Screening times:
Saturday, July 18, 8:30PM

John Greyson | Canada | 1996 | 95m
English, French with English subtitles

1952: Bishop Bilodeau visits a prison to hear the confession of Simon, a boyhood friend jailed for murder 40 years ago. However, once there, Bilodeau finds himself forced to watch a play put on by Simon and the other inmates depicting the two men’s youths. As the play progresses, the truth of Simon’s crime comes to light in a film that explores forbidden sexuality, race, gender, the Catholic church and a tragic miscarriage of justice. Director John Greyson ( Zero Patience, Uncut, The Law of Enclosures) fuses past and present, love and betrayal in this adaption of Quebec Playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s play Lilies or the Revival of a Romantic Drama.

Speaking about what resonated with him about the project, Greyson says: “What was… present for both Michel Marc and myself was our shared history of growing up Catholic. I was an altar boy and a choirboy. He was growing up in rural Quebec in the utter grip of the post–Vatican II Council revolution, with Catholicism just emerging from the legacy of a very repressive church. I think both of us were accessing not the contemporary urgency brought by ACT UP—which also targeted Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and Ronald Reagan—but our own pasts. ”

Lilies is part of Carbon Arc’s July retro series : Queer and Now, Queer Canadian Classics. Also screening in the series are Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Saturday July 11), and Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Saturday July 25).

"A tense drama of tangled emotions and savage repercussions." - Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle

"Greyson deserves much credit for realizing an outrageous theatrical conceit with clarity, consistency, and an arsenal of cinematic ideas." - Bob Satuloff, Film Journal International

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