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Brandon Cronenberg on process, penises, and Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg discusses his fucked up horror film Possessor and its many unintentional penetration metaphors. The film is now on VOD in Canada, the US, and the UK.

A headshot of director Brandon Cronenberg in front of a still from his film, Possessor. The text on the image reads 'Interview'.
Brandon Cronenberg on process, penises, and Possessor.

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It has been eight years since Brandon Cronenberg’s first feature, Antiviral. In that Caleb Landry Jones-led chiller, people paid to be injected with viruses contracted from various celebrities. In Possessor, the emerging director looks inward once again, following a mercenary named Vos (Andrea Riseborough) who executes her kills from within other people’s bodies. When Vos’s newest mark, Colin (Christopher Abbott), fights to regain control of himself, Vos starts to lose her grip on reality as their two identities merge. 

Cronenberg hopes to continue along the path of genre weirdness, and is aiming to shoot his next two films, Infinity Pool and Dragon, back to back. He describes Infinity Pool as “a kind of a humorous resort satire with some sci-fi horror stuff in it,” and Dragon as “a trippy space horror movie.”

For now, though, he’s content to talk about Possessor and its many unintentional penetration metaphors. During a surreally distanced press day, I caught him on the phone to chat about process and penises.

Brandon Cronenberg and cinematographer Karim Hussain lean together in discussion behind a camera on the set of Possessor.
Brandon Cronenberg (left) and cinematographer Karim Hussain (right) shooting Possessor.

Seventh Row (7R): First, I want to hear about the eight years between Antiviral and Possessor.

Brandon Cronenberg: I finished Antiviral in 2012, and I started working on Possessor. I took a few years to write and get something else in motion, and then we just hit all of the usual indie financing problems and casting problems. It wasn’t anything especially bizarre; it was just a lot of the usual stuff over and over again — going down a path with a bad financier for a while and having everything fall apart repeatedly. So yeah, [Possessor] was in development the entire eight years. We were trying to make it happen.

7R: Speaking of casting, I’m really interested in how you ended up with Andrea Riseborough as your lead.

Brandon Cronenberg: She’s just fantastic. I think she’s one of the best actors working right now. I’ve always really liked her stuff. I met up with her at TIFF thinking it was going to be a huge job to talk her into it. But it turned out she had seen Antiviral, and she was actually friends with Caleb Landry Jones, and she was interested in possibly doing something together, just by pure coincidence. So it was a weirdly short conversation where we both were thinking we had to have a proper meeting and talk each other into it, but we just sort of hung out a bit.

7R: When you’re putting together a film like this, how concrete is your vision before filming begins? What’s your pre-production process like?

Brandon Cronenberg: I try and find a balance between getting everything nailed down, and then sort of being open to collaborate and explore it with other people. I’ll have the film in my head in a very specific way, and try and have all the answers. 

But at the same time, I work with, fortunately, some really great people, even during development — people like Karim Hussain, our cinematographer, and Dan Martin, our effects artist. I’ll spend a lot of time with them experimenting. Karim lived down the street from me for years during development. I would just go over to his place, and we would play with projection feedback and the different lenses and gels and figure out different ways that we can deform the image for those hallucination scenes.

7R: Antiviral has this very stark, white palette, and then Possessor is working very intentionally with primary colours. Talk to me about that thought process.

Brandon Cronenberg: I don’t know if it was a thought process so much as it was just a kind of shifting of taste over the years. I was in a particular place when I was making Antiviral, and that was a certain aesthetic that I wanted to explore. For this kind of hyper-subjective, dreamy shooting [for Possessor], it felt nicer to have colours, to explore colour and also camera motions. Antiviral had a very static camera, deliberately — we would break up the shots with camera movements that we would cut out of editing, just to have everything fairly fixed — whereas Possessor is a lot of Steadicam, just kind of floaty, subjective camera.

A closeup of Andrea Riseborough as Vos, her face bathed in patchy red light.
Andrea Riseborough in Possessor.

7R: Was the use of primary colors in Possessor intentional?

Brandon Cronenberg: To a degree. I liked the idea of working with these different colour spaces, but some of them we found through the process, like the yellow. If I’m being honest, the yellow was there a little bit, but it became a much bigger presence in the film once we started reworking those shots. All those hallucination scenes are totally in-camera, practical effects, so even the yellow flares and image distortions were done after the fact. And we decided to really run with the yellow as we were rephotographing those scenes through lenses and gels.

7R: Violence and body horror play major roles in this film. How did you get from a tamer feature, like Antiviral, to a movie like Possessor?

Brandon Cronenberg: So much of the film is about Vos, and so much of Vos’s character is rooted in her relationship to violence. The audience needs that visceral reaction to understand what she’s going through. But the depiction of the violence also tracks with her psychology. Sometimes, it’s much more observational and fast and brutal, and then sometimes, as it’s settling in, she looks back at it, and it has this kind of ultra-stylized, almost sensual quality to it. It’s so much at the core of her character, and because her character is the driving force of the narrative, it had to be explicit, but also stylized in different ways as the film progresses.

7R: Two moments — a closeup neck stabbing and an altercation with a fire poker — spring to mind as standout examples of violence in the film. Were those images clear to you before shooting? How did they come to be?

Brandon Cronenberg: I mean, conceptually, Vos has a strange relationship with violence, where it’s this weird thing that she loves and almost fetishizes, but it’s also something that’s possibly deforming her, or being encouraged in her by this other person. And that person might be manipulating her — or, perhaps, bringing out her true self. So I wanted these moments to have that kind of impact, and the neck stab, the face trauma, those have potency and make people uncomfortable in a way that I think was necessary.

I like practical effects, especially with on-screen violence. The benefit to CGI is that it frees up choreography, and you can have these sort of long, one-shot action sequences, but I always find something a bit floaty about CGI blood. It doesn’t really have the same impact. So I knew we were going to have to use prosthetics and puppets. 

I worked with Dan Martin, who’s a mad genius of practical effects, and we were able to do some really amazing stuff because of how great his fake heads are — for instance, the closeup of needles going into the scalps. Those are normal-sized scalps with really well-punched hair. We shot them with a probe lens that was, like, an inch away from the effect. We didn’t think we’d be able to pull that off, but his great work freed us up to do a lot practically that we might not have otherwise been able to do.

7R: Ha, I literally have a question in here that just says, ‘Talk to me about your prosthetics guy.’ I’m especially interested in discussing one scene, where Colin wears Vos’s face, and another, where Vos is having sex as Colin and then, suddenly, she’s in her own body, but she has a penis.

Brandon Cronenberg: So, in terms of the face, the actual mask was something that Dan sculpted. It was kind of straightforward. There was a little bit of design discussion, but we were pretty much on the same page from the start.

The story behind the penis is a little bit funny. For one, I’m told Dan has, like, an entire closet of penises. This was a penis that was sculpted specifically for the film, but he’s sculpted many penises in the past. So, old hat for Dan. But that moment was in the script before it went out, and some of the feedback I was getting from our producers was that maybe it shouldn’t say that she had a penis, just in case that was like a total deal-breaker for an actor. Was that the hill to die on, if someone was going to get completely put off by the prospect of having a penis? So I rewrote it in kind of a vague way.

And then I sat down with Andrea for one of the first conversations we had once she had already signed on to the film, and one of the first things she said when we were talking about the sex scene, was, “Look, I don’t want to freak you out here. But I really think that Vos should have a penis.” I just thought, This is amazing. You’re reading my mind. You’re clearly the perfect person for this. And I was just thrilled to go back to my producers and say, “She absolutely must have a penis. This is her idea.”

7R: This seems like a good time to talk about penetration for a second, because you introduce that as a theme in Antiviral when you have a character give this fascinating, Freudian monologue about how transmitters are gendered male and the infected are gendered female. And then in Possessor, you’ve got a protagonist entering other people’s bodies in all these myriad ways.

Brandon Cronenberg: I’ve been asked about this a couple of times. I’m not really sure what to say about penetration in the film. I understand, obviously — she stabs a few people, and she has a penis at one point, so the kind of Freudian implications are there, but penetration wasn’t so specifically thematic for me while I was writing it. 

