"A Night for Dying Tigers" (cine 2010)

A mi me parece genial, esta sí que tiene buena pinta, y JB en las películas independientes está como pez en el agua. No hay más que mirar esos segundillos en los que sale para ver lo buenísima actriz que es, y como expresa los sentimientos sin necesidad de hablar

A Night for Dying Tigers screening times @ Toronto Film Festival

screening times

*
o Friday September 10
o 8:45:00 PM
o AMC 3

*
o Saturday September 11
o 11:45:00 AM
o AMC 2

*
o Friday September 17
o 3:30:00 PM
o AMC 6

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2010/nightfordyingtigers


Principal Cast:
Jennifer Beals, Gil Bellows, Lauren Lee Smith, Tygh Runyan, Kathleen Robertson, John Pyper Ferguson, Leah Gibson
Director: Terry Miles
Producer: Terry Miles, Sidney Chiu
Cinematographer: Terry Miles, Lindsay George
Editor: Terry Miles
Sound: Mark Noda
Music: Eiko Ishiwata
Production Designer: Cameron McLellan

International Sales Agent: Joker Films
Production Company: Cinemanovel Films

Gracias por mantenernos informadas Leonora. Asistirá Jennifer a alguna de esas proyecciones? Supongo que no.

Tenía yo un pequeño lío con las fechas de celebración del festival de Toronto, pensaba que era la primera semana de Octubre, pero ya está aclarado que no, que es del 9 al 19 de Setiembre

http://www.torontoenespanol.com/festival_de_cine_de_toronto.htm

http://anioscorporation.com/cinemanovel/archives/754




TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Fri Sept 10, 8:30pm, AMC 3 (World Premiere!)
Sat Sept 11, 11:30am, AMC 2
Fri Sept 17, 3:30p, AMC 6

CALGARY INT. FILM FEST

Fri Sept 24, 7:00pm Eau Claire Market Cineplex Odeon #1
Sat Oct 2, 12:15pm Eau Claire Market Cineplex Odeon #1

MORE TO COME!

http://www.indiewire.com/film/a_night_for_dying_tigers/#
A Night for Dying Tigers

Website
Dиrector: Terry Miles
Writer: Terry Miles

Cast: Jennifer Beals, Gil Bellows, Lauren Lee Smith, Tygh Runyan, Kathleen Robertson, John Pyper Ferguson, Leah Gibson

Country: Canada

Synopsis: They say home is where the heart is. Festival regular Terry Miles puts that idiom to the test in this acerbic tragicomedy set in an upper-class residence where brothers and sisters meet for an unusual dinner.

Jack (Gil Bellows), the eldest and surrogate patriarch since the death of their parents, is leaving for jail in the morning to serve a five-year sentence for killing a rapist. His wife Melanie (Jennifer Beals), a sophisticated professional photographer, is doing her best to keep up appearances while the other members of this highly dysfunctional pack hide their grief and problems in a clumsy manner. Russell (John Pyper-Ferguson), a well-known writer and English professor, has moved from the loneliness of the blank page to the excitement of the sheets with ex-student and admirer Carly (Leah Gibson). Patrick (Tygh Runyan), the youngest of the three brothers, is an arrogant filmmaker on the rise and unable to let go of his love for his adopted sister Karen (Lauren Lee Smith), the loose cannon of the family. These disparate individuals are no candidates for a happy reunion, as confirmed by the rivalries and resentments that soon surface. And the party is just getting started, with unexpected guests, fights and bitter revelations ahead.

With a dynamic script brought to life by straightforward filmmaking and sophisticated jump-cutting, Miles dissects the hearts and feelings of his characters with candor and nuance. He is a one-man-band behind the camera (producer, writer, director, cinematographer and editor), while in front of it stands a terrific cast of gifted actors, all fully dedicated to their characters and all humble instruments in a pitch-perfect ensemble. Jennifer Beals anchors the narrative’s moral center, becoming the viewer’s guide into this "Long Day’s Journey into Night" for the twenty-first century. [Synopsis courtesy of Martin Bilodeau/Toronto International Film Festival]

http://theperlichpost.blogspot.com/2010/09/canadas-coolest-couple-knows-how-to.html

Director Terry Miles talks about securing Jennifer Beals as the female lead in his movie 'A Night for Dying Tigers', which premieres at TIFF on the 10th of September.

