The Confederation Centre of the Arts and City Cinema Present: All My Puny Sorrows

14A, language, mature themes.
Dir: Michael McGowan, Canada, 2021, 103 min.
Alison Pill, Sarah Gadon, Mare Winningham.
Awards include Best Canadian Film (Vancouver Film Critics) and Best Feature (Writers Guild of Canada)

Author Miriam Toews will be presenting the 2025 Symons Lecture at Confederation Centre of the Arts on October 3.

“All My Puny Sorrows is a mature and beautiful story, the union of a celebrated author with a filmmaker in his creative prime. It’s ultimately about the way grief sneaks up on us, the way death sneaks up on us and the way, sometimes, life and light sneak up on us.” – Chris Knight, The National Post. “I love this movie like a person. It pierced my heart the way certain paintings or pieces of music do… The story, briefly: Lottie and her daughters Elfrieda, known as Elf, a world-renowned concert pianist, and Yoli, a recently divorced mother and burgeoning novelist, are living with the after-effects of the suicide of their husband and father 12 years ago. Now, as Elf’s own depression closes in, Yoli has to fight to give her reasons to live. That sounds bleak, but mysteriously, it’s the opposite. What the screenwriter and director Michael McGowan pulls off here is a miracle of tone – the same tone that Miriam Toews established in her source novel, whose title comes from a Coleridge poem: ‘I too a Sister had… To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows.’ It’s that juxtaposition of puny and sorrow, that heightened awareness of the bitter-sweetness of being human, that slays me. Our individual sorrows, when we are suffering them, are everything. But in the collective scheme of things, they are nothing. We go on. Life is funny because it is so sad, beautiful because it is ephemeral. Getting that tone right is how a story about grief turns into one of the most life-affirming things you’ll ever see.” – Johanna Schneller, the Globe and Mail