A still from Agatha's Almanac.AMALIE ATKINS/Supplied
Agatha’s Almanac
Directed by Amalie Atkins
Classification N/A; 86 minutes
Opens in Toronto April 3 and Vancouver April 10
Critic’s Pick
Silver Screamers
Directed by Sean Cisterna
Classification N/A; 95 minutes
For a solid stretch last year, it felt as if Hollywood was experiencing a golden moment for those in their golden years. Between the acclaimed dramedy Eleanor the Great (starring June Squibb, now 96), the retirement-home-set Netflix mystery The Thursday Murder Club (Helen Mirren, 80), the Netflix comedy Nonnas (Talia Shire, 79) and the latest season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building (Steve Martin, 80, and Martin Short, 76), age was not just a number but a coveted bonus. But all trends pass, and it feels as if the industry has now returned to its targeted 20 to 40-ish audience.
A still from Silver Screamers.Mythic productions/Supplied
Not that such demographic concerns ever concerned Canada’s documentary filmmaking community, whose members operate just about as far from the mainstream as possible. To wit, this weekend sees the arrival of two new homegrown docs that chronicle the rarely explored lives of senior citizens, albeit in radically different ways.
Sean Cisterna’s Silver Screamers has the higher concept and easier elevator pitch. After struggling to get his latest production financed, Cisterna – perhaps best known for his 2019 drama From the Vine starring Joe Pantoliano – stumbles upon a grand idea. He’ll recruit a group of local seniors to help produce a short horror film, and document the results in order to create a two-for-one package.
At first, Cisterna has trouble building his team – his initial, gore-heavy pitch emphasizing the opportunity to crack some skulls and craft some terror has few takers – but eventually he collects a quirky bunch of characters who are looking to enliven their days.
The resulting drama, while perhaps predictable in an American Movie meets Cocoon kind of way, is still awfully sweet and warmhearted. As Cisterna’s makeshift crew master the ins and outs of production – from special effects to casting, camerawork to production design – the film builds a twinkly-eyed ode to the power of broadening your horizons, and opening yourself up to new opportunities, no matter your vintage.
While the doc does slightly overstay its welcome and hits its emotional and thematic beats a little too hard, even at a relatively slim hour and a half, it’s laced with a wisdom that only comes with age. And the film that the team makes, a supernatural thriller called The Rug (about, well, a haunted carpet), looks markedly more interesting than a lot of other shorts I’ve come across.
Whereas Silver Screamers is slick and well-packaged entertainment, Amalie Atkins’s new doc Agatha’s Almanac is a far more ragged and challenging proposition, all to its ultimate benefit. With a cast of one and an inexpensive DIY cinematic style that feels imported from another generation, the film posits that age is something to be treasured and contemplated, rather than torqued and twisted.
The focus is solely on Atkins’s 90-year-old aunt Agatha Bock, who spends her highly ritualized days tending to her farm in southern Manitoba. There is no inciting incident or dramatic tension, unless you count Agatha’s long-time war on the bugs who ruin the crops dotting her 64-acre property. Mostly, the film simply follows Agatha from dawn till dusk, the charming subject occasionally reflecting on her life and offering poignant but not exactly mind-blowing pearls of wisdom.
Atkins, a multidisciplinary artist, proudly doesn’t obey the almost obligatory rhythms of documentary filmmaking. There are no talking heads, no manufactured narrative momentum.
And, blessedly, it avoids the too-crisp digital sheen of contemporary docs, with the director enlisting cinematographer Rhayne Vermette (who has another defiantly avant-garde film out this week with Dead Lover) to capture Agatha on 16mm film, the images so gritty in texture and saturated in colour that they feel unearthed from another era altogether. Age, this time, comes after beauty.