Saturday, August 20th / 5–9 PM
Hosted by SSB and Únashay
It was grief. I knew it well. And this time it was for the changing world around me.
—Jennifer Abbott
Some Serious Business is pleased to join Únashay for a screening of SSB Away artist in residence Jennifer Abbott’s award-winning film, The Magnitude of All Things, as part of Unashay’s first Noria (grief) café on Saturday, August 20th, 5-9 PM. Janeen Singer and Aimee Wilson will lead the Café and Jennifer will speak about her experiences making the film. Potluck: Please bring a dish to be shared by the community. Café 5–7 PM; Potluck dinner 7 PM; Screening at 7:45. Please RSVP to info@someseriousbusiness.org for directions and information. Donations accepted, but not required.
When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown, drawing intimate parallels between the experiences of grief—both personal and planetary. Stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood on Ontario’s Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything. For the people featured, climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action. Watch the trailer.
Noria (grief) café: a hybrid of guided and exploratory community sharing of what hurts, held in reverent, curious community care. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés refers to it as the Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river, whereby we seek to listen and attune ourselves to, without the need to ‘fix,’ but rather carry the experience of grief together. Noria is a waterwheel driven by the current of the river, pulling water from below up to the surface to nourish the land, crops, and villages. It’s an ancient Arabic invention, whose linguistic roots mean to “groan” & “grunt”; referencing the sound the wheel makes as it turns, reaching below and pulling water to the surface.
About Jennifer Abbott
Jennifer is a Sundance and Genie award winning filmmaker who sees filmmaking as art, philosophy, and activism. She is best known as Director, Writer, Editor, Sound Designer and Co-Producer of The Magnitude of All Things (2020); the Co-Director and Supervising Editor of The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (2020); and the Co-Director and Editor of The Corporation (2003). Since the release of her first short film Skinned (1993), she has exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and is the recipient of over 45 international awards. The Magnitude of All Things has been called “Perhaps the most visceral reasoned call to action for humanity since An Inconvenient Truth,” and POV Magazine compared it to the “…lyrical and elegiac wonder of Terrence Malick”. The New Corporation was called the “Must-see documentary of the year,” by Forbes, “Chillingly relevant,” by Variety and made the Globe & Mail’s Top 20 films of 2020.