Reta Winters (Catherine Keener) has many reasons to be happy: her three teenage daughters, her twenty‐year marriage, and her work as a successful novelist. But suddenly, all the quiet satisfactions of her life disappear when her eldest daughter, Norah (Hannah Gross), drops out of college and leaves home for a Toronto street corner, refusing to speak and holding a sign that says simply ‘Goodness’.

Adapted from Carol Shield’s final novel, Unless is a deeply moving study of parental grief in the face of incomprehensible loss.

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn

Screening as part of the Alan Gilsenan Retrospective