Summertime, and the livin’ is easy – not for Robin, a cannery worker trying to warn her leery orchard town of an invasive pest while grappling with the stress of an unwanted pregnancy.
Robin (Grace Glowicki) is the central figure of Until Branches Bend, a 2022 film by Vancouver-based director and writer Sophie Jarvis. Since its world premier at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the movie won Best BC Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Prix de Soleure 2023 at Solothurner Filmtage in Switzerland. The film has been an official selection at other festivals including South by Southwest, and was nominated twice at the Canadian Screen Awards, which took place last weekend.
Awards are really important, Jarvis says.
“It’s hard to make a film, and it’s easier when your work has been recognized in a critical sense,” she added. While Jarvis didn’t win for Best Original Screenplay, she said she was very happy to see Anthony Shim take the prize for Riceboy Sleeps, another B.C. feature.
“To be included in a critical capacity means that artists are going to not have as challenging of a time making their next project,” Jarvis said.
This time around, however, Until Branches Bend proposed multiple challenges for the emerging director. As her first feature-length work, she had to get the support of producers – which included some former classmates, colleagues and a Swiss company.
“It’s funny, I’m Swiss because my grandfather, who lives in Summerland, moved from Switzerland to Canada in the ’60s,” Jarvis said, describing the “full circle” moment.
And while Summerland is a picturesque location, filming there in July 2021 added some real tension to the drama on screen.
It was a bad year for wildfires. “They were happening super close to where we were filming, so there was a lot of tension just inherently working in the middle of a natural disaster zone,” Jarvis explained. “And also the pandemic … it’s tough, when you can’t be inside and can’t be outside either with the fires.”
She also decided to capture the entire movie on 16-millimetre film, which added to the cost and difficulty, with limited labs able to process it. But Jarvis said the medium lends itself to the texture in the subject matter.
“It’s from the landscape, it’s from the clothes people are wearing, it’s from the environment and the fruit and everything we see. And I wanted to maintain that organic texture,” Jarvis said.
Those elements fuse with an unsettling score composed by her brother, Kieran Jarvis, with performance by Vancouver vocal group, musica intima. The result is a 91-minute runtime dripping with mood.
Starting as a draft script in 2016, Jarvis said that it was incredible to see the film finally come together, and be played in theatres.
You can watch it now via on-demand services including AppleTV, Google Play and YouTube. It will also be on Crave in Canada on July 1.
Jarvis now lives in Kitsilano, but grew up with her brother in West Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay neighbourhood. She thanks her former Ecole Sentinel Secondary teachers Mr. Isernia, Ms. Sunday and Ms. Evans for their support.
