Passionflower

Passionflower (2012)

On the brink of puberty in 1962 suburban Winnipeg, Sarah Matthews is increasingly challenged and confused by her mother’s instability and sexual power. While her father refuses to acknowledge that the family is fracturing under the stress of his wife’s mental illness, Sarah uses her creativity, inner strength, and a new friend to discover her own identity. With courage, Sarah bears witness and demands truth from the adults around her, demonstrating love’s capacity to endure.

Date of release
2012-04-17
TMDB
9.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 24m
Genres
Drama
Director
Shelagh Carter

Casting

Interesting facts

Passionflower is a 2011 Canadian coming of age film written and directed by Shelagh Carter and starring Kassidy Love Brown, Kristen Harris and Darcy Fehr.

Production

The idea for a film started to solidify when Carter was accepted into the Canadian Film Centre's Directors Lab in Toronto in 2009.We had to send in two feature film treatments. I had written about my mum and me and the cat... I had written it as a short film around that time, and I showed it to my friend John and he said, "Shelagh, I think this is actually a feature, for some reason." Scenes started to come to me, all kinds of scenes, they were a…

On her return to Winnipeg, Carter was introduced to producer and fellow CFC alumna Polly Washburn in November 2009, who read the treatment and said they would make the film. Washburn would talk to Telefilm Canada while she was in Vancouver for the Olympics, assuring Carter: "We're not going to worry about going into development, we're going to go straight to production." In January 2010, Carter took a screenwriting course, "got a structure going,…

The film was made with the support of Telefilm, Manitoba Film and Music, and the Winnipeg Arts Council. In addition, Carter and Washburn raised US$5,920 on crowdfunding website Indiegogo towards Passionflower, when the film's working title was still Hello, Darling. The working title appears in the film's first official trailer, and was used in notices published as late as early 2011.

All of the actors were from Manitoba. Carter knew she wanted Darcy Fehr, whom she had seen in several Guy Maddin films as "Guy's alter ego": "I knew he was right and I had to put my foot down. He was busy working on Keyhole and Polly said, 'Well, I don't know if we can get him' and I said, 'No, we gotta have him.'" Carter had a meeting with Kirsten Harris and "she talked about how much she loved the script", asked some questions and Carter made a…

The child actors were found through Carter's connections locally, as Carter intended. Even so, through Telefilm, they put the script out in a national call and received tapes from some "very serious actors across Canada ... but I just felt I could do it out of Manitoba." In an earlier workshop, just to hear the script, I invited Kristen, Darcy, Jacqueline Guertin, Cindy Marie Small and a couple other people to do the party scene, and I had them r…

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