Academy Award, Best International Film (Nominee)
Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival

With his first film in seven years, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End, Moonlighting) directs one of his most free and visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a nomadic gray donkey named EO. Loosely inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, and featuring immersive, stunning cinematography by Michal Dymek coupled with Pawel Mykietyn’s resonant score, Skolimowski’s film puts the viewer in the perspective of its four-legged protagonist. EO’s journey speaks to the world around us, an equine hero on a quest for freedom.

Advisory: multiple scenes in EO feature strobing lights.

In Polish, Italian, English, and French with English subtitles.

Nominated for six Canadian Screen Awards:
Best Film, Director, Cinematography, Lead Performance, Editing, Original Screenplay

Best Canadian Film, Toronto Film Critics' Circle
Best Canadian Film, Vancouver International Film Festival

Raising her young son Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) in Vancouver’s suburbs in the '90s, So-young (Choi Seung-yoon), a South Korean immigrant and single mom, desperately wants to instill a sense of pride in the boy. In turn, he only wants to be considered “Canadian” in hopes of avoiding bullying at school. Elegantly interweaving social realism with fable-like sequences, Anthony Shim (who grew up in nearby Coquitlam) makes sublime use of Christopher Lew’s glorious cinematography and Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s expressive score to craft a film that’s both emotionally and sensorially rich.

In English and Korean with English subtitles.

Best Actor, BAFTA in Scotland
#1 Best Film of 2022, The New Yorker

The latest from writer-director Terence Davies (The House of Mirth; A Quiet Passion) is a sumptuous portrait of 20th-century English poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Davies crafts Sassoon’s experience of the First World War in layers of heroism (he was decorated for bravery on the Western Front) and loss. His attempt at conscientious objection to the war leads to his being committed to a Scottish hospital, where he meets and mentors fellow poet and soldier Wilfred Owen. Davies tracks much of Sassoon’s life after the war as a chain of fraught romances — most notably with actor and homme fatale Ivor Novello — and ongoing questions of sexual identity, social mores, and integrity both artistic and personal, leading to Sassoon’s late conversion to Catholicism and struggle to connect with his son.

The indignities of aging haunt many of Benediction’s characters, yet Davies’ recent string of exquisite films speaks to the artistic grace that can accrue with time, rigour, and experience.