from GAT

Theatrical Premiere
Sunday, April 6, 2014
4:00 pm – REVUE Cinema – 400 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto

Filmmakers Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham
will be in attendance for a Q+A following the screening.

Ontario’s Highway 7, once the main route between Toronto and Ottawa, is now a road much less travelled. But the towns and the people remain—for now.

The Lost Highway is a 40-kilometre stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway and part of Highway 7 in Eastern Ontario. Once a heavily travelled corridor, Highway 7’s traffic was siphoned by the completion of Highway 401 in the 1960s, which led to a regional economic depression. Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham’s new documentary looks at this phenomenon to create an intensely intimate film about a vanishing way of life in rural Canada. The Toronto-based filmmakers have also produced The Lost Highway Online, a visually captivating interactive website that expands on the themes examined in the film.

Just outside the village of Arden (north of Kingston as the crow flies) Howard Gibbs pumps gas. But few stop anymore. His garage is collapsing and drivers think it’s closed. Gibbs wants his daughter to take over the 80-year-old family run station when he retires, but she’s not sure her father is telling the truth about what’s in store. Next-door, transplanted Torontonians Linda Tremblay and David Daski have spent seven years turning a dilapidated farmhouse into a boutique bed and breakfast, but by the time they finally open to the public the years of isolation and intense physical labour have taken their toll. Can they make a go of it or has their journey taken too long? Then there’s artisan Sarah Hale, who’s seen 40 years of slow decline, and whose Batik shop is now the last remaining store in Arden’s downtown.

But amid the boarded-up and abandoned buildings life goes on—and even when the locals band together to fight its demise, even those who love the town wonder if it’s not just too late. “When we first arrived we thought much of the region was abandoned. When we found people unwilling to let it die, that’s when we knew we had a story,” say the filmmakers.

Graham and Roemer’s acclaimed Last Call At The Gladstone Hotel chronicled the displacement of people living in a flophouse hotel. For The Lost Highway the duo take the same probing lens to the struggles of life along Highway 7.

For more info on film please visit website