Roads in February – March 2nd: 1pm

March 2nd: 1pm: Roads in February 

Director: Katherine Jerkovic 

CANADA/URUGUAY, 2018 Spanish w/ English subtitles 82 minutes 

Principal Cast: Arlen Aguayo Stewart, Gloria Demassi 

Winner of the 2018 City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival, Roads in February follows a young woman’s journey back to her roots. 

Mourning the recent death of her father, Sarah (Arlen Aguayo Stewart) leaves her adoptive home of Montreal to visit her paternal grandmother, Magda (Gloria Demassi), in a sleepy village in rural Uruguay. Sarah and her parents left Uruguay over a decade ago and never returned. Driven by childhood memories, she hopes to renew her relation- ship with Magda and with her birthplace. But as soon as Sarah arrives, a quiet unease forms. Magda doesn’t understand why her son never returned to see her and must now live with the fact that he never will. The tension comes as a surprise to Sarah, who must come to terms with both her grief over her father and the distance she feels between herself, her family, and her Uruguayan homeland. 

Director Katherine Jerkovic skilfully infuses each scene with an intimate yet powerful tone as Sarah struggles to reconcile the gulf between past and present, ideals and reality. The stifling heat and torpid pace of rural life in Uruguay heightens her growing sense 

of alienation. Aguayo Stewart and Demassi deliver beautifully subtle performances, where the gravity lies in what remains unsaid between them. An evocative slice of life with an assured visual style, Roads in February is an enthralling debut that firmly establishes Jerkovic as one of Canada’s bright new talents. 

“Jerkovic is a gifted, intuitive storyteller who doesn’t need to oversell her story’s emotional undercurrents; she trusts her audience to understand what’s going on simply by paying attention to her actors’ faces.”  —Norman Wilner, NOW Magazine 

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