Screening times:
Saturday, July 11, 8:30 PM

Patricia Rozema | Canada | 1987 | 81m

In Patricia Rozema’s (When Night is Falling, Mansfield Park) fanciful first feature, waifish aspiring photographer Polly lands a job at a Toronto art gallery run by Gabrielle, who is also a painter. Polly is impressed with Gabrielle’s paintings, but as Polly gets to know her lover Mary and becomes entangled in their lives, she realizes Gabrielle isn’t exactly who she appears to be.

The gauche absent-minded temp with spiky orange hair and the polished, bourgeois curator with a gift for gab are like night and day, yet a strong connection builds between these two women through their shared love of art, and their genuine curiosity and appetite for love.

The film was a breakout role for McCarthy as wistful daydreamer Polly. Rozema said ofher casting:” ‘When she came into the audition, I thought 'oh, pleeease be able to act.' She looked so unbelievably perfect, like a little bird just hatched.”

Winner of the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, it was the first English-language Canadian feature ever to be a prizewinner at Cannes. I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is part of Carbon Arc’s July retro series : Queer and Now, Queer Canadian Classics. Also screening in the series are John Greyson’s Lilies (Saturday July 18), and Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Saturday July 25).

"Rozema uses a seemingly simple style to make some quiet and deep observations… McCarthy has one of those faces that speaks volumes, and she is able to be sad without being depressing, funny without being a clown." Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

“Swift, witty and intimate, it is an amazingly confident first feature that reveals with exquisite humor and charm the pitfalls in a relationship between two radically different women.” Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Winner: Prix de la Jeunesse, Cannes Film Festival, 1987

Tickets $12 ($11.40 cash at the door if available)