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Parsley Days


Year: 2000
Language: English
Format: 35mm Colour
Runtime: 76 min
Director: Andrea Dorfman
Producer: Andrea Dorfman, Kim Boyd
Writer: Andrea Dorfman
Cinematographer: Andrea Dorfman
Editor: Scott Simpson
Sound: Mike Smith
Music: Robert Benvie, Ian McGettigan
Cast: Megan Dunlop, Mike Le Blanc, Marla McLean, Kenneth Harrington, Marcia Connolly
Production Company: a.d. pictures

Kate (Megan Dunlop), a bicycle maintenance instructor, and Ollie (Mike Le Blanc), a birth control educator known as the "king of contraception," are the perfect duo. Together for five years and the envy of all their friends (they are referred to as one entity, "Katenollie"), they seem to have the kind of relationship everyone aspires to. But while all her friends effuse about how Ollie is the ideal guy, Kate has come to the painful realization that she is not sure she is still in love with him. To complicate matters, she discovers she’s pregnant.

Kate’s eclectic group of friends respond with varying degrees of shock and disbelief. But Kate wants to end both her relationship and her pregnancy, and her friends try to offer support in their own quirky ways. Chloe (Marcia Connolly), an herbalist, assures Kate that parsley can induce a miscarriage. So Kate embarks on her parsley days – a steady diet of parsley sandwiches, tea, snacks and even baths – in the hope that she will somehow find the solution to her dilemma.

Andrea Dorfman’s debut feature is an engaging and heartfelt tale about the difficulty of falling out of love. Set against the backdrop of a Halifax summer, the film explores what happens when a couple everyone idealizes begins to break up.

Funny and charming, Parsley Days is a bittersweet story of self-discovery with a decidedly indie flavour. Dorfman wrote and produced the film and, also acting as cinematographer and camera operator, shot it in Halifax in eleven days. The film was named one of Canada’s Top Ten of 2001 by an independent, ten-member national panel comprised of filmmakers, programmers, journalists and industry professionals.

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