Glasgow Film Festival 2024 interview: The Burning Season’s Jonas Chernick on the art of backwards storytelling

A visit to the Glasgow Film Festival is something of a tradition for Jonas Chernick. It’s the fourth year that the Canadian actor/writer/producer has been in town to promote a film – and he’s already looking forward to coming back next year. Ironic, when you consider that his new film, The Burning Season, is a love story told backwards.

Married couple Alena and Tom have been visiting the same peaceful holiday cabins for years, but their latest trip isn’t a holiday. Their friends who run the resort, J B (played by Chernick) and Poppy are getting married but when a long-standing secret is blown wide open, the event is thrown into chaos. And it’s just the start of a story that digs into a destructive relationship until all its history is revealed. Although you could say it’s the end of the story as well.

In this exclusive interview, Chernick, who co-wrote as well as playing one of the main characters, describes the thinking behind the backwards narrative. It allowed him and co-writer Diana s to “examine the idea of shared trauma and memory and addiction and how you can become addicted to a person in the same way as you can become chemically addicted to drugs or alcohol or romance.” He also describes how the film was actually shot in chronological order and why he keeps returning to themes of love and romance in his films. One of the reasons is that he’s just an old fashioned romantic himself.

The Burning Season screens at the Glasgow Film Festival on 3 and 4 March 2024.

Read our review.