Friday, March 22 / 8:30 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

Program: Our Grandmother the Inlet, Evil Does Not Exist

Feature presentation \

environmentalism \ greed \ wonder

From the internationally acclaimed, Oscar-winning director of Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, comes this poetic, captivating, and haunting slow-burn drama about a proposed commercial development in an unspoiled region of Japan. Takumi and his daughter Hana live near a pristine forested area that has remained untouched by modernity. That is until a pair of agents come to Takumi’s village to propose the building of a “glamping” site, a resort for wealthy urban vacationers. During the public presentation to the community, many critique the project, but the agents make it clear the decision is a foregone conclusion. Seemingly set up as an environmental ‘us vs them’ drama of resistance, Hamaguchi’s startling, original storytelling soon shifts its perspective to those of the agents, whose own inner conflicts and struggles with this project are examined when they return to the city. It is a fascinating, elliptical narrative that illuminates how thoughts and actions can be altered, how imperatives can be transformed, and how time itself affects consciousness and conscience. Mysterious and haunting. 

- Tom McSorley

Short film \

Our Grandmother the Inlet

2023 / 9 minutes / British Columbia
Director: Jaime Leigh Gianopoulos, Kayah George
Language: English

A young Tsleil-Waututh woman reflects on her relationship to water, culture, and land as kin and relatives.

Our Grandmother the Inlet uses a hybrid documentary format to chart the lineage of the George family, as well as their ongoing fight against the impacts of industrialization, which threaten both the land itself and their people’s connection to it and their culture.