To me, the stabbing was more indicative of the fact that she wanted to be directly involved, and physically involved. She’s gotten too sterile and too distanced, and she’s going off-script to experience violence in a more tactile, direct way. 

And then with the penis, that character’s experience of sex and gender is obviously completely fascinating, because she inhabits all these other bodies, so I wanted that to be depicted. It was also useful in terms of the two characters and where they are: as she’s losing control, he’s fighting back, and I wanted that duality to be visual. I wasn’t really trying to say she just wants a penis and these things are all penises, or something like that. It wasn’t intentionally penis-focused.

7R: That’s interesting. I wasn’t really thinking of it from a penis envy angle so much as a Carol J. Clover, possession-as-penetration angle.

Brandon Cronenberg: There is something penetrative about just being in the body of somebody else — the drilling into the head and entering the body. But that sort of stuff you can kind of explore after the fact. It makes for interesting analysis, but I wasn’t deliberately getting quite so penetration happy.

Several members of the filmmaking crew gather around Andrea Riseborough's character as she lies down on what looks like a surgical table. The still is in black and white.
Behind the scenes of Possessor.

7R: What scares you?

Brandon Cronenberg: I have no idea. The usual things that scare people, I suppose — fear of intense pain and avoidance of generally horrible situations. But I don’t have a great one. I’m not phobic of one really interesting thing, like balloons.

7R: What do you think about the fact that you live in a human body?

Brandon Cronenberg: I think that I am my human body. It’s funny, I’ve spoken to a couple of people about this, as well. I know that Possessor lends itself, from a certain perspective, to a kind of mind/body divide. But that’s not really my philosophy. 

I think, in Possessor, part of it is that her physical body is now extending, through technology, into someone else’s physical body. But I don’t think her mind is just being transferred in this completely free-floating way. 

We all have this relationship with our bodies in a day-to-day way that we are very used to, but when you depict somebody as being in a new body, then suddenly, that relationship can be examined with fresh eyes — even though it’s really talking about how we are actually in our own bodies, or how we are our bodies.

7R: What do you think it means to be human?

Brandon Cronenberg: I don’t know. I mean, if you know, let me know. I don’t think it means anything to be human. I think meaning is already a human thing. Once you step outside human experience and talk about meaning, it becomes incomprehensible.

7R: Do you think that the last year has impacted the way you look at any of this at all?

Brandon Cronenberg: I think it’s interesting. We’re all having this like, non-monogamous relationship with this virus. It’s in our lives. It’s defining how we behave even if we don’t have it. It’s become central globally, which is fascinating. We’re all having this biological experience at the same time. 

The fact that people are talking about which vaccines they’re going to hopefully get, like, “Oh yeah, I hope I get the Moderna.” It’s like, are you serious? It’s horrible, but it’s sort of fascinating. I don’t know if it’s changed my perspective about my own body. It’s maybe made me realize I’m not quite as much of a hermit, because I am going a little stir crazy, but that’s probably it.

7R: I actually watched Antiviral for the first time to prepare for this interview, which was quite the experience mid-pandemic.

Brandon Cronenberg: I’ve also been getting questions about pandemic horror and viral horror and “Wouldn’t it be better to be releasing a virus movie right now?” And I can’t tell, because I feel like, in horror movies, if there’s a virus, it’s usually a metaphor for something. It’s usually standing in for other anxieties that we have. I think no one can take viral infection metaphorically right now, because it’s so in our face.

7R: What has it been like releasing a movie during the pandemic?

Brandon Cronenberg: It’s been weird. I mean, I think as someone who’s making indie films — and, despite working at it for quite a few years now, I’m still kind of at the start of my career, it’s my second feature — you don’t expect to have a massive theatrical release anyway. You don’t expect to compete with a Marvel movie or something.

Because so many people are going to be seeing your film at home through streaming or digital anyway, it doesn’t feel like a massive loss — and I don’t fetishize theatrical the way that some directors do, generally. 

Releasing it’s been a bit weird in the sense that it’s all done at home. Normally, I would travel with the film and be able to meet people and show it to audiences and have that experience. It sort of feels a bit more like playing a video game of releasing a film. I’m Zooming people and doing press that way and then getting up and having lunch.

7R: So you didn’t get to see it at a drive-in at all.

Brandon Cronenberg: I got texted a few pictures from drive-ins. I’m sort of delighted that it played drive-ins. That resurgence has been kind of fun. I don’t have a car, though.

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Sonia Boileau on telling a human story about MMIWG in Rustic Oracle

Mohawk writer-director Sonia Boileau discusses her new film Rustic Oracle about the human side of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis in Canada. She discusses working with child actors, creating empathy, shooting in her home community, and decolonizing the filmmaking process.

Listen to us discuss Rustic Oracle on the Seventh Row podcast here. Watch Rustic Oracle worldwide here.

Writer-director Sonia Boileau (left) and Lake Delisle as Ivy (right) in Rustic Oracle

How do you get people to care about systemic violence and racism when they’re used to being able to ignore it? For Mohawk writer-director Sonia Boileau, she found that making fiction films, rather than documentary films where she got her start, would let her reach a broader audience who might otherwise be hostile to learning about Indigenous issues. In particular, she had been wanting to make a film about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) for over a decade. In Canada, Indigenous women account for 16% of all female homicide victims and 11% of missing women, yet Indigenous people comprise only 4.3% of Canada’s population. Boileau began her career as a documentarian so had initially planned to address the issue through that lens, but at the time, she couldn’t find anyone interested in funding such a project.

Fortunately, in the last five years, the national consciousness about MMIWG has increased because of the national inquiry launched in 2015, meaning funders were more receptive to this idea. In the meantime, Boileau directed her first narrative feature, Le dep, and discovered that telling fictional stories might be the best way to reach a broader audience. “When you’re doing a documentary, you’re actually speaking to people who are already interested in that subject,” she told me. “I’m not going to see a documentary on boats if I’m not interested in boats. But if you’re making a fictional story, you’re actually casting a way wider net.”

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The result is one of the very best films of the year, Rustic Oracle, about a Mohawk mother and daughter, Susan (Carmen Moore) and eight-year-old Ivy (Lake Delisle), coping with the aftermath of Ivy’s teenage sister, Heather (McKenzie Deer Robinson), going missing. Set largely in the 1990s, in the time before social media, Susan and Ivy go on a road trip to personally try to find Heather after the police have provided little assistance. Told through Ivy’s perspective as an adult looking back on her childhood, when she didn’t fully understand what was happening, the film weaves a complex and heartbreaking story of family bonds, grief, and the effects of systemic violence on the community. 

As a single mother, Susan was already struggling to keep things together and support her family, and when she loses her daughter, she becomes so stressed that it’s difficult to still be a good mother to her remaining daughter. Meanwhile, Ivy hasn’t just lost a sister, but her main support system. The film follows Ivy and Susan as they look for Heather and find a way to regain the closeness between them that they’d lost because of all the trauma they experienced.

Although Rustic Oracle deals with dark and difficult subject matter, the film is never gratuitous in its depiction of violence — in part because Boileau didn’t want to retraumatize Indigenous viewers who might be watching the film. It’s much more about the psychological effects of this systemic problem — not on those who go missing, but on those who have lost loved ones. 

To make the film, Boileau returned to her home in Kanesatake, collaborating with the community where she grew up to create her vision. On the occasion of the film’s worldwide VOD release (it’s also available on Blu-ray in Canada), I talked to Boileau via Zoom about telling stories about traumatic experiences, working with child actors, helping audiences heal, and decolonizing the filmmaking process.

Lake Delisle stars as Ivy in Rustic Oracle, directed by Sonia Boileau. Ivy is riding her bike on a rural road.
Lake Delisle stars as Ivy in Rustic Oracle, directed by Sonia Boileau

Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of Rustic Oracle?

Sonia Boileau: I’ve actually wanted to talk about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women for such a long time now. I, at first, wanted to make a documentary; this is more than 10 years ago. I was working with broadcasters, at the time. I didn’t really know how to finance feature-length documentaries, so I was more knocking on the doors of broadcasters to see if they were willing to make a documentary. Sadly, there wasn’t much interest.

