I've Heard the Mermaids Singing Fri, Apr 26 | 7:30pm | TMT
LIMITED SERIES WEEKEND WITH... PATRICIA ROZEMA APR 26–29, 2024
Weekend With… is a series that offers audiences the chance to dive deep into the work of a filmmaker, actor, or creative over the course of one weekend. Considered part of the informally defined collection of independent filmmakers to make up the Toronto New Wave in the 1980s and early 1990s, filmmaker, television director, artist, and educator Patricia Rozema (b. 1958) found breakout success at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival when her first feature, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing , nabbed the Prix de la Jeunesse in the Director’s Fortnight section, making it the first English-language Canadian film in the festival’s forty-year history to win an award. Rozema’s subsequent career, which has encompassed narrative features, shorts, documentaries, and episodes of hit television series as both director and writer, maintains her first feature’s lighthearted irreverence, stylistic bravado, eye for magical realism, and distinctly queer sensibility. Currently inspiring the next generation of filmmakers as an adjunct professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television, Rozema joins the Academy Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive for a weekend-long trip through her playful outlook on artmaking. Programmed and notes by K.J. Relth-Miller and Film Programmer at the UCLA Film & Television Archive Amanda Salazar.
Co-presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Please note screening locations below.
In-person: Patricia Rozema.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing Fri, Apr 26 | 7:30pm | TMT
DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Patricia Rozema. WITH: Sheila McCarthy, Paule Baillargeon, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Richard Monette. 1987. 83 min. Canada. Color. English. Rated R. DCP.
Supported by government funding thanks in part to an endorsement from David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema’s feature debut centers on Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy), a Girl Friday for the curator of a private art gallery in Toronto. Through a video diary and Polly’s literal flights of fancy that unfold in her mind’s eye, Rozema’s delicate and distinct world-building reveal Polly’s purity of soul, sexual awakening, and ultimate growth. Offsetting her film’s deep psychological and spiritual meaning with a lightheartedness, Rozema has said about Mermaids : “It’s about the artist in all of us. And the discovery of sexual difference. It’s also about some serious ’80s shoulder pads.”
Mansfield Park in 35mm Sat, Apr 27 | 7:30pm | TMT
Called “the best thing to happen to Austen in a long time” by Xtra Magazine , writer-director Patricia Rozema boldly enters the “Austen-mania” of the ’90s (five other Jane Austen adaptations were filmed for the big screen in the decade, and that’s not counting Clueless !) with this loose interpretation of the British author’s complex 1814 novel. A rags-to- riches tale of Fanny Price (Frances O’Connor), sent by her struggling parents to her wealthy uncle, Mansfield Park rejects the lure of rendering Austen in a purely elegant mode, facing the realities of the
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