The Vic

A young woman has disappeared at the edge of the city. Four women are drawn into the race to find her. As we watch them grid-search the fields for traces of her passing, we move through the shattering events of their recent lives that have left them as lost as she is. Mentor and protégé, lovers and sisters, they explore one burning question: who’s got the power, and what is he or she going to do with it?

Redolent with ambiguity, playing on the multiple meanings of victim, victory, and theatricality while undermining and interrogating these conventions, The Vic creates an ensemble of sharply drawn characters: eight ethnically diverse women, ranging in age from their teens to their fifties, each of them eager to claim the entitlement they feel their status as victim has “naturally” conferred upon them.

Drawing on the cult of Rock Thériault (aka “Moses”) near Burnt River, Ontario, in the early 1980s, and the Bernardo case, The Vic starts out where the popular media coverage of these events leaves off: with the media’s inability to penetrate the humanity of its subjects beyond the constructed veils of saints and sinners; evil perpetrators and innocent, “helpless” victims. It is an unsparing, often shocking, sometimes incredibly humourous dramatization of how the status of victim has become the most powerful and effective manipulative tool for social advancement in an age where all public discourse begins and ends with the populist media motto, “if it bleeds it leads.”

Cast of 8 women