I had other projects, but it was still something I wanted to talk about. Then, slowly, socially, we started talking about it [MMIWG] a lot more. There was more awareness. There was a government that was willing to acknowledge it. When we started talking, as a country, about those numbers and statistics, I realised that we were losing touch with the fact that we were actually talking about human beings and families that are going through this. That’s when I thought, OK, if I am going to tell a story about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, it’s going to be a personal story, so people are reminded that we’re talking about human beings and not just numbers. It’s not just a political issue; it’s people’s lives. 

In the meantime, I wrote my first feature film called Le Dep, and when I started showing that film at festivals and travelling with it, I realised that it’s easier to get people’s attention with fiction than it is with documentary. When you’re doing a documentary, you’re actually speaking to people who are already interested in that subject. I’m not going to see a documentary on boats if I’m not interested in boats. (laughs) But if you’re making a fictional story, you’re actually casting a way wider net, because your audience might be someone who’s not interested or aware of Indigenous issues; they just want to see a film. And then you hit them with those realities that are specific to Indigenous people, and people are like, “Holy crap I didn’t know this!” 

Because you’re connecting them with the emotion of your characters, then they feel empathy, which you don’t always get in a documentary. That’s when I decided to write a fictional story. It’s fictional, but it’s based on specific cases. I wrote it around the time I wrote my first feature, then twisted it after that film started playing, and I got all this feedback about fiction. In 2008, there were two girls that went missing from my partner’s community. I didn’t know them personally, but I knew a lot of people who knew them, and I saw what it did to the community. I saw all these families — the helplessness, the despair, the frustration. It shook us to our core. 

That was the emotional reason behind making the film. I felt for these families, and I just wanted to scream. Often, when I make films, there’s a bit of a cathartic part to it. It’s always because it’s something that’s bothering me, that I need to express.

7R: You mentioned that being on the festival circuit changed your thoughts on documentary and fiction, and how to make a fiction film. What was it that made you realise those things?

Sonia Boileau: With the first film that I did, because I had been mostly doing documentary, I didn’t even know if I had the tools to make a fiction film. I didn’t know if I had the skill to be able to communicate a story with actors. 

My first film, which was done with the micro-budget programme at Telefilm, which is now called Talent to Watch, I had a really, really tiny budget. I figured, if I can’t do this well, it’s not that big of a risk, and I can just go back to documentaries. I still love documentaries. 

But I realised that I loved creating environments, and I loved seeing actors understand what I’m trying to convey and convey it even better than I imagined. And I loved the response, because people were responding emotionally. They were responding like it’s visceral: you’re living through the story that you’re watching. 

I’m glad I did that first film [Le Dep] first, because, at that time, I wouldn’t have been ready to do Rustic. There’s no way I could have jumped in with Rustic as as a first film; I would have butchered it. And if there’s one subject matter I don’t want to butcher, it’s that story. 

Maybe a documentary on that subject matter would have been as powerful. There’s many documentaries that are brilliant. One of my friends, Kim O’Bomsawin, made Quiet Killing. It’s a documentary on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It’s so well done and heart-wrenching, but again, it’s more about facts. You feel for these people, but it’s not the same rollercoaster of emotion as what fiction can bring.

Ivy (Lake Delisle) and Susan (Carmen Moore) go on a road trip in search of Heather in Rustic Oracle directed by Sonia Boileau
Ivy (Lake Delisle) and Susan (Carmen Moore) go on a road trip in search of Heather in Rustic Oracle

7R: Some of the most mainstream coverage of MMIWG has been about the women who go missing, like CBC’s Finding Cleo podcast. But this was so powerful to see not just that one person, but the people around them that are affected. How did you decide to make Rustic Oracle from Ivy’s perspective?

Sonia Boileau: I actually really wanted to dive into the childhood perspective because first, I am a mom, and every time I read or see a story about a missing person, particularly an Indigenous person, I always think, how would my kids handle this? It’s so big. I started really observing how kids react in certain situations. 

Even going back to the two kids who went missing, I participated in walks and vigils, and I saw family members. I was really in awe of how kids have this natural inner resilience that they manage to find happiness wherever. As humans, we need to find rays of light, hope, laughter, even in the hardest circumstances. I always found it fascinating about kids being able to do that. We lose that, as adults; reality takes over. 

I feel like anyone can identify with a child regardless of their cultural background. That was another way to cast a wider net for my audience and get people to get on the boat and let Ivy tell the story. It’s easier for people from different cultures to connect with what a kid is feeling. There’s so much prejudice towards Indigenous people, in general, that I feel like just having an Indigenous character like Carmen’s character, Susan, part of my audience would already have sat and watched it with these filters of prejudice, preconceptions and misconceptions, and that alters how they would view the film. 

You can’t really do that with kids; you can’t judge a nine year old! (laughs) I liked the idea of the audience not being fed all the information in regards to the actual investigation. I wanted to create a sense of frustration or [limited information], because you’re following a kid, and that’s what a kid feels all the time. They only get a limited bit of information. 

If you want to take that even further, it can be a metaphor for what Indigenous families have been going through when they live through this: they don’t get all the information. They are passengers within this tragedy. Even in the government, decisions are made at the top, and meanwhile, they’re just dragged along and nothing gets resolved for them.

7R: How did you decide to use the framing narrative of an adult Ivy looking back on her childhood, now that she has a daughter of her own?

Sonia Boileau: Before we were shooting, we were debating whether the film should be set in the ‘90s or today. If it is set in the ‘90s, as my script intended, do we really need those bookends? For me, the reason for the bookends was I really wanted the film to end with hope, something to look forward to, something to show the strength and resilience Indigenous women have now. I didn’t want to end on something so somber and sad that we feel defeated. 

We need to see strong characters that overcome hardship rather than are just destroyed by hardship. Films are a reflection of society but they can also fuel society. I think if we see these people on screen, it might change the way we view ourselves and others. I see that as a positive note. She’s now a beautiful grown woman and a mother; that’s something to look forward to. 

I wanted to set the film in the ‘90s so we could see the outcome years later, that she’s standing proud and strong, but also because I wanted to set it before social media. Social media has been a huge tool for Indigenous families to get the word out when somebody goes missing. In the ‘90s, if someone went missing, you, as a parent, had to physically go and knock on doors to get the word out. I wanted to show what these families had to go through to get attention from anyone.

7R: I agree that Rustic Oracle has a hopeful ending, but the flip side is that the story isn’t over. It’s not something in the past; she has to live with this grief. And I also wonder how that might affect her own relationships, because we see how tough intimacy with her children is for Susan, because she’s had so many hardships.

Sonia Boileau: I think the fact that she [older Ivy] ends on a hug [with her daughter is a sign of hope]. It’s already a proximity that, in the first half of the film, you barely see between Susan and Ivy. There’s a bit of it, but you can tell that it’s Ivy going in for the hug, who needs it, and Susan is struggling with how to deal with that. 

But at the end, it’s older Ivy that brings her daughter in. She [as a mother] is the one that’s going to create that proximity. I see that as a way of slowly getting rid of intergenerational trauma, very slowly. For sure, she has baggage; her sister is gone, and her father is a bad person. But I see her as being more equipped to heal than her mother was.

Susan (Carmen Moore) hugs her daughter, Ivy (Lake Delisle) in Sonia Boileau's Rustic Oracle
Susan (Carmen Moore) hugs her daughter, Ivy (Lake Delisle) in Sonia Boileau’s Rustic Oracle

7R: I’m wondering a bit about how you thought about physical closeness and touch in Rustic Oracle. The sisters are so close to each other, and it takes Ivy and Susan a while to find that physical closeness, which then leads to more emotional closeness.

Sonia Boileau: That was the whole basis of the film I would say, when we were discussing our characters in rehearsal. Ivy’s main curve is exactly that. Heather is her emotional pillar. She [Heather] is the main source of physical comfort [for Ivy] but just comfort, in general, and her mom is the provider. 

Because Ivy’s missing that huge, important part of her life [when Heather is gone], she tries to get her mom to become both, to become the emotional provider and the life provider. It takes Susan a while to realise that’s what Ivy needs. That was what we discussed in terms of what Heather represented for Ivy, and what fuels her.

