How I learned the beauty of a simple life from my 90-year-old aunt who lives alone in rural Manitoba

CBC

02-05-2025

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by direct or Amalie Atkins focuses on her film Agatha's Almanac
The first time I filmed with my aunt, Agatha Bock, she arrived in Saskatoon by train to play a part in one of my earlier films, The Diamond Eye Assembly. Ready for anything, she had brought a suitcase with farmer's sausage wrapped in the Winnipeg Free Press, her red Pyrex bowl, a perogy-cutting pineapple tin and all my grandmother's handmade aprons. She shows up, every time, as her full self.
During that project, I realized that in my next film, she should simply be herself, unscripted. Moving through her world already felt cinematic.
Agatha's farm is only an hour from where I grew up in rural Manitoba, but it always felt like another world, shadowed by old oaks, thick with ferns and full of domestic rituals that left a lasting imprint on me.
Every summer, we'd visit. And after my parents died, I felt a magnetic pull to reconnect with my family's matrilineal Mennonite history, rooted in Ukraine but still very much alive in the rhythms of Agatha's everyday life. I wanted to reconnect with a place that hadn't changed much, where every object — quilt, embroidered pillow, kitchen utensil, garden tool — had been made or held by my family and is still in use on Agatha's farm.
There, I sensed something just beneath the surface, an elusive presence I now think of as "the Manitoba Feeling" — fractured histories held in the land, which are felt more than seen. These intangible currents connect us to place, story and each other.
As the film progressed, I came to understand how much loss had occurred on the property in my aunt's childhood.
Agatha is resilient and unstoppable. She is always on the move — planting, gathering, harvesting, making something, hosting someone or scheming on the phone. She has strong ideas and opinions, and nothing can be wasted.
When I was a teenager, Agatha gave my mom a blue-flowered bedspread to pass on to me, and I gave it the classic teenage side-eye. After persistent questioning, I found out she'd pulled it from a box behind a dumpster. To her, it was a perfectly good bedspread. And this makes sense when you consider she was born during the Great Depression, when recycling and reusing items were standard practice, if not crucial for survival.
When my dad died, Agatha arrived on the bus in her usual way, armed with jars of home-made chicken noodle soup, reused Styrofoam trays loaded with her famous perogies and iced sugar cookies packed into old tissue boxes, held together with tape. Anytime someone wept, I'd offer them the box. And instead of a tissue, they'd pull out a cookie — pink, yellow or robin's egg blue.
In Agatha's world, everything is held together with tape — her chimney (she assures me this is safe!), her leaking water pails, her tools, her linoleum and her windows. Tape, a central motif in the film, not only serves a practical purpose but also as a space to record information she doesn't want to forget: "Good tub from Anne Leadbetter, June 2003."
Years before I started the film Agatha's Almanac, my sister and I asked our aunt to teach us some of her processes. She started with her pickle recipe (only the tiniest cucumbers make it into her pickle jars). I noticed the label on her secret ingredient: "Horseradish 1975," the year I was born.
Next, she showed us how to make soap. She'd tagged the main ingredient "Good goose fat from mother 1982," referring to my grandmother, who had died when I was 12. It made me wonder if she had a container with "bad goose fat" and, if so, what it would be used for (because in Agatha's house, no goose fat would be thrown away).
To tell this story, centred around the life of one woman, I sought out an all-female crew. Through filmmaker Heidi Phillips, I met cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, who brought Charlene Moore on board as sound recordist and Kristiane Church as production coordinator.
Agatha immediately welcomed us with plates of varenyky and a list of house rules. We filmed her carving a thick-skinned watermelon for over two hours. No one questioned it — and if they had, I'm not sure I could have explained why it mattered.
Later, I found out the watermelon had originated from my grandmother's seeds. They had been saved, stashed and regrown for 37 years. This scene was about more than Agatha's brightly coloured outfit and her sculptural way with a knife — it was a moment that connected the past to the present, a quiet continuity running through the earth of her garden.
Another time, we arrived to a cold, dark house after driving through a sudden flurry of snow. Agatha's power was out. Luckily, we were relying mostly on natural light throughout the film.
Every time a complicated situation presented itself, we found ways to keep going. We worked so well together, with ease and a collaborative spirit. What began as a short personal experiment grew into so much more. After the first shoot with the watermelon, I was hooked.
After each shoot, I matched the 16-mm film with audio. Somewhere along the way, I realized this wasn't going to be a short anymore, but a multi-chapter project. The structure of an almanac emerged, exploring both the visible and the unseen aspects of Agatha's world.
That winter, I shot 11 rolls of film: macro close-ups of hoarfrost, ice fog swirling off the river in –40 C cold and quilts floating on a line against the snow. The colder the winter, the more beautiful the footage.
With high hopes, I sent the film to Negativeland, a lab in New York. The box was delivered on a Saturday, and somebody stole it before it could be collected on the Monday. I lost the winter. And it wasn't just a technical setback. It felt like a disruption of time, as if a part of Agatha's world was gone.
Four chapters were screened in an exhibition at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska and rotated with the seasons. I kept going. Filming as many of Agatha's processes as possible became an obsession. When I realized I had gathered well over two hours of footage, I realized it was going to be a feature.
I made it to the farm every spring, summer or fall, sometimes with the crew, sometimes alone. Last July, I filmed the final roll: Agatha wandering through the yard in her hip waders, the ones she wears when the basement floods.
What I observed in those six years was Agatha's devotion — to her garden and her particular ways of life — her generosity and her care. She shows that ritual doesn't need to be grand to be sacred. Her way of moving through the world with purpose, frugality and intention is the foundation of this film.