Local filmmaker Sherry White is well-known for writing movies like Crackie and Down to the Dirt, and she writes scripts for hit shows like Rookie Blue, Saving Hope, and Orphan Black. This fall, her latest feature film, Maudie, is doing the film festival circuit. The 2016 Atlantic Film Festival took place in Halifax this weekend, and Maudie won both Best Feature Film, and Best Screenplay.

Maudie features Ethan Hawke and Sally Hawkins. It was filmed in Newfoundland in 2015, and is a biopic about Maudie Lewis, a real-life folk artist, but the story focusses on the unlikely love story between two outsiders, Maudie (played by Hawkins) and her husband (played by Hawke).

“Everett Lewis hires a fragile yet determined woman named Maudie to be his housekeeper. Maudie, bright-eyed but hunched with crippled hands, yearns to be independent, to live away from her protective family and she also yearns, passionately, to create art. Unexpectedly, Everett finds himself falling in love. Maudie charts Everett’s efforts to protect himself from being hurt, Maudie’s deep and abiding love for this difficult man, and her surprising rise to fame as a folk painter.”

It was White’s affinity for “outsiders” like those in the movie that prompted co-producer Mary Young Leckie to ask White to write the story a decade ago. White was happy to do so, having found the real life woman the movie is based on to be “infectious in how she sees the world.”

You can catch Maudie in St. John’s this October during the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival.