We are excited to announce a free screening of the film Lilies (1996) and we hope you will join us!

Lilies (1996) presents a fluid relationship between reality and fantasy in which the past is hallucinated rather than faithfully remembered. Directed by John Greyson and based on the play Les Feluettes by Michel Marc Bouchard, the film tells the story of Simon, who, along with his fellow prisoners in 1952, stages a theatrical reenactment for Bishop Bilodeau of the love story between Simon and the aristocrat Vallier and the tragedy that came between them in Roberval in 1912, drawing the Bishop, who believes he has come to hear a confession, back into the past.

This theatrical exercise forces the characters to exorcise: for the Bishop, the admission of a harbored truth may be the only source of resolution for the vengeful Simon; for the prisoners, the fulfilment they find through this project of unconventional justice, where men play men and women and complicate questions of class, culture, language, and race, is more ambiguous.

To commemorate the film’s 30th anniversary, a free screening will accompany Lilies, d’aprés Les Feluettes, an exhibit which extends Shannon Brownlee’s meditation on the bricolage of fantasies, subjectivities, and positionalities that inform the shared reality of the film’s characters to consider the people behind the film and the patchwork of perspectives, imaginations, and imperatives through which Les Feluettes became Lilies. A Quebec-Ontario co-production filmed during the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Lilies also engages with fantasies of cross-provincial Canadian unity, including the dissonances within that imagined unity.

Lilies, d’aprés Les Feluettes considers how the written record of Lilies’ making and reception, including production notes, press releases, reviews, and more, interacts with these questions of fantasy related to the film and its wider cultural-political context. With new insights from Greyson, Bouchard, and English translator Linda Gaboriau, the exhibit ultimately celebrates how art allows us to experience what is not and question what is—to consider the changemaking potential of art, imagination, translation, and collaboration that feels desperately needed at the present moment.

This exhibit was curated by Whitney Mambou in collaboration with the Film Library & Media Archives of the University of Toronto, with assistance from Cinémathèque québécoise and the TIFF Reference Library and art from Between Studios.

The screening takes place at 6:30pm on Friday, September 18th, in the Robarts Theatre (Room 3-025 on the third floor of Robarts Library, 130 St. George Street, Toronto.

Lilies 30th Anniversary Screening

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