When your an international film festival showcasing big fall titles and you can close out and open your fest with Canadian films, then you know that the country that usually serves as backdrops for American cities is good at being more than just that. As reported in Screen Daily, Paulo Barzman's Emotional Arithmetic will receive its world preem and close out the fest.
The pic that was shot in my neck of the woods during the crispy cold months actually boosts a cast of somebodies. Based on the book by Canadian novelist Matt Cohen and adapted by Jefferson Lewis and Barzman, the film probes the intricate possibilities of love and madness and the shadows the past throws upon the present. Three people who formed a life-long bond in a concentration camp are re-united for the first time forty years later in the bucolic setting of a renovated farm. Sarandon will play Melanie Lansing Winters, a beautiful woman in her 50's who balances her precarious emotional state with an innate sharp, deprecating wit. Byrne will play Christopher Lewis, a British novelist haunted by the survivor's eternal question – “Why was I saved?” Von Sydow will play Jakob Bronski, a heroic dissident and veteran of a Soviet psychiatric hospital; who loses and saves his family twice and David Winter, (Plummer) Melanie's husband, whose compulsive infidelity has left him with a marriage in tatters and an embittered son (Dupuis).
