CONTENT ADVISORY
Nudity
Canada, Chile2024100 minEnglish, KoreanComedy, Romance
After a mysterious encounter leaves her daughter Sumi in a coma, Sara rushes from South Korea to Winnipeg to be by her side. As Sumi heals, Sara begins to unpack details of her life that her daughter never shared with her. On a mission to find a husband to take care of Sumi when she wakes, Sara ventures into the daunting unknowns of dating apps and Winnipeg winters, and finds out more about herself than she planned.
Triangulated somewhere between K-drama, telenovela, and rom-com is Johnny Ma’s feel-good film about a mother becoming her own woman again, unshackled by the roles of “wife” or “mother." After festival-favourite dramas Old Stone (2016) and To Live To Sing (RA 2019), Ma swerves into cross-cultural zaniness while grounding his characters with the same soul of his previous films, and shows us it’s never too late to explore oneself.
– Aram Siu Wai Collier
Kim Ho-jung
Lee Won-jae
Jonathan Kim
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Toronto International Film Festival, 2024
Johnny Ma
Johnny Ma was born in Shanghai and immigrated to Toronto at age 10. Johnny’s first feature, Old Stone, debuted at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival. His second feature, To Live To Sing, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2019. The Mother and The Bear is his third film, and the first produced outside of China.
16 Nov, 2024 2:30 pm
TIFF Lightbox C4AA
CONTENT ADVISORY
Nudity
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This film is scheduled to be presented with English subtitles only (no subtitles for English dialogue). Wheelchair spaces and step-free seating is available for this screening – click below to book accessible seats.
Join us for a Q&A immediately after the screening with director Johnny Ma and actor Jonathan Kim.
Trouble seems to follow Jie and his family. Training to be a competitive fencer, Jie is lost, haunted by the childhood memory of a near-drowning incident with his menacing older brother Han. Years later, a teenage Han is imprisoned after killing a competitor during a fencing match (by accident, he swears). Meanwhile, Jie's mother has been spiteful and distant ever since, with no love to give her younger son. So when Han is finally released from prison, Jie is desperate to have some family love restored — and eager for some helpful fencing and boyfriend dating tips, too. But is Han’s reformed presence for real?
What does greatness look like? What does it take to be great? In the documentary Ashima, greatness looks like Ashima Shiraishi, a modest but determined 13-year old Japanese American rock-climbing prodigy. For her demanding father, Hisatoshi, a former Butoh dancer and Ashima’s coach, greatness requires discipline and intense focus. Together, they’ve embarked to South Africa to climb Golden Shadow, a famous V14 boulder, for Ashima to become the youngest woman to ever climb it.
Deep in debt, with a house and a university-bound kid, plus a marriage on the rocks, reformed gambler Lucky sees his luck run out after getting scammed in a tax-fraud scheme. Ashamed and desperate to keep it from his family, he returns to underground backroom gambling dens, playing for big payouts to relieve the debt and win back his family’s favour. Meanwhile, each family member, unaware of Lucky’s troubles but feeling the money crunch, too, resorts to unsavoury means to dig out of their hole.
Founded in Toronto in 1997, Reel Asian is Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival and a year-round cultural organization dedicated to championing Asian and Asian diasporic artists and storytellers. What began as a grassroots film festival has grown into a national platform supporting filmmakers and audiences through screenings, education, industry initiatives, artist development, and community programming presented across Toronto, the GTA, and online across Canada.
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