Filmi 21! Virtual Edition
Filmi Toronto’s South Asian Film Festival Celebrating 21 Years!
December 27th, 2020
21st Filmi: Toronto’s South Asian film festival
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The bakebook
A modern-day animated fairy-tale, in which a woman overcomes the disappearance of her lover through her passion for baking.
SURI PARMAR is a Toronto-based writer, filmmaker, designer, and self-described “creative carpet bomber” whose work has screened at film festivals around the world. In 2011, she was one of five writers from across Canada selected for the Canadian Film Centre’s prestigious screenwriting residency program. She is also an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre’s Short Dramatic Film Program and the Writers Guild of Canada’s Diverse Screenwriters Program for television writing, and a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Although Suri writes in a variety of genres, she prefers fantasy, and includes Kelly Link, Angela Carter, and the Wachowskis among her influences. She aspires to evoke the same awe and wonder she herself experienced the first time she watched the film Akira.
The Bakebook is based on a short prose piece that I wrote while attending Humber College’s School for Writers, that was published in Black Heart Magazine in 2012. My older sister loved it and begged me to adapt it into a film. I guess you could say that The Bakebook is my gift to her.
Because of the story’s fanciful elements and delicate tone, I felt it could only be an animated film. Puppets were hand-drawn and shaded in watercolour to channel Golden Age colour plates. As with fairy-tale books of the era, it espouses universal themes. Love, grief, loss. Specifically, how different people deal—or don’t deal—with tragedy.
Ginny, the protagonist, is a new take on fairy story heroines. She’s an accountant in her thirties rather than a princess, and is spirited, stubborn, and eccentric. She’s also a woman of colour; when I was growing up, I loved fairy-tales, but felt they embodied a world in which non-Orientalised visible minorities like me didn’t belong. Ginny is a response to this paucity.
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