they are given three years at the Oxford boarding school to try to turn their lives around. Acclaimed documentary maker Kim Longinotto (Sisters in Law, Divorce Iranian Style, The Day I Will Never Forget) has once again turned her compassionate lens onto people living in extraordinary circumstances.
Everything is most definitely not fine in this compelling feature debut from Quebecois director Yves-Christian Fournier. Sixteen-year-old Josh (Maxime Dumontier) wakes one morning to learn of the suicide of one of his best friends. Another young man is found dead, and then another – all victims of an apparent suicide pact that leaves four teens dead and Josh the only survivor of this group of five friends. 
Assuming the post of Chief of Staff at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist Dr. Richard Thorndyke (Mel Brooks) comes across evidence of embezzlement and unexplained disappearances. He’s hustled off to a psychiatric convention by scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman), she of the impossibly pointy breasts and Teutonic moustache, and her snivelling sidekick Dr. Montague (Harvey Korman), who has a predilection for S-M. 
Peter Seller’s Oscar-nominated performance in Being There is one of the most remarkable of his career. Directed by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home), and adapted by Jerzy Kosinski from his short comic novel of the same name, the film stars Sellers as Chance, a developmentally challenged middle-aged man-child who works as a gardener for a wealthy Washington, D.C. citizen.
Filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb’s brother Nicky was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, when he was 21. Although people with Asperger’s can be highly intelligent, they are unable to pick up on social cues. Subtleties of body language, facial expression, tones, or gestures go unnoticed, and their own behaviour can strike others as bizarre and inappropriate. As a small child, Nicky demonstrated amazing abilities. 
The Dignitas organization in Zurich, Switzerland, is the only place in the world where citizens from any country can come to receive assistance in committing suicide. Asserting that the choice to end one’s life is a basic human right, Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli has indirectly assisted in the suicides of more than 500 people from more than 40 countries.
On a kibbutz in southern Israel in the 1970s, 12-year-old Dvir Avni enters his bar mitzvah year with the knowledge that his dearly-loved mother Miri is mentally ill. When Stephan, Miri’s Swiss boyfriend, comes to visit, he captures Dvir’s heart and makes Miri happier than she’s been in years.