Never Eat Alone

Sofia Bohdanowicz's grandmother, Joan Benac, entrusts her granddaughter Audrey (Sofia's alter ego, played here by Deragh Campbell) with a mission: to find a certain Don Radovic, a failed love interest from her youth, with whom she shared the screen in the 1950s. From this plot, which forms the premise of Bohdanowicz's first feature film - and foreshadows a rocky quest - emerges instead a restrained portrait of everyday life. We see the ritual and meticulous gestures of domesticity; chopping vegetables, washing dishes, making a bed, reading a book... The director questions this time that is sliding by without us knowing too well what it is made of. Apart from the great moments of existence, those that are narrated and exalted by the narratives, what is really happening? Bohdanowicz's film lingers on what Georges Perec called "the infra-ordinary" in an attempt to retain on screen the various layers of memory evoked by her grandmother's existence. A recipe for a shared remedy, the reading of an old correspondence, a blouse from another era; it is from these fragments of ordinary life that the emotional memory is nourished, it is from this antispectacular that the density of our existences is formed. Real life is not elsewhere, it is *already here*.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director