The Oxbow Cure

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

When rivers meander and are sometimes cut off from their course, they form an oxbow lake.

The Oxbow Cure is a winter tale of Lena, a middle-aged woman who has recently been diagnosed with a life-altering disease. In an attempt to come to terms with her transforming body, she leaves her home in the city for a new life in remote northern Ontario. While exploring the natural world outside her cottage, she begins to create an interior routine. A frozen lake, mere steps from her front door, is a source of both fear and fascination.

Date of release
2013-08-23
TMDB
4.7 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Drama, Horror, Science Fiction
Director
Calvin Thomas, Yonah Lewis

Casting

Interesting facts

The Oxbow Cure is a 2013 Canadian independent film directed by Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas. It stars writer Claudia Dey as Lena, a woman who moves away from the city to a remote cottage in an attempt to heal herself and escape from her past.

Production

On January 17, 2012 a Kickstarter campaign was launched with a fundraising target of $12,000 under the working title of Condition of the Heart. On February 17, 2012 funding closed with $12,150 pledged by 117 people. The film was partially financed through a grant from the Toronto Arts Council. Telefilm Canada provided completion funds through their Low Budget Independent Feature Film Assistance Program.

The film was influenced by the 1963 Swedish documentary Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, in which property master Karl-Arne Bergman discusses how his recent ankylosing spondylitis diagnosis is transforming his physical and emotional life. Yonah Lewis noted, "We instantly loved the way Karl-Arne was talking about the inevitability of it, about having to come to terms with the disease, that there was nothing you can change.

Claudia Dey, who the directing pair had worked with on their previous film, Amy George, was cast in the lead role. "Casting is always really hard for us, and we really don’t like it very much," explained Calvin Thomas. "We had worked with Claudia before, and we wrote her and said “Do you know of any buddies who might want to do this?” And she wrote back and said, “I would do it." We never thought to ask her because she had just had a baby and she…

Lewis and Thomas, and the film's third screenwriter, Lewis' younger brother, Lev Lewis, set the story in the dead of winter, but there was an early-March thaw in Hunstville, Ontario during principal photography they weren't prepared for. "We would get our really small crew to shovel snow from one location to another to make it look like we had more of it than we did, but eventually we just had to give up and sort of let spring just happen.

The opening of the film and the few flashbacks were shot as pick-ups back in Toronto during the edit. "There was nothing in the original screenplay other than just the cabin. Through watching other cuts of it and showing it to friends and other people, we realized there needed to be a little bit more contrast to talk about where she was coming from and where she was going, and you couldn’t get any sense of that before," explained Lewis.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended