By: Jessica Goddard
Mina Shum’s Meditation Park is an engaging, quirky, and empowering film about the overdue self-actualization of a Vancouver woman (Cheng Pei-pei) in light of the discovery of her husband’s affair. This thoroughly modern film also expertly highlights the immigrant experience in multicultural Canada, while making clear that the narrative is culturally universal. There is an exquisite balance of humour and poignancy in the writing, strengthened by an excellent cast.
One of the best things about Shum’s movie is that there are so many subplots unfolding at once; all of them believable and intriguing in their own respects. This is not simply the story of an old woman being sad that her husband isn’t who she thought he was – this is the gripping story of the secret life of a driven and resourceful but aging woman, and the multigenerational conflicts of the family of which she is the matriarch.
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Meditation Park screens at TIFF on:
Wednesday, September 13 at 7:00 p.m. @ Scotiabank Theatre (press and industry)
Wednesday, September 13 at 9:30 p.m. @ Scotiabank Theatre
Friday, September 15 at 11:45 a.m. @ Scotiabank Theatre
Rating: PG
Language: English, Cantonese, Mandarin
Runtime: 94 minutes
For more information on the festival, visit the official TIFF webpage here.
Buy tickets here.
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