Kim Ho-jung plays widow Sara in The Mother and the Bear.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
The Mother and the Bear
Written and directed by Johnny Ma
Starring Kim Ho-jung, Leere Park and Lee Won-jae
Classification N/A; 100 minutes
Opens in select theatres Jan. 9
There might be no better time to release a Winnipeg-set film than in the dead of January. No matter how badly the rest of Canada thinks they might have it this particular weekend, director Johnny Ma is here with The Mother and the Bear to remind you that, no, it could be quite worse. (The facts, ahem, bear him out: I’m writing this from a relatively balmy -3 C Toronto, staring in disbelief at my iPhone’s report of Winnipeg’s -22 C fate.) But Ma’s film isn’t solely set on establishing The Peg’s winter bona fides, but rather exposing the city’s throbbing romantic heart, which might be able to melt the coldest of days.
Part romantic comedy, part winsome character study, and part cosmic fairy tale, The Mother and the Bear follows Sara (Kim Ho-jung), a lonely but sturdy South Korean widow who is forced to travel from Seoul to Winnipeg after her twentysomething daughter, the school teacher Sumi (Kim Ho-jung), slips into a coma following a late-night encounter with a bear. What starts as a typical stranger-in-a-strange-land comedy – with Sara enduring the rituals of a Winnipeg winter – gradually turns into something more unexpected, even fresh. Especially once Sara begins to pursue the naive but well-intentioned fantasy that her daughter is in a romantic relationship with a local man named Min (Jonathan Kim), and then gets herself entangled in a burgeoning romance with Min’s father, Sam (Lee Won-Jae).
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Even before Ma’s film settles into its quirky comedic rhythms, The Mother and the Bear represents a dual set of departures for its director. While the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker has previously trained his rather unrelenting eye on serious-minded narratives, including the 2016 thriller Old Stone and 2020’s opera-set melodrama To Live, to Sing, the material of The Mother and the Bear is defiantly buoyant. But more than that, Ma has managed to make a proudly Winnipeg-first film without having ever lived in the Gateway to the West before filming there.
That might land as strike one against the director, but it is clear that Ma is following (unintentionally, given the timing of the two productions) in the footsteps of Winnipegger Matthew Rankin, whose 2024 comedy Universal Language treated the city not as a place to memorialize but to mythologize. In Ma’s view, the town might be constantly buried under snow and crawling with bears, but it is also a land of resilience, and a hub for the most romantic of souls to converge.
While not everything clicks in The Mother and the Bear – it takes Ma an awfully long time to figure out just where Sara and Sam might be heading in their relationship, the audience catching up far before the characters do, while a reveal involving Sumi is similarly too well telegraphed – the film will keep you warm enough during the dark days of winter. No matter where in the country you might be watching it.