Snow the movie

Snow is the title of the new movie by Sri Lankan Tamil director Rohan Fernando. From Halifax, Canada, Snow is one of his latest projects, with the World Premiere in March at Cinequest Film Festival in California. Snow follows the journey of Parvati, who after having lost her entire family, in the Asian tsunami, leaves her small village in Sri Lanka and immigrates to Canada, into a family of distant relatives she’s never met.

She begins working in a hotel as a chambermaid where she meets a host of people from a culture that’s alien but also exciting to her. Parvati is pushed and pulled from the traditional demands of her host family and the allure of the people she meets at the hotel who have their own personal stories of extreme loss. After a doomed love affair with one of the hotel guests, Parvati leaves her relatives and sets out on a journey with a homeless girl, Emily, to see the ocean once again. “Snow” is in many ways about the fragile connections between people and the ways in which the most seemingly inconsequential relationship can have life-changing effects. It is about the delights and difficulties of belonging and otherness—about the pain and gift of foreignness. View the beautifully filmed trailer below.

Born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka in 1972, Rohan Fernando moved with his family first to Switzerland and then to Halifax, Canada. He drew on his own story for his documentary debut, Cecil’s Journey. The film was the first documentary to be selected as best short film at the Atlantic Film Festival, and has been broadcast nationally a number of times. In 2003 it was honoured with a Gemini nomination for best documentary.

Fernando followed up the film with the 2005 release Trudeau’s Other Children, about Pierre Trudeau’s early travels and how they informed his later embrace of multiculturalism as official Canadian policy. In 2006, he completed the feature documentary Blood and Water, about a man coping with the loss of his entire family to the 2004 tsunami.

Snow is a truly Canadian production with all scenes filmed in Canada and a local cast and crew from Halifax.

CAST
Character – Actor
Parvati / Kala – Kalista Zackhariyas
Emily – Ria Mae
Ganesh – Mohan Fernando
Lakshmi – Achala Hewaarachchi
Jennifer – Himalyi Fernando
Uthayan – Pardis Parker
Afro Canadian – Sobaz Benjamin
Maria – Alicia Orr MacDonald
Joe – Li Dong
Reporter – Patriz Quas
Emily’s Mom – Sheryl Knowles
Chelsea – Emma Wells
Mandy – Melanie Ferro

CREW
Executive Producer – Ann Bernier
Producer / Writer / Director -Rohan Cecil Fernando
Producer / Production Manager -Suzanne Lively
Production Coordinator -Erin Oakes
1st AD – Mary Reynolds
DOP – Tarek Abouamin
Camera Assistant – Heather Wilkinson
Grip – Robert Eshelby
Gaffer – Jason Goodyear
Swing – Jason Grant
Production Designer – Alan MacLeod
Art Director – Michael Holleran
Sound Recordist /Boom – Aram Kouyoumdjian
Wardrobe & Hair/Make -Up – Michael Holtzman
Make-Up Assistant -Sara-Jane Britton
Wardrobe Consultant -Pat Robinson
Stunt Coordinator -Robert Seale
Caterer – Celine Fernando
Crafts – Carol-Anne DeYoung
Stills Photographer – Holly Crooks
Set Production Assistant -Dean Messervey
Accounting Assistant – Sherry Lively
Unit Publicist – Mary Jane Webber
Composer -Asif Illyas