Maudie

Maud Lewis is among the most inspiring figures in Canadian art. Afflicted with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, she spent her early life dismissed for what was presumed to be her limited ability. But Lewis' colourful paintings, made on surfaces ranging from beaverboard to cookie sheets, established her as one of our country's premier folk artists. Starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke (also appearing at the Festival in The Magnificent Seven), this moving film explores Lewis' life in all its heartbreak and triumph.

Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, 1937. Maud Dowley (Hawkins) is stuck living with her unsympathetic aunt. Desperate to break away, she responds to a local fish peddler's call for a housekeeper. Everett Lewis (Hawke) is disagreeable and initially cruel to Maudie, but the two quickly acknowledge that each is in their own way a social outcast. They need and understand each other. Within weeks, they marry.

One day a summer resident comes calling. She's a New Yorker, wears alluring clothing and talks like Katharine Hepburn. She sees something in Maudie's paintings and commissions one. Suddenly Maudie's pastime is recognized as having real value. People come from far and wide. Eventually her work will hang in the White House.

Cinematographer Guy Godfree fills Maudie with majestic images of maritime landscape and light, while director Aisling Walsh focuses on character, drawing performances of emotional complexity and great physical detail from her leads.

Though set in the past, Maudie speaks to the present in many ways — this is, after all, a tale of a woman asserting herself as a generator of both art and commerce. But it is also a story of the power of creativity to transform a life and touch the soul.

MICHÈLE MAHEUX