Some Kind of Love is a film about a scientist, his sister the artist and the nephew who arrives to make a film about them. It screens at the International Film Festival in Auckland, direct from its Official Selection at the Toronto Festival.
It has also been selected for Sydney, Palm Springs and DocAviv. Some Kind of Love is the third feature collaboration between multi-award winning, Emmy-nominated, Oscar short-listed filmmaker, Tom Burstyn and producer, writer and social commentator Barbara Sumner Burstyn.
Their first film, One Man, One Cow, One Planet about the farming revolution in India won multiple film awards, while This Way of Life was shortlisted for Oscar and won more than a dozen international awards.
Artist and designer Yolanda Sonnabend, 77, lives surrounded by a half century of painting, sculpture, frames, fabrics, books, archeologia and fleeting bursts of frenzied imagination. Her glory days behind her, she resides in ‘Havershamian’-splendour in the last un-renovated house in a posh bit of London. Her older brother has moved in, along with his concert grand piano.
Dr Joseph Sonnabend, 79, is an esteemed doctor, famous for discovering one of the building blocks of the AIDS virus. After a career committed to science, Joseph has returned to a country he has little affection for, a house he hates, and his sister who shows early signs of dementia.
Bound by duty, he struggles to cope with her deterioration. Into this heady mix their step-nephew, filmmaker Thomas Burstyn, arrives to bring this to the screen: A story of fractured sibling love, gender, art, science, diaspora, legacy, and the uncomfortable role of the filmmaker as voyeur.
“Some Kind of Love is number two in our quartet of films exploring the four types of loves as defined by the ancient Greeks,” says Barbara Sumner Burstyn: “This Way of Life was about family love or Storge. Some Kind of Love is about unconditional love or Agape. Our next film will be about romantic love or Agape.”
In addition to producing three feature documentaries, a number of television commercials and instructional films, Barbara Sumner Burtsyn is widely published in New Zealand and an award- winning social issues columnist.
Her book based on This Way of Life was published by Harper Collins in 2012. Barbara Sumner Burstyn is currently working on an historical fiction about her lost father, a Formula 1 driver. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Burstyn trained at the National Film Board of Canada before enjoying success in feature films.
Canadian born, he directed the award-winning documentary One Man, One Cow, One Planet and This Way of Life.
In Auckland Some Kind of Love screens on Monday July 20th at 6.30pm and Friday 24th July at 10.45am at the Rialto Cinema, Newmarket; Wednesday July 29th at 6.15pm and Thursday July 30th at 11.15am the Academy Cinema.
Filmmaker Sumner Burstyn will be in attendance for all screenings, except the first. In Wellington Some Kind of Love screens on Monday 3rd August at 6.15 at the Te Papa Soundings Theatre and Tuesday 4th August at the Penthouse Theatre, Brooklyn at 1.30pm and 6.15pm.
Sumner Burstyn will again be undertaking
