Latest feature from Winnipeg director gets local debut Audience invited to ‘solve the puzzle, to be detectives and sleuth along’ By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:26 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 8, 2024

The Burning Season, the newest film from Winnipeg-based director Sean Garrity and Winnipeg-born writer-actor Jonas Chernick, is coming to a big screen near you — the Cineplex McGillivray, to be specific.

Opening at the south end theatre Friday, the film is a tale told-in-reverse starring Chernick (My Awkward Sexual Adventure), Sara Canning (The Vampire Diaries) and Joe Pingue (Station Eleven).

“It’s a love story that goes backwards, like (Christopher Nolan’s) Memento or (Gaspar Noé’s) Irréversible, and it similarly has a structure that invites the audience to solve the puzzle, to be detectives and sleuth along,” Garrity says.

Before reaching Manitoban screens, the film played the Glasgow International Film Festival, the Whistler Film Festival and the Canadian Film Festival, taking home the award for best screenplay from the latter two.

Scripted by Chernick and veteran Canadian writer Diana Frances (Corner Gas Animated), with adaptations by the director Garrity, the film is also nominated for a Writers’ Guild of Canada Award for — you guessed it — best screenplay.

The 10th film by Garrity and his seventh collaboration with Chernick, who recently appeared in the Kiefer Sutherland-starring espionage thriller Rabbit Hole, The Burning Season came together last summer when Garrity was brought in as a last-minute replacement for the original director.

During the summer of 2023, the film was shot at a scenic summer camp in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, with the cast rounded out by Tanisha Thammavongsa as well as Natalie Jane and Christian Meer, two young actors whose performances as younger versions of Canning and Chernick’s characters Garrity credits with making the film work.

With the film garnering solid feedback from audiences at festivals, Garrity is pleased with The Burning Season’s trajectory. As compared to other collaborations – including 2023’s The End of Sex, starring Chernick and Schitt’s Creek’s Emily Hampshire – Garrity says the new movie should reach and satisfy a different crowd.

“This film is very much for a demographic of people who are cinephiles,” says Garrity, who will follow the Friday 6:30 p.m. screening with a Q&A. Garrity might be joined by Canning, who is in town to shoot a new project, as well as editor Jon Gurdebeke and composer Kevon Cronin, who both live in the city.

Many of his other films, including End of Sex and I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight, were made for a broader audience, he says.

“This movie is planted squarely in the arthouse,” he says.

Throughout the film, Garrity says, the audience is “stampeding toward some sort of secret.”

For those interested in uncovering the truth, The Burning Season will be screening at Cineplex McGillivray beginning Friday, when it screens at both 6:30 p.m. and 9:40 p.m.

“(The movie) will stay there as long as it has an audience,” the director says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com