The reason to go on the road trip isn’t only to find Heather, but it’s also visceral: she’s in need of that comfort that Heather brought, and she needs her mother to fill it. The grandmother could have! It could have been a whole other movie if she had stayed with grandma. (laughs)

7R: What is the process for working with actors to figure that out? You’ve got a wonderful performance from Lake playing Ivy, and then this really strong mother-daughter relationship in Rustic Oracle.

Sonia Boileau: The reason it clicks so well on screen is we did a lot of work before the shoot. I brought Carmen here a few months before shooting, because she lives out west. We shot in July, and I brought her here in April for a week, just to get to know Lake and Mackenzie, who plays Heather, and to build on that relationship. 

Even after she went home after that week, they would phone each other. They would FaceTime, and send cute messages and videos on social media. They were already creating this nice bond. When we got to real rehearsals and on set, they were already close, To the point where it became tricky. On set, Lake and Carmen were so close but I wanted them to feel distant; sometimes, I had to remind them of the distance and cold that has to exist. 

Carmen’s a pro and such a good actor. In the scenes where she’s kind of rough and cold, as soon as I would yell cut, she would go, “I’m so sorry baby, I’m so sorry! It’s not me yelling; it’s the character!” At first, Lake would find it funny. Eventually, she was like, “Oh I know! It’s fine!” They were already so, so close that Carmen didn’t want her to feel like it was Carmen yelling at her. I think that work, building that connection before shooting, definitely helped create the whole arc of their relationship.

7R: What kind of rehearsals did you do for Rustic Oracle?

Sonia Boileau: We didn’t do full on rehearsals as in, You stand there, you go there. It was all sitting down, table reads. It was more about diving deep on the meaning behind the moments, getting the emotions right in some scenes. For Lake, it was also about understanding, which was really key, as well. Even before we made our final decision in casting her, I had a conversation with her mom, just to make sure it was OK for her to be in this film, because it’s such a hard subject. It’s just a movie. I’m not going to traumatise a kid for a movie. So I wanted to make sure she felt safe, that her mom felt comfortable. 

Her mom was amazing. She became everyone’s mom on set. Her name’s Cookie. Cookie was like, “You know what, not only does Lake know about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, we lost someone in our community who was murdered, and Lake knows about her. So Lake doesn’t come in fully green about the subject. She comes with her own baggage and knowledge even though she’s only nine. And she wants to be part of this process. Don’t hold anything back from her. She’s mature enough to understand what’s going on. And if you’re not sure if something should be said in front of her, then just look at me. I’ll be here.”

And sure enough, when I wasn’t sure, I’d look at her mom, or she’d give me a little nod or not. It was good to have her mom there because it helped with the whole process. A lot of the rehearsal was just making sure everyone understood the subtext.

Even though we did auditions for Susan, I almost feel like I knew it would be her when I was writing it. As soon as she sent in her audition tape, I was like (gasps), “Oh my god, it’s her! Oh my God, it’s alway been her.” I knew who Carmen Moore was, so I was like, OK, maybe subconsciously, I kind of knew I wanted it to be Carmen Moore.

Sonia Boileau (right) directs Lake Delisle (right) on the set of Rustic Oracle.
Sonia Boileau (right) directs Lake Delisle (right) on the set of Rustic Oracle.

7R: Aside from having her mother there, did you use other different techniques to direct Lake?

Sonia Boileau: Oh yeah, and I learned that the hard way. The first few days, and in rehearsal, but particularly, on set, I was almost talking to Lake the same way I was to Carmen, and that was so off. Even though she is very mature for her age, she’s still a kid! Sometimes, when you want to get a specific reaction out of a kid, you have to bring it back down to her knowledge of emotions. 

In some moments, when I realised it was too complex, I was diving into the character and story too much, I was like, you know, I have to go for something she can relate to. There were scenes where I would just say, “OK, picture your mom saying you can have your favourite dessert, and then, at the last minute, when she says you’re supposed to have that dessert, she decides you’re not getting it!” And she goes, “What?!” She got super insulted. And I’m like, “That’s it! That’s the face I need it!” And she’s like, “Oh!” And she looks at her mom and goes, “You wouldn’t do that?!” She was so in the moment.

But in some of the key moments, like the scene where she runs out of the motel screaming for Heather, and she’s crying, she bawled her eyes out for that scene. Those were real tears, and she did seven takes in a row, and I was like, holy cow. First of all, I felt terrible for making a kid cry. I was crying because I was like, oh my God, I’m making a child cry. This is so wrong. But her mom was like, “No don’t stop, it’s fine, it’s fine!” When I asked her afterwards what fuelled that, she [Lake] said, “I just imagined what I’d feel if my brother went missing.” For those moments, she dove into the real feeling that came with the setting of the film. But in other moments, we went completely off track and talked about candy. 

7R: What do you think Ivy understands in Rustic Oracle? How much do you think she understands about what’s going on with her mother?

Sonia Boileau: We discussed that at different moments in the scenes. In the moment, there’s not much she actually does understand, but because the movie is a collection of memories of that summer, the way it’s told, it’s almost as if adult Ivy is connecting a lot of the dots. In the moment, she’s kind of a passenger. She doesn’t grasp those hints.

7R: Does that mean you’re directing her as if she doesn’t know, but you’re composing the scene to give us the information that older Ivy has?

Sonia Boileau: Exactly that. Like when she draws the tattoo [that she saw on the boy that Heather was last seen with, and that Ivy later spots on a bouncer in a bar.]. Once it’s revealed, she’s like, “Oh I sort of get it [the connection between the two men because of their shared tattoo] but not really.” But in the moment, she’s not got the light bulb thinking of, “Oh my god, this tattoo must mean something!” It’s just that she saw a tattoo. But older Ivy is processing it. We, as an audience, are witnessing Ivy’s memories.

7R: Is that part of why you wanted to have the story of Rustic Oracle be an older person looking back?

Sonia Boileau: I think it came after. That notion was more in the treatment of it. Now that I know I want this to be a memory, how do I present those memories? That’s also why I wanted some moments to not really matter to the main storyline, but for some reason, as adults, some memories are more vivid even though they don’t really serve the main moment. That’s where all the smaller things come into play, like playing tic tac toe with her mom, and even the water scene. There’s another comment there, of course, of her drinking water from the tap [because so many Indigenous people in Canada are without clean drinking water], but why is that memory more vivid than any other one?

A steadicam shot in Rustic Oracle directed by Sonia Boileau
A steadicam shot in Rustic Oracle directed by Sonia Boileau

7R: How did you work with your cinematographer, Patrick Kaplin, to create the aesthetic of Rustic Oracle?

Sonia Boileau: I’ve been working with Pat for many years now. It was easy to communicate the world that I wanted to see. I make a lot of weird sounds when I direct. Sometimes, I’m looking for my words, but what comes out is just sounds or reactions. But he knows them now. So sometimes, when I go (sharp intake of breathe) he’s like, “Oh it’s too blue, right?” I’ll be like, “Yeah, it’s too blue, how did you…?”

That was one of the reasons why I wanted to shoot this film with him. There was such a huge step between my first film and this one in terms of size, budget, message, everything. I wanted to keep at least a couple of elements I was already comfortable with. That being said, we are so close that sometimes, it didn’t always serve the scene. We were a bit too comfortable with each other that, I think, for the crew, it got weird. I think for my next film I would like to work with someone else just to figure out what it’s like to work with someone else. 

With Pat, we really wanted to create a sense of nostalgia in the colours and textures. We wanted it to be very creamy, very warm. But we also wanted the colours to pop: the green of the trees, the textures, basically, to create that feeling of ‘80s film. 

We knew that Lake, as a kid, couldn’t always be on, and, sometimes, [kids will] do something spontaneous that is magical, and you wan’t to capture that. So we made sure that the camera was almost always ready to shoot if needed, even if the setting or camera wasn’t perfect. The camera was fairly small and light, and Pat was able to quickly handheld grab it and follow whatever Ivy was giving us. In some instances, I think that worked beautifully. There’s a lot of little moments that were quite spontaneous. 

