Creepy comments and weird whispers: friends trade tales from the patriarchy on Halloween

‘Maybe next year we’ll have less stories to tell.’

Pumpkin Movie opens with the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, blue-lit in front of her laptop, in a shadowy room festooned with Halloween lights and a black-and-white horror film on TV. This mix of the mundane and the eerie is the staged setup for a conversation about something that’s far from fictional – the misogyny they experience every day. Over a Skype call, with Romvari in Vancouver and her friend in Halifax, they trade a year’s worth of sexist encounters while carving pumpkins and drinking wine. What emerges is both a deeply personal and edgily playful exploration of the forms of casual misogyny that don’t make for headlines, but pervade everyday life.