"To me, the film seemed like a good fit for Jennifer. Knowing her work in The Anniversary Party, Roger Dodger and The Last Days of Disco, I had a feeling... she would respond to this material. So our casting director sent the script to Jennifer's manager. She read it, loved it, and forwarded it to Jennifer. She loved it and that was that. I’ve always believed if I can get the right actor to read a script, they’ll do it. Getting past the agents and managers is usually the hard bit."

Gracias Leonora Ay, que ganas de que llegue el festival de Toronto, se pasará Jennifer por allí?

julia escribió:Gracias Leonora Ay, que ganas de que llegue el festival de Toronto, se pasará Jennifer por allí?

no lo sé, no me he cruzado con información sobre eso, pero me parece lógico y probable que esté.. :) ya veremos :)

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/tiff/tiffnews/article/857703--questions-for-jennifer-beals

Questions for Jennifer Beals




Jennifer Beals: "The acting always came first."
By Richard Ouzounian Theatre Critic

Jennifer Beals is best remembered for her performance as Alex Owens in the 1983 megahit Flashdance, where she played a young woman who’s a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night, but who dreams of being a legitimate dancer. Since then, she’s also made her mark by starring in films such as Devil in a Blue Dress and by a six-season run on The L Word. She’s currently filming a new Fox TV series called Ride-Along, where she plays the first female police chief in Chicago.

She’s at TIFF this year in an emotionally charged dark comedy called A Night for Dying Tigers, written and directed by Terry Miles (When Life Was Good).

Q. You play Melanie, a woman whose husband is about to go into jail for five years. What appealed to you about this project?

A. I just really enjoyed the writing and the razor’s edge that the film walks every moment between comedy and tragedy.

Q. When the director is also the author, does that mean every scripted moment is sacrosanct?

A. There were times when it was very much to the letter of the script, exactly, but then there were times when Terry would give us space. My big moment is this toast I give at the end and I said to Terry, “I’ve got a couple of things I want to try with this. Just give me the room to fail.”

Q. What was unique about this project for you?

A. It was so quiet! Some days there were only eight people on the set, including the crew. I’m usually used to having to work through all the noise and chaos of a typical film set, where you’re secondary and tertiary to the technical stuff. Not with Terry. The acting always came first.

Q. Gil Bellows plays your husband, John, who’s a really unsympathetic, unfaithful man. How could you stand behind him so completely?

A. I thought there had to have been a time when he wasn’t like that. She’s a smart woman and for her to fall in love with him once, he had to have been loving and interesting an inspiring and that’s what I remembered.

Q. They’re making a stage musical of Flashdance in London right now. What do you think it’s going to be like?

A. I bet . . . there’ll be a lot of singing and dancing in it.

http://www.moviefone.co.uk/2010/09/08/jennifer-beals-a-night-for-dying-tigers-interview/

Jennifer Beals Talks 'A Night for Dying Tigers,' Family Love and Why She Has a Dagger in Her Skirt




Jennifer Beals was a college student when she landed the landmark role of steelworker Alex Owens in 'Flashdance.' That steamy water chair dance became an iconic '80s image that launched her career, and Beals has worked steadily since then (despite turning down the role of Apollonia in 'Purple Rain' and another in 'Pretty in Pink' to continue her studies). The 46-year-old recently starred in the critically-acclaimed 'The L-Word' for five seasons, and worked with Tim Roth on 'Lie To Me.'

She's currently on the set of the new Fox series 'Ride Along' as a no-nonsense Chicago police officer. But her latest film, Terry Miles' 'A Night for Dying Tigers,' will premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Beals plays a woman who gathers family and friends together for a farewell dinner for her husband, who is heading off to prison for five years. Moviefone spoke with Beals about familial love and why her character has a metaphorical dagger up her skirt.

It's interesting that the premise is so relatable, that it's about the loaded interactions of a family in crisis. Things get ugly and you can't look away.
This family takes things to new heights; the germ is in all us. What's also true is how we bear things, certain dysfunctions because we love people. With family, we also love our biology. You bear certain things because of biology and that is certainly true of Melanie.

That forbearance sometimes holds families and people and society together.
I found that to be exciting but I didn't feel it when I read the script. I saw the love between the brother and sister. This could be incredibly unsavory but when I watched the film, believing they should be together, it was a cultural boundary they cross. It was a very weird thing, and I'm unfamiliar with the phenomenon, but to see it play out in the film successfully to me was radical. How does society continue? Why doesn't it fall apart? Family takes all forms.


Your character is conflicted. She's so positive when she's not really feeling it. She plays the warm host even though she's ready to kill.
Definitely... Because you're in denial and that can only hold up so long. Things have to break apart and have new meaning. The character was in denial about her relationship with her husband and in denial and how it sustained itself. She had to come to a new meaning and understanding and know her place in the world. I think sometimes you can see something in a different experience and you learn something else, and it may resonate with you in different ways. Hopefully as her husband is going off to jail, another farewell may be happening. Their relationship is transforming and what they think they had at one time is now destroying them. That needs to change. There is no external force; you have to change it yourself.

And the last scene where Melanie is in the hospital sitting next to Jules [played by Kathleen Robertson]... There were takes where I couldn't put the wedding ring on. I couldn't do it. Forbearance for the whole family is okay for a little while, but if other people are not stepping up and trying to transform things for the betterment of the family or themselves, then it's no longer tenable. You see things coming -- you don't want to because they're so painful. It's not always enlightenment; it's often pain.

The film is going to frighten some people. Melanie is really falling apart.
Yes, but she is hiding a dagger in the folds of her skirt. Nobody knows the strength of will beneath her; she will eviscerate the enemy.

How does it affect you to work in an intense closed environment on such a tough project?
Well, first, the cast was amazing. They blow my mind. My goodness! They were so courageous as they went higher and higher. No, I felt great, we laughed a lot. But I would literally feel sick to my stomach and almost physically turn my car around in the mornings on the way to the set. If it were not for the other vibrating excitement that I had in the center of this dysfunction which was very exciting, I wouldn't have gone. It was like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean in a huge storm and being asked to dive down. You're told everything is going to be fine. It's exciting, the way a storm is exciting. And I felt very safe with this supportive group. We laughed while we went deep sea diving.

You go in a different direction in the new Fox police procedural this fall called 'Ride Along.' What is your character Theresa like?
For me, it's really an exploration of being female within a male context, and where you find a female strength within that police world. 'The L-Word' prepared me to do it in a world with my own sex. Without 'The L-Word' I doubt I would have felt as comfortable as I do. Theresa is much tougher, incredibly focused, driven and singular. I met policewomen and went on ride-alongs and that was eye-opening. I wouldn't last 30 seconds; I wouldn't be able to stand it, the stress, day in and day out. My nervous system wouldn't take it. My last ride-along was to a shooting. I was with the detective when he found the shell. It was interesting. But to think that Theresa was a police officer, a woman who made her way up through the ranks quickly and was driven enough at such a young age was just extraordinary. And she's in a discipline where others would love to see her fail. There are endless storylines about that and about cleaning up the corruption in Chicago.

You played Tim Roth's estranged wife on 'Lie to Me'; that must have been entertaining!
We've known each other for a long time and that makes it much easier. He's very dedicated to the show and very smart and he's a fine director. They're lucky to have him. He's really smart.

You published the Eastman Kodak and Color Centric photographic journal of 'The L Word' with 250 photographs, call sheets, production notes, and cast interviews. Wow.
The idea was for charity. It seems incredibly glamorous but it was really made for the cast and crew, and it became something more. So much of our experience of 'The L-Word' was as a catalyst for fundraisers for various organizations, and this was a way to continue that with proceeds going to charitiy.

You have always worked, which is amazing for an actor – what's the key?
I don't know. I have no idea! But I am incredibly grateful.

'A Night for Dying Tigers' opens on September 10, and is screening at the Toronto Film Festival.

Jennifer Beals delivers 'one of the greatest, most intense performances' that Gill Bellows has ever been in a room for, in 'A Night For Dying Tigers'

video: http://vimeo.com/14879579

http://tiff2010.thetfs.ca/2010/09/tiff-review-a-night-for-dying-tigers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TorontoFilmScene+%28Toronto+Film+Scene%29&utm_content=Twitter





TIFF Review: A Night for Dying Tigers

Posted by Katarina Gligorijevic on September 11, 2010

A Night For Dying Tigers is a dark, and often quite funny, portrait of a family so screwed up, it’s actually mind boggling.