I also like steadicam a lot. I feel like it fuels that notion of oracle: it’s dreamy and nostalgic, and feels like a floaty memory. There’s steadicam mostly for the stuff that Ivy controls. We established from the get go that we have two types of shots: everything where Ivy was in control, the environment she controls, her home and room, these bubbles where she feels she’s comfortable, those were all handheld or steadicam because we can move around like Ivy moves around. When she’s stuck in more of a passenger situation, in an environment that’s not her environment, that she can’t control, those were all on sticks. Those were more like your typical studio framing, when she’s at a police station or the missing children’s network. Because she’s not master of her environment in those moments, we wanted to box her in.

Lake Delisle in front of the camera in a classroom on the set of Rustic Oracle
Lake Delisle in front of the camera in a classroom on the set of Rustic Oracle

7R: When you’re thinking about how to parse out information of what Ivy knows and what only we know, is that something that’s happening more on the set, or is it more of an editing concern?

Sonia Boileau: It’s a bit of both. Depending on a scene, sometimes, it was more in an edit, and oftentimes, I would communicate it to them, but in the edit, you use that. For example, when she’s in the room at the friendship centre and her mom is talking to Karen for the first time, and [Ivy is] playing on the etch-a-sketch, once in a while, she looks up. But in the edit, we placed the looking up at very particular moments in the conversation. So, as an audience, we’re like, “Oh she heard that.” I guess, in those instances, it’s more of an edit thing, but to be able to edit that I still need those shots.

7R: I’m wondering a bit about the nightmare scenes that occur throughout Rustic Oracle. How did you think about how those would look and how they would evolve throughout Rustic Oracle?

Sonia Boileau: Now, when I watch the film, I don’t like those scenes anymore. It’s weird! I still think they’re important, because they reveal the family’s backstory and why the dad’s not there anymore, and also Heather’s own insecurities and trauma that probably led to her being more vulnerable to the people that took her. All that was needed. But now when I look at it, I feel like the treatment is so different from the rest of the film that it’s a little jarring. I guess all filmmakers feel that.

7R: I didn’t find that!

Sonia Boileau: Oh thank you! I think, as filmmakers, we always tend to be hard on our projects. 

Those scenes actually also refer to the title, because is it a memory, a dream? Is it an oracle, as in she’s first seeing the future or something that’s happening that she didn’t see? They turn out to be a memory that’s intertwined with what she’s living.

Ivy (Lake Delisle) and Heather (McKenzie Deer Robinson) hold dandelions in Rustic Oracle directed by Sonia Boileau
Ivy (Lake Delisle) and Heather (McKenzie Deer Robinson) hold dandelions in Rustic Oracle directed by Sonia Boileau

7R: How did you come up with the film’s title, Rustic Oracle?

Sonia Boileau: Well, there’s that. And actually “rustic oracle” was a literary, poetic term for a dandelion. There’s a metaphor with the dandelion or blowing your childhood memories to the wind and making a wish. 

There’s also a wider metaphor of the dandelion, which is a super powerful flower. It holds so much medicine. You can cure diseases with it. It’s edible. It tells time; farmers used to use it to tell time because it has different cycles during the day. It has the strongest roots; it can grow anywhere. And yet we, as a society, decided to refer to it as a bad weed that we need to get rid of. 

There’s something there in the difference between what something truly is and the value of it, versus how society perceives it. I’m not saying I’m directly comparing Indigenous women to dandelions. But there’s something in there where, when society decides to view something a certain way, no matter how powerful it is, it becomes obsolete when nobody else can see its value.

7R: Where did you shoot Rustic Oracle, and how did you choose those locations?

Sonia Boileau: I shot it in my community, and I was very happy to! Kanesatake is a small Mohawk community about 45 minutes north of Montreal, right beside Oka. Ever since my very first project, I’ve shot a lot in my community. My first few documentaries were focused on my community, and my process is a lot about me exploring my own identity and lack of confidence. So I shot a lot in my community with elders and people. 

I’m always calling for favours about shooting in certain locations. For once, I was able to bring a production home, a real production, and hire people and pay for spaces, rent spaces. It was really cool to be able to pay it forward. They’ve been supporting me for years, so here’s a shitload of money, and I’m going to hire 100 people! The craft is going to be local, and as much as possible, the set dec and the props will be local. The extras will all be local people. That was amazing. It was very cool to have so many community members be a part of it. It felt like they were with me telling this story. It was a really comforting blanket. 

Funny story, when I first sat with council and told them I was going to do a film, I brought my line producer and my producer, and they were like, “Yeah, Sonia, of course. You know we’ll do whatever you need. We’re so happy you’re living out your dream!” And I was like, “Yeah, but this one’s bigger!” And they’re like, “Yeah, whatever you need.” So my line producer started meeting with people from council more specifically, and I wasn’t there, and she was like, “OK we’ll need this. We’ll need this much space. We’ll need to park our trailers…” And they were like, “Oh it’s like a real movie?!”

And they were like, “OK, for this, you’ll need to speak with Leona, and for that, you’ll need to speak with Leona, and that, you’ll need to speak with Leona.” And she was like, “OK… can someone introduce me to this Leona?” And they were like, “You haven’t met her yet?” And my line producer was like, “No…” And they were like, “Well that’s Sonia’s mom!” My mom is director of finance on council, so she manages all the money. That night, my mom called me up like, “Oh my God, I feel like I’m a producer on one of your films!” It was very cool to have my mom be a part of it, and for her name to be in the credits.

7R: That must have made such a big difference, that you know everyone, and they were happy to have you shoot there, too.

Sonia Boileau: It has its pros and cons though. On the con side, sometimes, that whole aspect of knowing everyone takes some of my time away that was meant to be spent elsewhere. But I can’t say no. You can’t just abruptly cut off a conversation with someone in your community because you’re supposed to be shooting. I shouldn’t have to micro-manage, but because everyone knew me, they came directly to me to ask questions, and I felt a sense of responsibility to deal with it. A couple of times, my first AD was like, “Step away. Someone else will handle it.” But I didn’t want to seem like I didn’t care.

7R: I was going to ask you about how you approached involving Indigenous people in the project. How did that affect the core team you picked beyond the people from the community you employed?

Sonia Boileau: I definitely wanted as many Indigenous women in the crew as possible. And I wanted Indigenous women in positions of decisions, being part of the creative. In some departments, that was quite hard to find, because in all honesty, there’s not that many Indigenous women in grip, electric, camera department, all that. There’s still not enough women period. That kind of sucked, and I’m hoping it will change before my next project. 

I had Indigenous women as my production designer, at the head of my hair and makeup team, an Indigenous woman costume designer. I had really amazing, powerful women at the head of several departments, and a lot of Indigenous women as community liaisons and on the production side to help my line producer, who wasn’t Indigenous. Even for her, she wanted to make sure she was respectful of everything. 

We actually had someone from a family of a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman on the production team. It was sometimes hard because I know that some scenes were hard for her. There’s one scene, in particular, which I always have a little gasp when I see it. In the search party scene, the first two ladies you see, holding the missing fliers, are two family members of a woman who died in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Her family has always struggled with that, and they’re still healing from that trauma. For them to be part of that scene, just talking about it, gets to me. I felt very privileged having them tell this story with me, but I also felt such a sense of responsibility, and great admiration for them. That was really powerful.

7R: Indigenous filmmakers often talk about how film is an inherently colonialist medium, and one of the challenges when making your work is how do you decolonise film?. I feel like you’ve answered some of that for sure, but I wanted to see if there was anything else on your mind.

Sonia Boileau: It’s basically what we just talked about. I think that giving power to those people to tell the story automatically changes what’s on screen and helps decolonise. For so long now, we’ve seen Indigenous characters on screen serving another voice, and you can feel that. For me, building strong characters is key to Indigenous cinema. It’s not just the theme and message. If you’re building strong characters, people might see other things than the one-dimensional, stereotypical Indigenous person.

7R: I imagine one of the challenges in depicting the Susan character is she’s struggling with a lot of things, so how do you balance the line of portraying that while not going so far that the audience just dismisses her as a bad mother.

Sonia Boileau: That’s such a good question because one of my first drafts, everyone who read it was like, “Yeah, but we hate Susan. We hate her.” I was like, “Crap, OK.” So I was trying to tone it down but still stay true to how I saw the character. I hope we gave just enough for her to not feel like the villain, to have her still be somewhat relatable and feel for her. 

There’s some moments that, for me, when we were editing I was like, “You could take that out, but no, no, no.” Like when she’s playing tic tac toe, and she actually does play and offers a little smile. Those little moments are so important because right after, she snaps, and she’s in her head. If we only had all those [harsh] moments and didn’t splash in a little love here and there, we wouldn’t like her so much.

7R: By filtering the story through Ivy’s perspective, did that give you licence to make Susan less likeable because Ivy doesn’t understand her, or was it the other way around?

Sonia Boileau: I think it’s almost the other way around, because as a kid, yes, she’d remember the hard times, but at the same time, you would hang on to the beautiful moments, even if they’re small. Like, why does she remember playing tic tac toe in the restaurant? It’s probably because she remembers her mom winning and smiling and finding it cute before she snapped. 

7R: How did you think about the target audience for Rustic Oracle?

Sonia Boileau: I think first and foremost, I thought of a non-Indigenous audience, because they’re the ones I needed to create a bridge with to reach them with this subject. But I also knew, for sure, that because this is an Indigenous film, and we’re talking about Missing and Murdered Indigneous Women, that automatically would capture the interest of an Indigenous audience. 

I was really careful about how I portrayed any form of violence, because I didn’t want to retraumatise anyone in the Indigenous audience. I thought of that in a lot of moments when we could have taken it in another direction. There’s a way to convey pain and trauma without showing it, and it still passes. I had the Indigenous audience in mind for that aspect, but for the rest, I was opening it up to a non-Indigenous audience. I could foresee the non-Indigenous reaction. 

What I didn’t think of, and is so naive of me for not thinking of it, was the wound it would open for some families. The first few screenings we did were in Vancouver, at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Everyone was crazy crying, and me, stupid me, I didn’t sit through the film; I was too nervous. I was so nervous and giddy and happy that I walked to the front with this huge smile, and I turned, and everyone was in tears. I was not prepared for that wave of emotion. I was not prepared for people opening up and sharing their trauma and their lost loved ones. 

I went to bed that night, and the three or four screenings after, so emotionally tired. Obviously, I let those people share, and I tried to answer as best I could and give the love back. But at the same time, I’m not a social worker, and I’m not equipped to do that. So I felt like I was just opening up these wounds without providing anything afterwards, like support. I kept thinking, “We can’t do this. We can’t keep showing the film for an Indigenous audience and not provide some sort of help.” 

So my distributor and producer sat down. In our distribution plan, one of the phases after the festivals and theatres was to actually go to communities and show it to communities. A lot of communities not close to urban centres don’t have theatres. They can’t access films, which sucks. So instead of just throwing it on VOD and saying, “Just watch it yourselves,” we still wanted to say, “Let’s come together and make an event out of it.”

7R: Especially if it’s going to lead to a lot of people with open wounds who are then stuck on their own.

Sonia Boileau: Exactly! So we were already planning a community tour, but then we added social workers to our team. If we’re going to do community screenings, we’d have people there to help them heal as opposed to just hurt.

7R: That’s amazing. What was your experience with that? 

Sonia Boileau: We haven’t done that yet because of the stupid pandemic! Phase three has not yet happened! That’s on hold. The film [is now] available On Demand, because we have contractual obligations, but even then, as soon as the world goes back to normal, we still want to have events in communities and provide support.

7R: What are you working on now?

Sonia Boileau: My partner slash husband slash producer is shooting a feature right now, so right now, in the next two weeks, I’m holding up all the balls he usually juggles. We own a production company together, but I’m not a producer; I’m on the content creation side of things, and he’s a producer producer. He manages everything, but he’s also a filmmaker, and he’s focusing on making his first feature. In the meantime, I’m focusing on juggling the rest, and we have three kids, so doing a lot of that. But I just finished writing my first drama series. We got confirmation that funding was accepted, and we’re going into production, knock on wood, in the spring.

7R: Is it in English? Or French?

Sonia Boileau: It’s in French. I’m not allowed to talk about it because the broadcasters want to make a big thing when we start shooting, but I am allowed to say that it’s based on residential schools in Quebec. So it’s another hard subject, and it was very hard to write. I cried a lot, and honestly, after this project, which will probably take the next two years of my life, if I do keep going in film, and I’m not even sure if I want to, I think I’m going to write a rom-com. I need something light and fluffy. You can still do a smart rom-com. But something a little lighter that we can laugh at. I’m not going to feel like it’s ripping out my guts when I’m writing and directing it.

Rustic Oracle is now available on Vimeo On Demand worldwide.

Discover more great Canadian Indigenous films

The last year was one of the best for Canadian cinema in history. Discover these great films through conversations with the filmmakers, guided by the Seventh Row editors in our inaugural annual book, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.

Get your copy now!

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Joshua Demers on his Canadian political satire, Québexit

Québexit director and co-writer Joshua Demers on shooting a film in three languages with 20 actors in 12 days, and what the film reveals about Canada.

A still from Quebexit next to a headshot of director Joshua Demers. The image is accompanied by text that reads: 'Interview'.
Joshua Demers on his Canadian political satire, Québexit.

Canadian satire on film is still very much in its infancy, with Philippe Falardeau’s brilliant 2015 film, My Internship in Canada, essentially hailing its birth. With Joshua Demers’s Québexit, there’s now another entry in this nascent genre, and it’s an exciting, and very funny, one. Both My Internship and Québexit share an interest in the culture clash between anglophones, Québécois Francophones, and Indigenous people. 

But Demers’s film takes the important next step of actually involving all three groups in the screenwriting process: he co-wrote the film with bilingual Québécois francophone actor Xavier Yuvens and Cree actress-director-writer Gail Maurice (recently seen on CBC’s Trickster as Georgina). The collaborative process really pays off because you feel like you’re getting an insider perspective on each of the characters, which ensures all of them are three-dimensional and the humour feels very, very specific. It also allows the film to be trilingual — in English, French, and Cree — which adds another level of authenticity and nuance.

When Québexit begins, Quebec has had another referendum to separate from Canada, only this time, the leave vote won by 51%, rather than the opposite. Quebec members of the Canadian military have immediately decided to take action: covering the Canadian flags on their uniforms, setting up checkpoints at the provincial borders, all while wondering why they haven’t seen their latest paycheck from the Canadian government. Their former (anglophone) colleagues in the Canadian army arrive on the scene to try to keep them in check; at first, the Quebec army’s primary concern seems to be to get people to tweet with the hashtag “#Québexit”. 

Set entirely over a small patch of land at the Quebec-New Brunswick border, Québexit is a biting satire about the pettiness of French-English relations on land that they both stole from Indigenous people. The film doesn’t take sides so much as celebrate, or at least depict, the cultural and linguistic differences in Canada, the political issues these cause, and the bureaucratic silliness and chaos that it causes. It’s very funny and whip-smart, with Yuvens and Maurice, who also star, as particular standouts.

Québexit had its world premiere at Sudbury’s Cinefest, and it will screen at Cinefranco next week, and Whistler Film Festival in December. I caught up with director and co-writer Demers by phone to discuss shooting a film in three languages with 20 actors in 12 days, and what the film reveals about Canada.

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Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of Québexit?

Joshua Demers: I was born in Alberta. My father is a Québécois Francophone. My mother is an Anglophone from Ontario. So growing up, we didn’t really speak French at home, because later on, I found out my father felt ostracised from both communities. In the military, the English treated him like he was French and called him a frog, and the French treated him like a traitor and called him a sellout. 

We grew up assimilated. I was the only one of my brothers who was really bothered by that because it felt like there was a piece missing. I figured I could call myself Canadian because that includes all those components: Ontario, Alberta, Quebec, English, French. So the idea of Quebec sovereignty was always kind of a counterpoint to that. It was always something that scared me growing up, because I was a bit patriotic. I became obsessed with Quebec sovereignty. In the process of researching it and also relearning French, you realise that everyone has their reasons. That was the genesis of the framework of the story. 

