The Williams Lake Film Club will show Starbuck next Tuesday, Sept. 25, at the Gibraltar Room.
Screening time is 7 p.m., and back doors will open at 6:30 p.m.
The film stars Patrick Huard, Julie LeBreton and Antoine Bertrand, and is directed by Ken Scott. It runs 110 minutes in French with English subtitles.
This film has been one of the most popular ever in Québec, so popular that Steven Spielberg picked up on it and has decided to make an English version of the film.
The film is about David Wozniak, 42, whose life is coming to a screeching halt. His girlfriend is pregnant, fed up and ready to go it alone.
Some thugs keep dropping by unexpectedly and nearly drown him in the hope of collecting on an overdue $80,000 debt.
Plus, the middle-aged slacker is a constant screw-up at the family butcher shop, regularly making deliveries late. The soccer jerseys he promises to fetch for a team photo — you guessed it — don’t get picked up on time.
These turn out to be the least of his worries because, about 20 years earlier, David regularly contributed to a local sperm bank. He was so prolific that he was given the code name Starbuck, after a particularly willing and able Canadian bull who sired more than 2,000 offspring.
“It is like paying us to breathe,” one buddy comments.
David learns the clinic has used his contributions to sire 533 children, 142 of whom have launched a class-action suit to learn the name of their father.
With the help of his lawyer friend, David files suit against the clinic to keep his identity secret and for much-needed cash.
But David can’t leave well enough alone. He can’t help wondering about the children he has fathered and begins to track them down, randomly and one by one.
With such a fertile concept in play, it is no surprise that what unfolds is a wonderfully sweet and poignant comedy that goes in all kinds of unexpected directions.
