Su Rynard is a Canadian documentary maker and video artist.  This is her first feature film. It is a moving experience.

The focus of Kardia is, as the derivation of the title suggests, the human heart.  A voiceover prologue reminds us that the heart is the fundamental organ of the human being. 

Before the developments of understanding of the brain, many functions were attributed to the heart.  Our language is full of heart phrases.  While there is myth that the soul should weigh 21 grams, it was said that the worthy heart of a dead person should be as light as a feather.

This prologue introduces us to Hope (Mimi Kuzyk) a pathologist who investigates the heart and causes of death.  After leaving her lab, she collapses, her heart stops and she dies. 

The film is principally a flashback to her childhood as well as to her immediate life before she dies.

Hope is an abandoned baby, found by a war veteran who takes care of her and rears her like a father, including volunteering to give blood in a pioneering operation to save Hope’s congenitally damaged heart.  Intercut with this story from the 1950s and 60s is the adult Hope’s work, her preparation for a lecture on physical data and its relationship to emotion and love.  Her two assistants are initially sceptical preferring to consider only the relevant physical facts.  Hope also investigates her own operation through archives and newspaper reports of the time.

The contemporary story raises a number of issues concerning a holistic approach to the human being and the relationship between speaking one’s mind and listening to one’s heart and the psychosomatic effects of emotion on the heart.

The continual flashback’s to Hope’s childhood are often lyrical, Dad being one of the nicest characters one could see on screen, a completely loving and dedicated man who opens Hope’s vision in a range of sequences, including imagining the joy of flying, reading from Dante’s Inferno, and explaining that she must set a salamander free so that it can live in its own environment.  One can see how profound his influence has been on the mature Hope.

And yet, as Hope asks at the end, how much of this story is memory and how much wish.  She feels an interconnection with the man who volunteered his blood for her.  His blood is part of her blood, his story part of her story.  This shifts the level of the narrative from a memoir to a kind of fable about the heart, blood and interlocking lives and mysterious, even mystical connections.

To say that this is a very feminine film is not merely to state that the film was written and directed by Su Rynard but to say that it is feminine in the best Jungian sense of Anima, that feminine principle, that is an integral part of women and men.

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