The next step was realising [that if] I’m trying to make a political comedy about Canada, I can’t really tell it by myself, because I don’t have the authority to do so. Then, it was a process of working with a co-writer, Xavier Yuvens, who I live with. He was a bit of a sovereignist, so we would have debates, and that informed the Quebec sovereignist storyline. He had acted in a short film of Gail’s [Maurice], so that’s how we came across Gail. She created the character of Meetos, which really informed the Indigenous storyline. 

As much as we want to tell a story about Canada, all the communities in Canada are far more complex than just us, so we had to make it even more specific. When we cast it, we told the cast members they had creative sovereignty over their characters, because that’s the only way to make sure it’s not a caricature. The job becomes somewhat of a composer making sure all the instruments are telling a story, but they have to be autonomous, and they have to be able to veto things. Otherwise, you’re diminishing the complexity of what exists. There was this personal component of why we pushed the boulder down the hill, but in order to tell the story I wanted to tell, I had to give up control so it was no longer just my story.

7R: What did that mean for casting? Were you specifically looking for people who could help with that collaborative process?

Joshua Demers: Casting was the most arduous, in the sense that we put the most effort into it. My view is, when you are producing or directing a project, casting your actors and also your crew is essential. Those are the people you’re going to rely on. 

Our DP [Elisa Iannacone], is a conflict photographer who’s been in war zones. She’s from Mexico, with a Canadian-British father and a Mexican mother; that informs the filmic approach of a docu-esque vibe, one, because it seems funny, and two, because I love the idea of a conflict reporter trying to do a civil war film on Canada. 

Working with Xavier and Gail, who are very connected actors in the Toronto film community, I was looking at casting, and then I talked to them and got advice. Especially with Gail, we were very aware of Nicole [Joy-Fraser] who plays Susan [the sister of Gail’s character in the film]. Xavier knows a lot of Francophone actors in Toronto so he introduced me to Alison [Louder who plays 2Lt. Sauvé running the Canadian army]. It was picking people who could bring something unique to it and then giving them as much space as possible.

Two soldiers face off, with another soldier mediating between them.
A still from Québexit.

7R: What was the process for working with the cast? Did you rehearse? Did you shift the script when they came on board?

Joshua Demers: We’re a low-budget Canadian film, so we could afford a four-hour rehearsal or table read, which was really stretching our budget, but I was adamant that we needed to at least have something. We had people in a room, and we chatted. You get different people from different points of view in the same room, some magical things happen, and then you incorporate that into the script. 

There were some times we went off book. There are parts of the film that are more improvised than we’ll ever let on. I’m not talking about just funny moments, but serious dramatic moments where we realised on the day that we didn’t know what the scene was about, and then we figured it out.

Probably one of the best examples are two scenes that are very much Gail’s: the scene at night when they go back to the Québécois blockade and things kind of erupt. In the script, originally, it was going for humour, and this is where settler filmmakers should steer clear as much as possible from [imposing themselves on Indigenous characters]. I didn’t clue in, at the time, that soldiers talking to two Indigenous women at night, how that read. It just went over my head. But we had two very brave actors who just follow what that is [really like]. You wouldn’t have had that if you were like, “No it has to be the script.” 

The other thing was at the end, when you have this beautiful moment when you think the movie’s going to resolve. Someone suggested that we should have a unity moment, and Gail was like, “Fuck that.” And I’m like, “That’s the scene!” Every time I was steering towards too pro-Canada, she [Gail] would call me out. 

I guess you can accuse the film of trying to be a bit of something for everyone, but for me, that’s kind of what the country is. You have to pile these different perspectives, so the audience can look at it from different perspectives. They can look at it and go, “Isn’t Canada a wonderful place where we can all work together?” Or they can look at it and simply see that Quebec should separate, and everyone should be united as friends but separate. Or you can look at this and say, “Reconciliation is truly dead, because no matter what, this always happens.” Or you can look at this and say, “Wow I did not know Canada has all these demons and divisions because it presents itself to the world as such a happy-go-lucky place.” So it allows people to take what they want from it, which I think is the only way to make a film that touches on Canada as an entity.

7R: In the opening of Québexit, you see the first people to go past the checkpoint are the two Indigenous women, Meetos and Susan, and they’re caught between these two ridiculous checkpoints from Quebec and Canada. It’s this wonderful little metaphor for what Canada is. I was wondering how that ended up as the starting point for the film?

Joshua Demers: A thing I like about collaboration is you forget where it comes from and whose idea it was. There’s a lot of characters in this, so early on, we were just trying to cut things down. I think, in the original draft, there were 40 [characters], which is too much, even from a creative perspective, even if you had all the money in the world. We were carving down the piece to the essentials. You also have to introduce everyone quite quickly. 

The scene with Meetos and Susan, the film can’t speak for more than what it is, and as much as I find it really important and love talking about it, it’s important to put it in context. This film does not answer questions or make everything OK; it’s not a salve. We were conscious of characters representing different ideas, but they’re characters. They’re just one person; they can’t be totally representing ideas. 

Gail Maurice as Meetos sitting back in a chair.
Gail Maurice as Meetos in Québexit.

Gail and Nicole really made that relationship [between their characters]. It was also Gail’s leadership as a creator. Nicole was saying that really helped anchor it: you have that strong older sister figure, and they’re just sisters. 

Then, you have the soldier, Hassan, who speaks to the more idealistic sovereigntist; you have another soldier who represents the more old-fashioned version of sovereignty, which is like, he’s into it but it’s a lot of work; and then the bilingual… but they’re all people. They’re just three soldiers who are stuck in the middle of a shitty assignment, and they’re just griping. 

And then you have the Canadian soldiers, and it’s a similar thing: on one hand, they speak about political points of view, but they’re just people. We made a film about 20 people in a crazy situation at the intersection of geography, identity, and language. The only way for there to be any hope in the idea of Canada, and I don’t mean as a country, is by loving the people more than the flag. That’s why I realised, in doing this story, you lose the idealism and realise these are just people. They speak for themselves and they can’t speak for all these big things. Even though they hint at it.

7R: I love that the film is in three languages, and that language is a battleground. Hassan refuses to speak English to the Cree sisters when they’re coming into Quebec, but then he refuses to speak French to the Canadians because he says they don’t know how to speak French.

Joshua Demers: When you’re trying to learn any language, it’s a very vulnerable thing to try to speak it, because you’re like a child. When someone switches back to the language they think you speak more fluently, in this case, someone switching from French to English, you do feel kind of called out. It’s like they think, “No, that’s not for you; we’ll be more comfortable in English.” 

One of my favourite Canadian political stories is Jacques Parizeau in ‘94, right when he became the Quebec Premier, everyone knew the referendum was coming, and he was having a meeting with Bob Rae, who was the Ontario Premier at the time. Bob Rae knew French fluently enough to speak it in a meeting. And Bob Rae starts speaking to Jacques Parizeau in French. And Parizeau says, “Oh, my friend, I think we’d be more comfortable in English.” It’s a power move. I can exist in your world, but you can’t exist in mine.

7R: There’s also that discussion of Cree and whether or not you can speak Cree and how that can be used, as well.

Joshua Demers: It was important to show language as a part of identity. With Meetos and Susan, you have a slight age difference. One of the things that was told to me was, if you’re above 40 on a reservation, often, you speak your Indigenous language fluently, and if you’re below 40, often, that’s not the case. You ask, “Why?,” and then people are like, “Residential schools.” The violence of that concept is you are severing people from the language that feels like home. 

Susan can understand it [Cree] more than she can speak it, and [her older sister], Meetos, only speaks to her in Cree to keep it alive for her. As much as we’re aware of this, it becomes more powerful when it’s on the level of characters. These are two sisters, and one’s trying to keep the language alive for the other one. The other has to choose to maintain it. 

I think there are similarities with the English and the French.  I’m not a Native Cree speaker so I can’t speak for it, but one of the reasons it was great working with Gail, who’s a fluent Cree speaker, when we were talking about translating it, she said, “You realise every language has a sense of humour.” I didn’t know that. I thought I could at least understand that sense of humour in French, but I realised the limits of my French [when] directing this [film], to a degree. 

7R: Québexit all takes place in this one patch of land, and you’re working with people who are also in the theatre community. Did theatre influence your direction? 

