Passionflower is a 2011 Canadian coming of age film written and directed by Shelagh Carter and starring Kassidy Love Brown, Kristen Harris and Darcy Fehr.

[2] Sarah Matthews, a creative eleven-year-old girl on the brink of puberty in 1962 suburban Winnipeg, is starved for attention in the midst of her chaotic family life.

With a distracted, hardworking father and a seemingly unstable mother, Sarah's loneliness leads her to make a new friend at school.

From the erotic seduction of dinner guests to the bouts of tortured distress in the middle of the night, Sarah grows increasingly concerned and confused with her mother's erratic behavior.

[4] Shelagh Carter's "director's statement" asserts that as a filmmaker, she is interested in "truth in life and in relationships", and that she needed to start with herself:Passionflower is the film that had to be done first as an artist.

[5]As a child, she had a troubled relationship with her mother;[6] there was a family history of mental illness going back to Carter's grandmother.

[7] In an interview, Carter asserted that Passionflower was her own story, that her experience of her mother is "85% of what is seen on the screen":A lot of women at the time, an era of being perfect, staying in the home, repressed their anger from not being able to express themselves.

The mental health industry at the time made women the problem and treated them with electroshock therapy.

I had written it as a short film around that time, and I showed it to my friend John and he said, "Shelagh, I think this is actually a feature, for some reason."

[8] On her return to Winnipeg, Carter was introduced to producer and fellow CFC alumna Polly Washburn in November 2009, who read the treatment and said they would make the film.

Washburn would talk to Telefilm Canada while she was in Vancouver for the Olympics, assuring Carter: "We're not going to worry about going into development, we're going to go straight to production.

[5] In addition, Carter and Washburn raised US$5,920 on crowdfunding website Indiegogo towards Passionflower, when the film's working title was still Hello, Darling.

[9] The working title appears in the film's first official trailer,[10] and was used in notices published as late as early 2011.

[8]Several years later, after Kirsten Harris had won an award for Before Anything You Say, Carter's second feature, and playing again opposite Darcy Fehr, Harris said Passionflower was one of the two most memorable roles of her career:It was the most difficult role I've played in that she was in quite a dark place mentally and emotionally throughout, so to sustain that took a bit of a toll (suffice it to say there were some late night calls to my mom!).

Even so, through Telefilm, they put the script out in a national call and received tapes from some "very serious actors across Canada ... but I just felt I could do it out of Manitoba."

Some time was devoted to rehearsals during the week before principal photography, which took place over fourteen days,[8] of August 2010, in Winnipeg.

[8] There is a scene with Kirsten Harris on a road which takes place in complete silence, which was controversial among Carter's team in post-production.