In about a day, Jack (Gil Bellows) is going to prison for five years, and his family is gathering at their deceased parents’ home to celebrate his final night of freedom. Jack and his two brothers, Russell (John Pyper-Ferguson) and Patrick (Tygh Runyan), are all brilliant and successful, but their lives are on the verge of collapse. Jack’s married to Melanie (Jennifer Beals) but having an affair with Jules (Kathleen Robertson) who had something to do with why he’s going to prison. Russell’s a professor living with a 19-year-old grad student, and Patrick is an acclaimed film director who’s unable to give up on a lifelong affair with their deeply disturbed and unhappy adopted younger sister, Karen (Lauren Lee Smith).

Writer-director Terry Miles’ allusions to the Salinger-esque family of dysfunctional geniuses are heavy handed indeed. Karen refers to eldest brother Jack as “Seymour”. Patrick refers to Karen as “the adopted Franny to [his] natural born Zooey”. In their stately, book-filled home (designed by their architect father and decorated by their photographer mother), the snarky siblings and their various partners, friends and lovers converge for a very drunken, all-too-honest evening to spill secrets, fight, cry, air out their dirty laundry and send Jack off in true familial style.

Everyone in A Night for Dying Tigers is both charming and totally horrible at the same time. And, as it turns out, it can be quite enjoyable to watch a group of spoiled, hateful brats bicker, wound each other and ultimately show their vulnerable (and dare I say likeable?) sides.

The film has a great ensemble cast, and Bellows really shines as Jack, bringing a quiet, smoldering quality to the character that almost makes it plausible that his unbelievably hot wife and mistress would both still cling to him in spite of his lies, cowardice, and the small matter of his upcoming five year stint in the big house. The film’s ‘dysfunctional family reunion’ setup is reminiscent of a cross between The Big Chill and The Royal Tennenbaums, but everyone in this family is a whole lot less cute and way more messed up. One of the strongest Canadian features I’ve seen at TIFF this year, A Night for Dying Tigers has humour and heart, but be warned – its heart is very black.

http://www.calgaryfilm.com/2010/schedule/film/1207/
A Night for Dying Tigers
A Night for Dying Tigers

14A - Advisories: Substance Abuse & Mature Subject Matter.

Screenwriters essentially have an unlimited number of ways to bring their characters together, and yet nearly every film about a family coming together takes place at a wedding or a funeral. Writer-director Terry Miles is far less conventional, and so is the dysfunctional family in his A NIGHT FOR DYING TIGERS.

In TIGERS, a family of gifted artists is forced together on the eve of one of the brothers’ incarceration. Even with only 24 hours before the start of a five-year prison sentence, the family has a difficult time staying polite. As the night progresses, old wounds will be reopened, secrets will be revealed and the family will move towards the brink of disintegration. Some of the moments are cathartic and others are simply vindictive, but each one cuts closer to the truths behind the family’s troubled past.

With a talented cast that includes Jennifer Beals (THE L WORD) and Gil Bellows (ALLY MCBEAL), A NIGHT FOR DYING TIGERS is a dark, poignant portrait of a uniquely messed-up family and the night that will either bring them closer or tear them apart once and for all.

PH

http://moviecitynews.com/2010/09/tiff-review-a-night-for-dying-tigers/

TIFF Review: A Night for Dying Tigers

Tolstoy would have loved the Yates family in Terry Miles‘ A Night for Dying Tigers. Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but the Yates, more-or-less normal though they may seem on the surface, are just about as messed up a family as you can hope to find in an indie film.

There’s certainly a prevalence of dysfunctional family setups in independent films, for better for for worse, but, this film leans more towards a stylilzed arthouse feel than your than typical low-budget indie family drama, and thankfully, no holidays, roasted turkeys or road trips are involved.

The storyline, about the messed-up relationships, long-standing competition and feuding among four siblings, and the various not-so-secret secrets revealed at a family gathering the night before the eldest Yates brother reports for a five-year prison sentence, somewhat evokes Festen, that marvelous Danish masterpiece of familial angst that was the first of the Dogme films.

Where Festen started out as an innocuous birthday gathering, then relied upon building tension leading up to a shocking reveal at the end, though, Miles instead reveals that his characters have some serious issues as soon as we meet them. “Aha,” we think, knowing this family is clearly deliciously dysfunctional — not quite in the seriously depraved Dogtooth sense of dysfunction, but still, obviously there’s a lot going on here. We don’t know quite how it will all fall together, but Miles uses a taut, controlled approach of smaller reveals that, a drop at a time, erode the family gathering as we wait with bated breath to see how it will all play out.

