Acts of Imagination by East Vancouver Director Carolyn Combs was shot around Commercial Drive and New Westminster (employing all-local actors and local technicians). It’s a contemplative and moody film, filled with rain and darkness in both environment and inner life. The film couldn’t look and sound more like Vancouver.

Katya and Jaroslav are brother and sister who survived their freedom-fighter parent’s deaths in pre-Orange Revolution Ukraine, before immigrating to Canada. The Fraser River, “a working river” stands in for the Danube of Katya’s native Kiev (as does Burrard Inlet off New Brighton Park, as a river in Korea, for Jaroslav’s relatively chirpy immigrant girlfriend).

Everything in this film, from the flower blossom struck by rain to the streaked window looking down on the grim East Side alley, to the Pakistani man Katya has an affair with, is a Wim Wenders-like metaphor for something else. There is scarcely a bridge between the two worlds, the one left behind, rich with memories and dangers, the other, the present, in the overcast and perennially dripping city. The only object that does pass through the porthole, a tiny antique religious painting, is abandoned for rent money.

The immigrant experience in Canada is a hallow charade, but its one, Ukrainian immigrant Combs implies by the end of her film, that is serviceable. It’s empty still and quiet here, she seems to say, which is hardly a new thing to hear about Canada, and the features here are mere imitations of those “back home,” but the peace, the safety, the chance to start new, and even the imitations, are all good enough, given the alternative.

New history is already being written in fits and starts here, and new roots are, in another kind of hard scrabble soil, shooting down. Even the harshest memories of Communist Russia-dominated Ukraine, and the cost it exacted on Katya and Jaroslav’s family, fade under the constant rain and the dull light, fades into a mix with everyone else’s memories.

It’s a beautiful contemplation, this film, more for what it leaves you with than for what it gives you while watching it. It plays as part of the Vancouver Film Festival on October 2nd at Granville 7 at 7 pm and October 12th at 11 am.