The Reel North Film Festival Basement Bijou double feature at the Thompson Public Library March 6 opens with director Charles Officer's first dramatic feature film Nurse. Fighter. Boy.
Doors at 7 p.m. with screening at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5 per person at the door.
An "urban love story about the soul of a mother, the heart of a fighter, and the faith of a child," Jude is a cancer-stricken single mother who descends from a long line of Jamaican caregivers.
Silence is a 'past his prime' boxer who fights illegally to survive, while Ciel is a troubled boy with a fanciful imagination who delves into music, conjuring dreams for his mother. During the last week of summer, a late-night brawl finds the fighter in the nurse's care causing their three fates to be forever entwined.
Officer produced the 92-minute Nurse. Fighter. Boy in collaboration with the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. He co-wrote it with Ingrid Veninger, who produced the film.
It debuted at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival and is currently being screened across Canada and internationally. It played last April at the Sarasota Film Festival and won the audience award at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany.
The second feature, My Son the Fanatic is 87 minutes long and starts at 9:15 p.m. It was made back in 1997 by director Udayan Prasad and written by Hanif Kureishi, based on his 1994 novella of the same title published in the New Yorker.
An alcoholic secular Islamist, Pakistani-born immigrant taxi driver Parvez, portrayed by Om Puri, drives in an unnamed city in northern England. Parvez and prostitute Bettina, whose real name is Sandra, played by Rachel Griffiths, find themselves trapped in the middle when Islamic fundamentalists decide to clean up the town.
The plot of the eerily prescient film revolves around Parvez whose life takes a very dark turn when his son Farid converts to radical Islamism, leading to family breakdown and social conflict.
He watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son; played by Akbar Kurtha, sell his electric guitar. "Where is that going?" Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. "You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!" Farid looks at his father with irritation. "You always said there were more important things than 'Stairway to Heaven,' " he says in a thick northern English accent. "You couldn't have been more right."
Farid was to be engaged to the local police chief inspector's daughter Madeleine Fingerhut; upon discovering that his future father-in-law detests his family he turns to Islam and is radicalized.