Here’s what we have here by the way of the set up: three brothers, all genius prodigies and the product of equally brilliant parents, and one adopted younger sister, fragile, cracked, and never shining as brightly as her brothers. A mother’s experiment, as one of the brothers says, in “nature versus nurture.”

Russell (John Pyper-Ferguson) is a Booker Prize-winning novelist, Patrick (Tygh Runyan) a successful director of horror films who’s just been greenlit for a more serious literary adaptation, and Jack (Gil Bellows), the stalwart oldest brother around whom the family is gathering at the family homestead, is about to go off to prison for five years. Fragile sister Karen (Lauren Lee Smith) has been charged with organizing the festivities.

The family home, which is the heartbeat of what’s left of the Yates family, was designed and built by their famous architect father for their art historian mother, a physical symbol of the very greatness to which the Yates siblings were always expected to aspire.

The relationships among the four siblings are revealed, more or less, through the women woven peripherally into their tale: dinner guest Laney (Jessica Heafey), a friend and past lover of all three brothers; Amanda (Sarah Lind) Karen’s friend who is onhand catering the affair, who seems to know all the family skeletons; Melanie (Jennifer Beals) Jack’s long-suffering wife; Jules (Kathleen Robertson), Jack’s longtime lover and the inadvertent cause of his prison sentence; and fresh-faced Carly (Leah Gibson), Russell’s much younger grad student girlfriend, the one outside observer of all that unfolds.

Old feuds, resentments and secrets simmer and boil, simmer and boil, in a deliberately unsettling rhythm as the wine flows and the party progresses. Miles carefully guides his players through a series of emotional hills and valleys around all the family history while Carly, who just thought she was meeting her boyfriend’s family, and had no idea of what she was getting into here, plays witness as the chaotic underpinnings of complicated sibling and marital relationships begin to unravel any pretense of social politeness.

The film feels, structurally, very much like a stage play, and Miles tends to keep his camera close to the action, creating a sense of intimacy between audience and story that very much draws the viewer into the psychological drama of the characters as it all plays out. This is a study in character and relationships, mostly; there’s very little in the way of narrative arc, character arcs, or inappropriately melodramatic moments, even when the film hits its most emotional peak.

Miles seems not to be passing judgment on his characters, so much as he simply allows us a glimpse into the lives of this very interestingly unhappy family at this pivotal point in their family history; he leaves it to us to judge for ourselves whether the uniqueness of their upbringing by parents determined to raise child prodigies excuses their questionable moral behavior as adults.

In a way, this film did remind me a bit of Dogtooth, one of my favorite films at last year’s TIFF. While A Night for Dying Tigers lacks Dogtooth‘s raw, edgy, weirdness, they have similar themes of children whose uniquely odd upbringing has very much shaped them into the flawed, imperfect, interestingly unhappy people we see during our time with them.

Of all the films I saw at Toronto, I’d have to say this film surprised me the most; I went into it with very little in the way of expectations, and came out of it quite impressed by the direction and performances. Beal and Smith are particularly noteworthy, but all the cast is solid.

I give Miles credit as a writer, as well, for not leaning on those dual crutches of the family melodrama, voice-over and exposition, to convey to us what we need to know about the Yates siblings and what made them the way they are. We learn enough about them peripherally to draw us into their story, and from there Miles pretty much just gets out of the way and lets his actors bring it on home.

Overall, I thought A Night for Dying Tigers was rather brilliant, and I hope it gets picked up for distribution. Well done.

http://www.westender.com/articles/entry/edgy-script-draws-actors-to-dying-tigers/

Terry Miles: "Jennifer was so great. We met for coffee before she signed on, and she told me she wanted to play Melanie because she was terrified; the material scared her and she wanted to embrace that."



MOVIES: Edgy script draws actors to ‘Dying Tigers’


Few selections at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival are likely to polarize audiences as much as A Night for Dying Tigers, the third feature from local writer-director Terry Miles. A largely unsympathetic portrait of a largely unsympathetic upper-middle-class family in the midst of upheaval, it begins in tears and ends with the suggestion there are many more to come — a notion of entertainment very far from Hollywood but very close to life.

