LUMIERE CINEMA

THE MOTHER AND THE BEAR

“In a snow-swept Winnipeg, school teacher Sumi (Leere Park) is hospitalized after a fall. On hearing the news, her anxious mother, Sara (Kim Ho-jung), flies over from Seoul to be with her comatose daughter — and once Sara sets herself up in the young woman’s apartment, she discovers she doesn’t really know Sumi at all.In a departure from his previous films Old Stone and To Live, to Sing, which were more serious-minded studies of life in contemporary China, Chinese Canadian filmmaker Johnny Ma embraces a new mode here, using suburban Winnipeg as the stage for a stylized, whimsical narrative of crossed wires, secret lives, and conflicting agendas.Sara despairs about her daughter’s single status, so she immediately starts catfishing the pleasant Min (Jonathan Kim) to be Sumi’s boyfriend — once she wakes up, of course — and also gets unwittingly entangled with Min’s estranged father, Sam (Won-Jae Lee), who runs a Korean restaurant in the city. As Sam and the widowed Sara connect over their mutual melancholies, a chance meeting with Sumi’s co-worker Amaya (Amara Pedroso Saquel) leads Sara to learn more about the life from which her daughter has chosen to exclude her.A unique mash-up of genres, The Mother and the Bear marks a bold new direction for Ma. And if you were wondering about that eponymous bear… well, you’ll just have to see the film.”