To give you a sense of the experience of seeing film at Remai Modern, local photographer, musician, and film goer Will Kaufhold shares reflections from a month spent with our summer screenings.
This August I set a routine: each week, I’d walk to Remai Modern, show my membership card, and watch whatever film was playing at the SaskTel Theatre. The program moved from Sicily and Sweden to Queens, the Paris banlieues, and Dakar, while I stayed in Saskatoon. The screenings kept returning to identity, memory, and place, but without decoration. They simply showed the work people do to live where they are.
We began with Cinema Paradiso. The bond between characters Salvatore and Alfredo reads as a clear portrait of mentorship and of how movies mark a life. Projection booths, reels, edits: the film treats them like ordinary tools. The ending keeps it simple. Leaving home is a line of small edits rather than a single cut. You build the next reel, and a few frames are left behind.
Persona shifted gears. Bergman’s doubled faces test where identity begins and ends and whether those lines hold under pressure. Watching, I felt the distance between viewer and subject narrow in practical terms: a person is watching, and a person is being watched, and sometimes those roles overlap. The film kept the surfaces clean and let the ideas do the work. The month began as a test of when those lines hold and when they blur.
Blue Sun Palace brought that study to ground level. In working-class Queens, small acts of care function as a survival method. People carry grief and keep moving. Strangers negotiate harm and responsibility in close quarters. The city does not smooth anything out, but it leaves room for the basics: a ride, a meal, a hand on a shoulder. It keeps focus on how people navigate systems and one another each day. In the theatre, that work is visible without staging or emphasis.
La Haine sharpened the view of the city. Black and white reduced the image to lines, faces, and concrete. Jokes land, but tension stays. I left the theatre and scanned my own streets for pressure points: sirens, glances, corners where people wait. The film does not argue a case. It points attention.
Touki Bouki threaded longing with colonization and class. Paris is marketed as a brand and a promise; Dakar tallies the price in labour, debt, and small crimes. The pair move between the slaughterhouse floor and elite patios, passing as what they are not. The horned motorcycle cuts through both worlds. Mobility is rationed, aspiration is sponsored, and the return is never neutral.
What stayed with me was the steady routine of attending films at Remai Modern. Each Friday started with the same river, the same doors, the same seat. Inside, the films widened the frame and then cut it back down to usable scale. World cinema can narrow the distance between ourselves and others. The month adjusted how I read the city on the way out.
These small shifts were the practical outcome: a weekly practice that kept the focus clear, films that tested my assumptions, and a slower pass through the city that notes details instead of conclusions. I’ll surely be back.
– Will Kaufhold is a photographer, musician, and avid moviegoer from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Join us at SaskTel Theatre
This season, we invite you to make your own routine of cinema at Remai Modern. Join us at the SaskTel Theatre to discover films that challenge, connect, and inspire. Whether you’re a longtime moviegoer or just beginning to explore world cinema, there’s something on the screen this fall that will stay with you long after the credits roll.
Film tickets are $10 at the front desk; free admission for members and youth under 18. Seating is first come, first served. Talks, tours and other events are admission by donation or free with membership.