For the second feature of the Spring season, the Kitchen Stove Film Festival is bringing the Oscar-nominated Incendies to the screen at the Pen Mar theatre.
While the film didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s not short on awards or nominations. It’s up for 10 awards at the Genies, including Best Motion Picture and it’s already won top honours at both the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals.
An adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s prize-winning play, Incendies, is a moving coming-of-age story that brings the horror of war to a personal level, examining the scars left by the cycle of violence and the power of the will to survive. The play premiered in France in 2003 and has since been staged all over the world, including Canada.
Incendies is the fourth feature-length film from director and screenwriter Denis Villeneuve and is a Canada-France co-production that was shot in Quebec and Jordan.
Set against the dark pages of the Lebanese civil war, this film follows the journey of twin siblings, Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette), whose deceased mother left two astonishing envelopes in her will: one addressed to a father they thought was long dead and the other to a brother they never knew existed. They travel to their mother’s homeland in search of the truth and eventually piece together a heartbreaking story of exceptional courage.
Simon is unmoved by the posthumous mind games of a mother who was always distant and cold. However, the love he has for his sister is strong, and he soon joins her in combing their ancestral homeland in search of a woman who is very different from the mother they knew.
Tickets for the film, which screens at 4 and 7 p.m. on March 10 in the Pen-Mar are $12 each and available at the Penticton Art Gallery and the Book Shop on Main Street. Limited tickets at the door may be available at the door.
