Agatha's Almanac
Dir. Amalie Atkins
Canada, 2025, 86 mins
English with English subtitles
This film will screen with English subtitles in-house
Friday 15 May
7-8:30pm
Doors open 6.30pm
Tickets on a sliding scale:
£8 / £5 / £2
See our Sliding Scale Ticket Guide for rate information
Each ticket includes a complimentary refreshment
Agatha’s Almanac centres on Agatha Bock, a fiercely independent 90-year-old who lives alone on her ancestral farm. Despite health challenges, she continues to tend her land, cultivating heirloom seeds passed down through generations.
Working entirely by hand, Agatha plants and harvests her expansive field of watermelons, beans, flowers, herbs and vegetables. Living without a car, mobile phone or running water, her meditative daily rituals and routines offer a quiet counterpoint to contemporary life. Made intentionally with sensory sensitive viewers in mind, the film carves out a (mostly) calm space amidst a chaotic world.
Filmed over six years by Agatha’s niece, director Amalie Atkins, and cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, the work is shot on 16mm using a windup Bolex and an ArriSR2 studio camera. This approach captures the tactile, material qualities of both Agatha’s environment and the filmmaking process itself.
Agatha’s farmhouse, largely unchanged since the 1950s, holds a dense accumulation of objects, textures and colour. It serves as a living archive, rooted in an esoteric way of life that predates modern conveniences. Attentive to rhythm, duration and sensory experience, the film creates space to observe Agatha’s ways of living and working, and to reflect on forms of knowledge and care that are often overlooked.
Amalie Atkins (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Renowned for her films and video installations, Atkins creates cinematic fables by blending 16mm film, performance, textiles, installations, and analogue photography. Her practice merges traditional elements with a hands-on, do-it-yourself aesthetic to imprint a fictional world onto everyday life.
Her work has been featured in major survey exhibitions, including Oh, Canada at MASS MoCA, DreamLand: Textiles in the Canadian Landscape at the Textile Museum of Canada, and Road Show East, which toured Eastern Europe.
Her films have screened nationally and internationally, including at the Berlin International Art Film Festival (Berlin, Germany), Bucharest Film Awards (Romania), Festival International Signes de Nuit (Paris, France), Montreal Independent Film Festival (Montreal, QC), Dresdner Schmalfilmtage (Dresden, Germany), and Analogue Resilience (Toronto, ON).
