Sophie Jarvis made one of the year's most powerful Canadian films (just don't ask her to admit it)

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Sophie Jarvis is pouring herself a cup of tea and the pot just happens to match her outfit — its speckles mimic the leafy patterns on her shirt while the rusty brown tan on its side complements her brunette hair.

"I didn't plan it," insists Jarvis bashfully from her Vancouver apartment.

I'm a little skeptical. The director has been working over the years as a production designer, meticulously curating the looks on sets for films like Never Steady, Never Still and The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open while honing her own craft. Her debut feature, Until Branches Bend, is a visual feast of a movie, where the 16mm images capturing the Okanagan region feel rich and textured.

Given her talents, I don't dismiss the idea that Jarvis pulled some earth tones together to class up the aesthetic on our humble Zoom call. "Maybe I just have a certain taste that comes through," she says, laughing.

We're speaking on a Sunday afternoon — morning for Jarvis on the west coast — about Until Branches Bend, which debuted at TIFF last fall. The film is about a woman trying to warn the Okanagan community about an invasive insect species threatening the local environment. It's landing on Crave next month, like a perfectly ripe summer watch right before we get into the peach-harvesting season that the movie is about.

The film is intense; Jarvis, on the other hand, is delightfully lighthearted. She's given to self-deprecating humour, often refusing credit for her own skills, as if she's not quite convinced that she made one of the most singular and powerful Canadian films in years.

Until Branches Bend is a movie only Jarvis could create, relying on her familiarity with the Okanagan region where her grandparents live, as well as her specific journey toward a real sensuous and tactile style of filmmaking that involved hands-on craftsmanship as a production designer and some light dabbling in stop-motion.

"I made all these shark attack movies with clay but they don't count," says Jarvis, dismissing her first foray into stop-motion filmmaking. She was 12 years old, using modeling clay, ketchup and her kitchen table to make Bloodbath 1 through 7 — films about two people swimming in the ocean, thinking everything is fine until a shark comes and chews one out. "I think I had something I had to work through," she says, laughing.

"I think I always wanted to tell stories," Jarvis continues, explaining how that early work helped her figure out exactly the kind of show-don't-tell filmmaker she was going to be. "I always found that just writing [stories], no one knew what the hell I was talking about. I realized you can tell a story using images and music."

Jarvis most recently co-directed a stop-motion short with Alicia Eisen called Zeb's Spider, which is about a homebody woman whose routine needs to bend to accommodate the titular critter. I sense a pattern in her work. Creatures tend to sneak up and disrupt people's lives, whether they be sharks made from clay, spiders made from wires and felt (among so many other complex materials), or the invasive insect in Until Branches Bend, which involved wrangling real darkling beetles and using paint or CGI to draw patterns on their backs.

Jarvis says her production designer brain was working overtime on that last detail. Her low-budget movie was so good at fabricating these mysterious insects that I was convinced everything was real, including a major swarm that floods the screen in one scene.

The original title for Until Branches Bend was Invasion, which she ultimately decided against because people were assuming it was going to be some sci-fi body snatchers type deal. The title was meant to allude not just to the invasive insect first found in a peach, but also an unwanted pregnancy and the legacy of colonization in the Okanagan area.

Actor and filmmaker Grace Glowicki stars as Robin, the young pregnant woman who discovers the threatening insect at a peach packaging plant. She tries to warn her supervisors, fearing the insect could potentially wipe out the area's harvest — but she's brushed off, gaslit and subsequently targeted as a whistleblower for threatening to disrupt production during peak season.

Jarvis says the film, about a woman under attack from without and within, was borne from anxieties that seemed to be hovering from the time she began writing the script in 2016 until the moment they began shooting the film in 2021. Within that time frame, you get Trump's election, the explosion of the #MeToo movement, the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, and the continuous climate crisis and political attacks on organizations trying to curb it. As I'm writing this, the air is thick with ash from the Ontario and Quebec wildfires. Those anxieties are largely internalized in a small, potent, and harrowing drama about mental, physical, and societal erosion.

So much of what is happening in Until Branches Bend goes unspoken, in keeping with Jarvis being a show-don't-tell filmmaker. The director talks about the things lurking beneath the surface in her story — whether it's the insect inside a peach, the fetus in Robin's body, or the toxicity in the people surrounding her, all of which are threatening to spill out. We sense those threats in Glowicki's attuned and full-bodied performance, as well as Jarvis' precise and intentional visual style, which utilizes the pastel and dusty atmospheric environment in the Okanagan.

Jarvis describes shooting through surfaces — an insect-splattered windshield, a screen mesh, a haze in the atmosphere — contributing to an aesthetic where you sense a lack of clarity or something being obscured.

"Maybe no one but me will ever notice," she says about the intentional physical elements contributing to her story, "but it's important to me that we try to imbue everything with the common theme."

Which brings me back to the teapot, the speckles matching her shirt; the blue pottery sitting on shelves in the background in her apartment, complementing the blues on a painting hanging on the wall; the greens and blues Jarvis wore to our photoshoot.

She's got an aesthetic and she knows how to use it — even if she's way too humble to take credit for it.

Until Branches Bend begins streaming on Crave July 1.