‘Aunt Agatha’ Offers a Vivid Profile of a Nonagenarian Free-Spirited Canadian Farmer

About an hour into Amalie Atkins’ debut feature, “Agatha’s Almanac,” we are made privy to a telephone message left by her 90-year old aunt, Agatha Bock. “When people are over eighty and they get double pneumonia,” Ms. Bock relates after having been admitted to the hospital, “that’s very often the end of the road.” She tells of how the other patients in her suite, all of whom are men, are not taking kindly to the surroundings. Among them is an 85-year old who favors being naked over wearing a hospital gown. “None of them,” she says matter of factly, “are suitable for marriage.” Whereupon Ms. Bock provides an overriding moral for Ms. Atkins’ documentary: “It’s an interesting world.” Truer words were never spoken, but is “documentary” the best word to describe “Agatha’s Almanac”? The picture won Best Canadian Feature at last year’s round-up of international documentaries at Toronto, “Hot Docs 2025,” and has been screened in locales as far afield as Ireland, China, Kosovo, and Denmark in which some permutation of the word “documentary” figured in the programming. So it is, I suppose, a go-to descriptor for the film.Why the hemming-and-hawing over semantics? Because Ms. Atkins’ achievement is, in its cadence and concision, something more akin to poetry than cinema. There is a story at the heart of “Agatha’s Almanac,” but it’s related in a nonlinear manner, being impressions of a life rather than an inventory of events. Though Ms. Bock intermittently confronts her niece, usually at moments of tension, the filmmaker speaks only a handful of words in response, preferring to remain a passive observer. Aunt Agatha is front and center.Or, rather, it is Aunt Agatha’s world in which we are given entry. The two are difficult to separate: The headstrong woman with a taste for radish sandwiches and the family farm in the backwoods of Manitoba. Following the aforementioned hospital stay, she has no urge whatsoever to convalesce in a nearby downtown apartment. Instead, Agatha convinces a brother into taking her back to the country. There is, as was said in another context, no place like home.Ms. Atkins and her crew, not least indefatigible camerawoman Rhayne Vermette, spent six years recording Ms. Bock’s adventures in the wilderness, and if “wildnerness” sounds a bit much, you try getting by without running water, a mode of transportation, or a cell phone. Agatha’s landline isn’t so reliable either. Still, Ms. Bock doesn’t just muddle along. She gains abiding pleasure, albeit sternly applied, from tending her garden, culling fresh water, and using duct tape to perform, if not miracles, then grand feats of utility.The family’s 19th-century farmhouse is in a state of disrepair and its decor hasn’t been altered since 1950-something. Still, Ms. Bock knows whereof she speaks in planting heirloom seeds, protecting her crops from cutworms with emptied cans of tuna fish, and knowing well enough to stay away from any man who stints on paying for dinner by taking his date out for breakfast. Family photographs are thumbed through and myriad handmade labels are applied to catalogue Agatha’s belongings.Ms. Bock is no lovable old coot. She has a temper and is fierce about protecting her privacy. If the camera isn’t necessarily her friend, it is a conduit by which she explains the knowledge she’s gained over years tending to humble needs. Ms. Atkins, in setting her sights on a life led outside the ever hastening parameters of contemporary culture, risks a willful naivete, particularly when she lingers on the tattered accoutrement of her aunt’s life. But that’s only to say “Agatha’s Almanac” skirts the maudlin in the pursuit of deeper truths. Settle into the picture’s gentle rhythms and you’ll come out a richer person.

‘Aunt Agatha’ Offers a Vivid Profile of a Nonagenarian Free-Spirited Canadian Farmer

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