A Winter Tale

Directed by Frances-Anne Solomon

Canada, 2007 (fiction, 100 minutes, colour, English)

Film Description:
"A Winter Tale tells the story of a Black men's support group that begins to meet at a Caribbean Takeaway restaurant in the aftermath of the shooting death of a local child. It was developed through a collaborative improvisational process with the cast, who were drawn from Toronto's Caribbean and multicultural communities."
-- francesannesolomon.com (source)

Film Credits (partial):
Produced by:	Michèle Lonsdale Smith, Susan Fueg, Frances-Anne Solomon, Page Ostrow, Regan Macaulay, Lars Dahl
Principal Cast:	Peter Williams, Leonie Forbes, Michael Miller, Dennis Hall, P. Barrington, R.O. Glasgow, Sabio Emerencia Collins, Onyekachi Ejim, Peter Bailey, Ryan Ishmael, Mike G. Yohannes, Valerie Buhagiar, Finlandia Casellas, Nicole Stamp, Shakura S'Aida, Bobby Del Rio, Ahmad Zahir Khan, Trinity Oelkers, Peter N Bailey
Cinematography:	Kim Derko
Film Editing:	Michele Francis
Music:	Mauri Hall, John Welsman
Production Company:	Leda Serene Films

(sources)

Notes about A Winter Tale

Filmed in Toronto.

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Quotes by the Director

"[For A Winter Tale] I wanted a cross-section [of actors], and I got it. We developed the story from the ground up. There was a lot of talking. A lot of talking. We taped all our workshops, and watched them to develop language patterns that would be authentic to the individual characters. We were going for the truth. Even when we had the script and performed it in a theatre, we tore it down again to play in the community centre, with a different kind of audience."
-- Frances-Anne Solomon (source)

"I was interested in how men feel, Black men feel, about the fact that when the shootings were happening everyone was saying it was Black men who were the perpetrators and Black men who were the victims."
-- Frances-Anne Solomon (source)

Quote about A Winter Tale

"Frances-Anne Solomon's A Winter Tale continues the Antillean preoccupation with race and community or belonging, but the location is changed to Toronto and the problem here, is that of shaping a group and an ethos of responsibility within the social complex. The murder of an innocent forces the community into a discourse on violence and the need to counteract violence to achieve new relationships between Caribbean peoples in the diaspora. The poster of the young boy is placed strategically as a repeated icon that fixes the narrative on the consequences for the future if communities do not come together in dialogue and take responsibility for self-analysis and self-healing. Migration is foregrounded as a battleground for the Caribbean person in the formation of nascent communities."
-- Jean Antoine-Dunne (source)

Bibliography for A Winter Tale

Articles from Newspapers, Magazines, or News Websites

Griffin, John. "Stepping up in a time of sorrow; A child is killed in a drive-by shooting and one social worker can't stand the silence that follows in fact-based A Winter Tale." Montreal Gazette, August 30, 2007.
Thompson, Laura. "A city tale about victims of gun crime: TV movie about child caught in crossfire." National Post, April 10, 2006.

Web Sites about A Winter Tale

"IMDb: A Winter Tale." Internet Movie Database, Inc. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0494291/reference.