93 minutes – Drama
Festival Release date: September 11, 2016 (TIFF)
Release date: October 14, 2016
Canadian Distributor: Mongrel Media

Reta Winters (Catherine Keener) has many reasons to be happy – her three nearly grown daughters, her twenty-year relationship with her husband (Matt Craven), her work translating the writing of larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman, and her modest success with a novel of her own and the demand for a sequel.
Then, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment. Her eldest daughter, Norah (Hannah Gross), suddenly drops out of college, runs from the family and is found on a Toronto street corner, holding a hand-written cardboard sign reading “Goodness.” There she sits daily, pan-handling and refusing to speak, having relinquished her privileged life and her future, seemingly for nothing more than a word.

Unless is an Ireland-Canada co-production based on the novel by Carol Shields. It was selected to have its World Premiere at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.