LEVERS
a film by Rhayne Vermette
FEATURE PRESENTATION
MAY 27, 2026 • 7:00 PM
@ THE BUS STOP THEATRE
(2203 GOTTINGEN STREET, HALIFAX)
2025 / CANADA / 95 mins
A Q&A WITH RHAYNE VERMETTE
WILL FOLLOW THE SCREENING
Rhayne Vermette has likened Levers, her second feature, to a curse that she’s unleashed, and over the course of its 95 minutes one does get the sense some great new crack in the world has opened.
In Ste. Anne, MB, after a monument is unveiled in the town square, the sun disappears for one day. Life goes on in the Red River Valley—where bears haunt doorways and tears are siphoned for holy water—and the darkness serves as an uncanny backdrop to a place that’s more profoundly broken. Events unfold like a 16mm dream, chapter-marked by tarot cards of Vermette’s invention and dictated by chance, fate, or something more sinister. That’s until a civil servant begins gathering symbols and tracking a mysterious sculptor, uncertain whether the clues will uncover answers or obscure them in a new kind of shroud.
Levers cements Vermette as one of the most singular artists working in film today, nationally or otherwise. And with the entrancing score of Bret Parenteau and lenses of analogue dream team Ryan Steel, Heidi Phillips and Kristiane Church, she may have landed on the cinematic ideal: an act of genuine collaboration true to a voice that’s all her own. —Evan Bower
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Rhayne Vermette
Rhayne Vermette was born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba. She is a director and cinematographer whose credits include the short film R Seymore Goes North , Black Rectangle, Les Châssis de Lourdes, Domus, and A Black Screen Too. Her feature debut Ste. Anne won TIFF’s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Film.