Muskoka: Volume 218

A young man down on his luck meets the woman of his dreams in an adult education course. But this is no ordinary male fantasy: the man is a Pakistani-Canadian artist with a treatable recurrent cancer; the young lady is an Indigenous princess just returned from art school in Europe to her father’s glass summer palace in Muskoka. This romantic comedy, set in mid-Toronto and on Lake Rosseau, plays with the intersection of Indigenous, settler, and immigrant success stories against the background of mortality and the stars.

Julian Samuel is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and a fine art painter. He was born in Lahore, Pakistan and has lived in the United Kingdom, Peterborough (Ont.), Montreal, and now Toronto.