Fall Reel Movie Monday series to be headlined by film with significant local ties

Sep 21, 2023 | 1:58 PM

The Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery (MAG)’s Fall 2023 season of Reel Movie Mondays will open strong with the highly anticipated feature film debut from award-winning, writer and director Trevor Anderson, Before I Change My Mind.

October 2, 2023, 6:30pm, Carnival Cinemas.

Born, raised, and educated in Red Deer, then Edmonton, Anderson describes himself as a “writer-director and former video store clerk”. Accolades for his short films include the Lindalee Tracey Award, 2007, from Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, Ontario, Jury Award for Best Short Film, 2009, from Pink Apple Film Festival in Zurich, Switzerland, Best Documentary Short, 2015, from Scruffy City Film and Music Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Anderson was named one of “25 Influential Alberta Artists” of the last 25 years by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. The writer-director now calls Toronto home. Before I Change My Mind is Anderson’s first feature-length film.

The script for Before I Change My Mind was named to the GLAAD List at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Before I Change My Mind went on to make its world premiere at the 75th Locarno Film Festival in competition as part of Concorso Cineasti del presente (Filmmakers of the Present) in August 2022. It has since gone on to screen around the world, from Gimli, Manitoba to Oslo, Norway, and now it is returning home with the MAG’s Red Deer screening.

Before I Change My Mind boasts a “soft and transportive ‘80s aesthetic” while the film “seems determined to confront the challenges and triumphs of self-becoming with the unwavering honesty of someone who remembers them both.” While the other students wonder if their new classmate is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in. Shot from an innovative screenplay, no gendered pronouns are used to describe Robin throughout the film. Anderson says “When I was a teenager in Canada in the 1980s, I was often asked, ʻAre you a boy or a girl?ʼ I wish I couldʼve let that question hang in the air unanswered, like Robin does in the film.”

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The film stars newcomer Vaughan Murrae (“Robin”), alongside Dominic Lippa (“Carter”), Matthew Rankin (“Daniel”), Shannon Blanchet (“Annie”), and local youth Lacey Oake as “Izzy”, who some may know from her Cornerstone Youth Theatre performances. Eagle-eyed viewers will also take note of the nostalgic ‘green onion’ water tower visible in some of the scenes, as the film was partially shot in Red Deer.

Tickets for the film are available for purchase online, over-the-phone, or in person at the MAG in advance of the film’s screening. Ticket packages to the Fall 2023 season of Reel Movie Mondays can be purchased up until 6:30pm October 2nd.

Other films screening this fall include The Eight Mountains on October 16th, Showing Up on October 30th, Twice Colonized on November 13th, and Jules on November 27th.

For more information on films screening as part of Reel Movie Mondays or to purchase tickets, please visit reddeermuseum.com/rmm/.

by Sheldon Spackman

Fall Reel Movie Monday series to be headlined by film with significant local ties

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