Anyone familiar with Miles’s previous features, When Life Was Good (the subject of a 2008 WE cover story) and The Red Rooster, will quickly recognize it as a further cementing of the filmmaker’s style. A former indie-rock musician who arrived at his current craft relatively late in life (he’s in his early forties), Miles views filmmaking as do many creative people who hear the clock ticking: His own goals and aesthetic considerations come first; the public is welcome to come along for the ride if it wants to.

Equal parts absurdist (Woody Allen is an influence), realist (so is John Cassavetes) and pessimist (Ingmar Bergman, too), Miles front-loads Tigers with turmoil, never indicating whether we’re meant to find its goings-on tragic or comic. Jack Yates (Gil Bellows), the eldest sibling among three gifted brothers and a train wreck of an adopted sister, is about to serve a five-year prison sentence for a possibly justifiable crime. On the night before he goes away, all of the above plus Jack’s beleaguered wife Melanie (Jennifer Beals), his mistress Jules (Kathleen Robertson), and assorted family acquaintances, gather at the Yates’ magnificent childhood home (vacant since their parents’ deaths the previous year) to eat, drink, and bid Jack farewell. Chaos — and some hilarity — ensues.

Numerous attributes mark Tigers as a substantial advancement for Miles: the assuredness of its direction, the complexity of its characters, and the calibre of its performances. The latter is thanks to the efforts of the impressive cast — the first group of ‘name’ actors to appear in a Miles film. A moderate Telefilm Canada grant helped him secure them, but the quality of his script was the linchpin.

Speaking while on his way to the Calgary International Film Festival, where Tigers made its Western Canadian debut (following its world premiere at TIFF), Miles admits the film was written largely to secure the involvement of actors who usually are paid much more. “I wanted to make a film for grown-ups, and I think that’s a big part of what the actors responded to,” he says. “It was really all about the script. I cannibalized a handful of my completed screenplays, took the best characters and some key scenes, and then locked myself in a log cabin for a few weeks. During that time, I turned those characters into the Yates family. I sacrificed a few other screenplays, but when I emerged from that cabin, I felt like I had something that I was ready to shoot. Thankfully, all of the actors were enamoured enough with the script to sign on to what would be a very low-budget, rough-and-ready production.”

As was the case with his previous films, Miles multitasked to a heroic (some might say absurd) degree, serving not only as director but co-producer, co-cinematographer, editor, and camera operator. Ensconced with the principal cast in an Arthur Erickson-designed house on S.W. Marine Drive, where roughly two-thirds of the film takes place, he also assumed the de facto role of on-set master of ceremonies, ensuring everyone was having a good time despite the lack of amenities actors as experienced as Beals and Bellows were accustomed to. “Because we were working with such a low budget, we had a very small crew, and the cast didn’t have trailers. The actors were definitely not doing this film for the money, and they understood from the very beginning that there would be certain (pause) limitations. I think that allowed them to come together as a family. With no rehearsal and having everyone hanging out in one area between takes, it helped establish a kind of history early on. We would be shooting something upstairs while the actors who weren’t in that scene would be downstairs getting to know each other — or, as was often the case, wondering what the hell was going on upstairs.”

The experience was enjoyable enough for everyone that Miles says the cast has become “like an extended family.” He continues to talk to most of them every couple of weeks, and he discloses he’s “already working on a couple of things with Gil and Jennifer.”

Without wishing to minimize the rest of the cast’s efforts, Miles should be especially praised for helping to prove that Beals (long a familiar face in the city for her role in the Vancouver-shot series The L Word) is among the most underrated and underused actresses working today. Her portrayal of Melanie balances vulnerability and fearsomeness with remarkable skill; during the opening credits, she projects joy, amusement, confusion and sadness in less than one minute, and without uttering a single word. “Jennifer was so great,” Miles enthuses. “We met for coffee before she signed on, and she told me she wanted to play Melanie because she was terrified; the material scared her and she wanted to embrace that.

“All of the performers in the film really welcomed the challenge in bringing these flawed and complex characters to life. I think they did an amazing job.”

A Night for Dying Tigers screens Oct. 4 (9:15pm) and Oct. 6 (2:45pm) at Empire Granville 7, as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Buy tickets and view the complete VIFF schedule at VIFF.org.