Cea Sunrise Person memoir 'North Of Normal' gets a touching, raw movie adaptation

If you've already gotten your Barbie and Oppenheimer fix, it's a good time to move to a Canadian cinema choice with North Of Normal, starring Sarah Gadon and Amanda Fix, based on the famed memoir by Cea Sunrise Person.

Directed by Carly Stone and filmed in northern Ontario, North Of Normal tells the story of Person's childhood.

Much of the film takes place when Cea (played by Fix) is a teen. After living with her grandparents in the Yukon wild, Cea reunites with her mother Michelle (Gadon) in North Bay. Cea is thrust back into her complicated dynamic with her mother, who seemingly drops everything for the next boyfriend she has coming through her revolving door of toxic lovers.

Looking back at both Cea and Michelle's eclectic childhoods, both growing up in the wilderness, Cea struggles to fit in with teens with more conventional lives. That leads her to audition for a model search, which would send Cea to Paris. The teen sees this as an opportunity for her mother to get out of the destructive cycle of her life as well.

North of Normal is a beautifully complex and touching look at this mother-daughter dynamic, which is something in Person's story that initially attracted Stone to be part of this project.

“There [are] so many relationships in the memoir that could be other films too, but Michelle and Cea's dynamic I found so interesting, so heartbreaking, and an important one to see on screen," Stone told Yahoo Canada in an interview during last year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

“I think the role reversal of who's the parent and who's the child set it up right away to be something interesting. At times entertaining, oftentimes heartbreaking."

Fix stressed she was "blown away" when she read the script.

“I cried, I laughed, I just felt so pulled to it and I think that's the biggest draw," she said. “But also, I think getting the opportunity to work with Carly, and work with an incredible new and upcoming female director, I think that was something that I really wanted, especially early on in my career."

"Working with people that are so passionate about these stories and wanting to tell true, raw, real stories, and I think that getting the opportunity to play a real life person is such a big challenge, but it was something that I really wanted to take on. Because I felt so connected to Cea.”

'Definitely daunting to know that people have read the story and feel so connected to it'

While Fix was enthusiastic about having the ability to take on a character that is a real person, the actor also expressed that it was "daunting" to not just develop this character, but to be part of a screen version of a story that so many people have read. But being able to spend some time with Person herself assisted Fix in that process.

“It’s definitely daunting to know that people have read the story and feel so connected to it, and have such strong feelings about it, because I was touched by it too,” Fix said. “So knowing that I was going to be playing her scared me a little bit, but when I talked to Cea, she was just so warm and so supportive of me.”

“She sent me playlists of music that her and her mom would listen to and we talked about their relationship, because that was what was most important for me to portray as purely and as honestly as possible. But I didn't want to think too much while filming about the pressure from people that have read the book, I wanted to be super present in the moment and work with Carly, work with Sarah. … We just wanted to create this honest portrayal of a mother and daughter, and I think that we did.”

For Stone, in directing the film, maintaining that mother-daughter dynamic that's so beautifully fleshed out in Person's memoir was also critical.

“I wanted to protect the essence of her family and their dynamics, and hope that even though we took creative licence in this way and that way, that she still felt it to be true in some crucial way,” Stone said. “That was very important to me. To do her story justice.”

North of Normal is currently in select theatres across Canada.