In Up the Garden Path, a young Barbadian seamstress is coerced into
posing as her half-brother to go to the Niagara region in Ontario and
work on a vineyard. There, she meets an aspiring actress obsessed with
Joan of Arc, the ghost of a Black Loyalist soldier who wants to die, and
a boss who can't keep the starlings away from his failing vineyard.
Finding it impossible to ignore their demands, but not wanting to be
found out and sent home, Rosa has to stop and figure out what she really
wants instead of what everyone around her needs.
Based on Bernard Shaw's short story, The Adventures of the Black Girl
in Her Search for God follows a young African girl who is abandoned by
a white missionary for asking too many questions about God. Taking
matters into her own hands, the Black Girl sets off on her own to find
out who or what God really is. Along the way she meets a number of
characters who have very different views on God, but the Black Girl's
unrelenting questions create conflict, and in the end she's forced to
make her own decisions on God and her search.