“It's a difficult film but there's really moments of hope and levity, and brightness, and I think that juxtaposition of extreme sadness with humour was what she did so well in the book, that I tried to do,” McGowan said. “Miriam has such a great way of exploring that, like Alison said, with intensity and darkness, but also silly humour, and her humour is so Canadian, it's so dry and silly.”įor filmmaker Michael McGowan, what attracted him to the book, leading him into the process of adapting it into a film, was that it was not just a “bleak,” “dark” and “tough” journey. “That to me was so fascinating because we have these people in our families, and we don't choose who they are, and they do things and then all of a sudden our whole life experience becomes filtered through these people, and through their choices.” “She's always kind of exploring the female experience as it is enmeshed in the family dynamic,” the actor said. Sarah Gadon said she was definitely in a phase of reading all of Miriam Toews’ work and got particularly excited about the characters in her novels.

“I want to die, this isn’t a mistake,” Elf tells her sister when Yoli arrives at the hospital.

Yoli gets a call from her mother, played by Mare Winningham, that her sister Elf (Gadon), an acclaimed pianist, tried to kill herself, 10 years after their father committed suicide.Īs Yoli rushes to be by her family’s side she has flashbacks to her upbringing in the Mennonite community and the constraints of that experience, including the push back her parents and sister faced when Elf wanted to leave the community to go to university to study music, for example. Yoli (Pill) is trying to stay motivated in her career as a writer, while trying to navigate her divorce from her daughter’s father. 'And yet, in our bones, how many of us can actually conceptualize death, understand it?” “In the history of mankind, has there ever been a more obvious truth than the statement, we are all going to die?' the voiceover at the beginning of the movie states. Famed novel by Miriam Toews has been adapted into a movie with the impactful All My Puny Sorrows, starring Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon, in theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on April 15 after making its debut at last year's Toronto International Film Festival.

All my puny sorrows summary