“Maybe this May will be the last of the bad months before things start to get better.”

May Flowers captures one month in the life of Toronto during pandemic times, just as the city is about to emerge from a period of maddening isolation—and one of the longest emergency lockdowns in the world.

Filmed in May 2021, amidst Covid’s third and deadliest wave, May Flowers unfolds through a moving collection of encounters with a cross-section of the city’s residents. Out of the telling of their stories, and strategies for coping, what emerges is a portrait of a city at a turning point—a city, like so many others, riven with uncertainty about the future, worsening inequality, and a fraying sense of trust in institutions and each other.

By turns funny and sad, peculiar and melancholy, May Flowers also reflects on the strangeness of how we experienced time and memory during the pandemic—a capsule of a moment not so long ago that already feels like some distant past. Will the most memorable period in most of our lives somehow elude remembering?

May Flowers
Directed, written, and produced by Chris Frey & Patrick Pittman
106 mins / 2023 / Canada