Agatha’s Almanac, portrait of 90-year-old Manitoban’s quiet life, packs powerful punch

‘You can have a life of joy and hope and love,” says Agatha Bock, the somewhat reluctant star of this luminous, lovely documentary. “But it’s not always easy.”

Agatha — who marks her 90th birthday during the filming of the doc — lives alone in her old family farmhouse in southern Manitoba.

She works 54 acres of vegetables and fruit, doing everything from seeding to harvesting by hand. She has no internet, no car, often no running water, but her world is rich in the ways that matter.

For this quiet, contemplative film, Saskatoon-based director Amalie Atkins, a multidisciplinary artist and Agatha’s niece, worked with an all-female crew, including cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, a Manitoban who is a director in her own right (Levers; Ste. Anne).

Like her aunt, Atkins employs vintage, handmade methods, using old-school analogue film and keeping things low-key and simple.

With a six-year filming process and a patient, observational approach, Atkins is drawing on the ideas of Slow Cinema. Agatha’s Almanac is deliberately repetitive — we ease into the rhythmic cycles of Agatha’s days and seasons — and utterly hypnotic.

It’s also beautiful — evoking a rapturous sense of the natural world, from colour-saturated images of Prairie sun filtering through treetops to a wasp crawling in a cucumber flower — and frequently funny.

Agatha can be hilariously matter of fact, as when she lists the men whose proposals she turned down and the reasons why. One poor sap suggested he would take her out for breakfast because it was cheaper than lunch.

As frugal as she is, Agatha was not impressed.

We follow Agatha as she works around the house, its exterior now greying but still solid. She is able to do a surprising amount of repair work with duct tape and Mactac.

We see stacked cardboard containers — often repurposed cereal and shoeboxes — that contain crucial odds and ends, and many masking-tape labels. “Very noisy fan,” reads one piece of tape; “Good tub from Anne Leadbetter,” says another.

We learn that Agatha uses onion skins to keep away potato bugs and old tuna cans to repel cutworms. (Her standoff with the rabbits and the deer remains unresolved, however.)

We get to know Agatha’s signature style, which usually involves cotton dresses, colourful sneakers and a wide variety of work gloves.

We get a sense of good neighbours and supportive family members through recorded phone messages, but the focus remains on Agatha, following her through tasks — winnowing heirloom seeds, carefully cutting a melon, or rolling, filling and pinching dozens of perogies.

Paradoxically, by concentrating so closely on the specific — the daily existence of one person in one place — Agatha’s Almanac slowly, subtly opens up to universal questions.

Most crucially, it asks what we really need for a meaningful life. The answer, for many of us in an increasingly busy, noisy, overwhelming world, might surprise.

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