Synopsis
Joan has a dream and shares a secret with her granddaughter: before she met her grandfather, she loved a man with whom she starred in a TV show in the 50s. He almost followed her to the altar. Joan wants Audrey to find this man. Written by the two actresses, Joan Benac and Deragh Campbell, and filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz, *Never Eat Alone* is a film that navigates the spaces of loneliness and togetherness between the young and old in a setting that is peppered with fiction and documentary. It is also the first of a series of films in which the character, Audrey Benac, becomes an archival detective who dives into the past to uncover the hidden stories of forgotten artists.
A word from Tënk
Sofia Bohdanowicz's grandmother, Joan Benac, entrusts her granddaughter Audrey (Sofia's alter ego, played here by Deragh Campbell) with a mission: to find a certain Don Radovic, a failed love interest from her youth, with whom she shared the screen in the 1950s. From this plot, which forms the premise of Bohdanowicz's first feature film - and foreshadows a rocky quest - emerges instead a restrained portrait of everyday life. We see the ritual and meticulous gestures of domesticity; chopping vegetables, washing dishes, making a bed, reading a book… The director questions this time that is sliding by without us knowing too well what it is made of. Apart from the great moments of existence, those that are narrated and exalted by the narratives, what is really happening? Bohdanowicz's film lingers on what Georges Perec called "the infra-ordinary" in an attempt to retain on screen the various layers of memory evoked by her grandmother's existence. A recipe for a shared remedy, the reading of an old correspondence, a blouse from another era; it is from these fragments of ordinary life that the emotional memory is nourished, it is from this antispectacular that the density of our existences is formed. Real life is not elsewhere, it is already here.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director
