Two Women

Two women: born on the same day, a hemisphere apart.

Two women: blind, middle-aged twin sisters, their world shaped through the magic of stories.

Bernice Archer has raised her blind twin daughters, Eva and Ava, in the relative isolation of their low-income downtown neighborhood. Every night Bernice tells her daughters the same bedtime stories; stories that are sometimes magical, and often cautionary, about the dangers of the world outside the walls of their small apartment.

Eva and Ava, now middle-aged, still wait for their mother’s stories with a combination of excitement and suspicion, knowing that there is much they haven’t been told. They are particularly mistrustful of Bernice’s warnings of the dangers of the opposite sex, and want to know more about the story of their own origins. As loving as she is loud and as full of secrets as she is of stories, Bernice is the centre of the universe for Eva and Ava, even as they yearn for freedom and experiences of their own.

When Bernice notices two new neighbours in their building, she is inspired to tell a new story. And so begins the saga of Violet and Rose. Bernice believes that these two women were born at the exact same moment, hemispheres apart, and that they share the same soul.

Like Eva and Ava, the reader is swept along in the wake of Bernice's stories, not knowing what is real and what is fantasy.

Christene A. Browne is an award-winning filmmaker. Born in St. Kitts, Browne moved with her family to Regent Park, Canada’s oldest and largest low-income community, in 1970. There she became involved in making videos, participating in and then leading the Regent Park Video Workshop Project before going on to attend Ryerson University's film program. Browne’s first dramatic feature, Another Planet, was the first feature film to be directed by a Black woman in Canada. In 2007 Browne completed Speaking in Tongues: The History of Language, a documentary series that looks at the History of Language from prehistoric time to the present day. In 2011 Browne was awarded the Documentary Filmmaker prize at the Women’s International Film and Television Showcase Visionary Awards. She lives in Toronto with her three children.