Joshua Demers: A friend of mine said we should make a play of it because we only have one location. Well, we only had one location because we didn’t have money, not because we wanted it to be one location! We very much were like, “Let’s go for the bone marrow of what’s funny or truthful, as fast as possible,” because we had 12 days to shoot. You trust your actors and DP, and her second camera operator, because we had two cameras. 

We said, “OK, let’s stage this in a way where we can shoot this quickly, but give ourselves a lot of takes,” because we wanted the actors to explore. One of them said it felt like we were always rehearsing, and we just shot the rehearsal. It allowed us to find the depth in what we wanted with the limited time and resources we had.

7R: How did you approach location scouting? 

Joshua Demers: We needed a road within the Toronto Union Zone; otherwise, we would have to pay travel time,which we couldn’t afford. It had to be isolated enough that it would feel like it could be a tiny road in New Brunswick and Quebec. We found a tiny road in Pickering. It was a process of elimination. 

We literally went on Google Maps and looked for different roads. You have to work backwards and say, “OK, we only have one location, so one location is the best creative decision we could make. Let’s make it work.”

7R: You mentioned your Director of Photography Elisa Iannacone is a conflict photographer. What was your process for working with her to develop the film’s aesthetic?

Joshua Demers: She was in a bunch of different countries when we were prepping, so we Zoomed and Skyped a bunch before. She came a week before. At one point, we were debating, “Should we try to make it more minimalistic? Should we do something crazy like shoot it on new tiny cameras?” But very quickly, we were like, Let’s do Blackmagic; let’s use two cameras because it’s the only way to get all this footage in such a short amount of time. We have to shoot quickly, but we want it to be good. Instead of doing something very elaborate and precise with blocking, we have to give the actors freedom, so therefore, it’s going to be fluid, docu-drama-esque. 

At the same time, when we’re blocking, we need to make sure it’s precise enough that we can cover everything quickly, because we don’t have a ton of time. Elisa Iannacone, the DoP, is one of the most resourceful people you’ll ever meet. She also does art photography. She did a very powerful exhibit on sexual assault where she took a creative approach to working with survivors, including herself as one, and finding colourful art therapy photos that symbolise people’s experience of processing the experience. She did these all over the world with no resources. She’d have someone in a cage with lions, and you ask, “How did you do that!?” And she’s like, “Oh I went to Africa and found lions.” Someone like that working on your film will find ways to get things done!

Indigenous protestors film an event with a phone camera.
A still from Québexit.

7R: How did you think about the comedy in Québexit? Were you thinking about certain comedic traditions when you were writing?

Joshua Demers: If it made someone laugh we went with it. A couple examples: the actor who plays Angus (Daniel Gravelle), is just a comedic gem. We quickly realised that. When we had our prep meeting, for whatever reason, I asked, “Do you rap?” And he said, “Yeah, I do, actually.” Because for whatever reason I felt like Angus would rap, and I felt like that was important because I think there’s a danger of Angus becoming pure comic relief and a goofball. But every character is a person, so how do you make Angus a human? Well, he’s trying to actualise the best version of himself. That turned into, he’s like your little brother: you love him, but he does dumb things sometimes. That doesn’t mean he’s not smart and capable. Daniel really brought that human element to it. We realised he had the gift of comedic timing, and we gave him more freedom to do that. 

Another great moment is with Andrew Martin, Keenan Grom, and Samantha Brown, who play the land defenders. Even for characters like those who weren’t in the film as much, it was very important to give them a moment, because you want to fill the world out so it feels like a rich place of people. One of the things that always annoyed me is people just hire background and put them in the background; they feel like they’re standing there. We were fortunate to get really talented actors who came out and played with us for a day or so. We said, “We want to find something to make it clear that they’re people,” and Keenan pitched something to me: “What if I come in all this gear, because he’s a young man whose image of this is the Oka Crisis, so he wants to dress accordingly, and then [the character of] Bogdan’s like, ‘You should take that off, just stop.’” That made Andrew laugh, so then we just did it! 

7R: You mentioned your father had been in the military, and I’m wondering if that informed how you were depicting these two sides of the military?

Joshua Demers: I really didn’t want it to come across as disrespectful of the military. I come from a military family. It’s a powerful thing when someone wants to do that for their fellow citizens. The way to do that was just depicting it as realistically as possible. If you talk to anyone in the military, it’s just like any other job. There’s always what they feel is incompetent leadership from the top. There’s always dumb rules. They feel like they’ve been sent to do something with not enough equipment. 

We were speaking with members of my family in the military. We tried to capture the reality of what would happen. The radios break down, soldiers get bored and do dumb things. If you depict it as realistically as possible, it comes across as respectful. You’re not denigrating the military in any way; you’re denigrating the politicians who use the military as props. They’re all for the military until it comes to paying veterans benefits.

A group of soldiers sit hunched together, conspiring.
A still from Québexit.

7R: What was that process of editing Québexit yourself like? You must have been working with a lot of material.

Joshua Demers: I only edited it because we didn’t have money to hire an editor. I wouldn’t recommend it for directors; I think it’s good to have an extra pair of eyes. What you do to protect yourself is you take a bit more time, and you make sure you show it to a bunch of people who will challenge you. There was a lot of material. 

You see your sins as a director when you’re like, “Why am I watching five takes of this? I needed four or three.” Then you’re like, “Oh I should have gotten an extra take of that.” 

So I take that back: every director should edit half of the movie. Then, it sharpens what they need and don’t need, and then you bring in a professional third eye to polish it.

7R: Comedy can be made or broken in the edit.

Joshua Demers: Did you laugh? I hope we didn’t break it!

7R: I laughed a lot!

Joshua Demers: Good!

7R: Is that just trusting your own judgement? Or showing it to other people?

Joshua Demers: I think it’s a bit of both. You try to trust your judgement. You try to show new people, and show it to different people at different times. You show it to close collaborators early on, because they know what you tried to do. Then you show people who care about you, so they’re a bit more distant, and then you show it to your last tier of people, the people who are going to treat it like they’re watching any movie on Netflix. It’s a game of inches.

Québexit screens in Ontario at Cinefranco on November 25 for 62 hours. Tickets are available here. 

Québexit screens across Canada at Whistler Film Festival on December 6. Tickets are available here. 

You could be missing out on films like Québexit at film festivals near you.

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‘You can’t survive colonialism and not be epic’: Loretta Todd on Monkey Beach

Writer-director Loretta Todd discusses the 20 year journey to making Monkey Beach. Today is the last day Monkey Beach is streaming worldwide at the American Indian Film Festival, at a pay what you can rate.

A still from Monkey Beach next to a headshot of director Loretta Todd. The text 'Interview' is over the image.
‘You can’t survive colonialism and not be epic’: Loretta Todd on Monkey Beach.

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Loretta Sarah Todd has been making films for almost 30 years, but Monkey Beach marks her first narrative feature — one of two adaptations of Eden Robinson novels to be released this year. It’s took taken 20 years to get the film made in part because Todd insisted on shooting the film where the story is set, in the remote Kitimat, BC — not just because the land is so integral to Robinson’s story, but also so she could give back to the community. Her refusal to compromise on this pays dividends in the film, but it meant facing many funding roadblocks, which Todd is frank about. One can only hope that future Indigenous productions of this scale won’t face the same degree of challenges.

Monkey Beach tells the story of Lisa (Grace Dove), a young Haisla woman who gets visions of loved ones dying before it happens. Ever since she was a child (her child counterpart is played by Zoey Snow), she’s been plagued by one vision, in particular, of her younger brother, Jimmy (Joel Oulette, and the younger Oliver Tru Sison), who is also a high level competitive swimmer, drowning. Having watched so many loved ones die and been powerless to do anything about it, she left home in, Kitimat, for Vancouver to drink and party and try to forget. When the film begins, Lisa returns home after two years away, to rekindle her relationships with her family and friends — and talk to dead loved ones, another gift. When Jimmy goes missing on a fishing trip, she becomes obsessed with saving him, but what that ends up meaning shifts as the film progresses, and as Lisa comes to terms with her gifts and her grief. 

Peppered throughout the film are flashbacks to Lisa’s childhood, where we get to know her Uncle Mick (the amazing Adam Beach) and her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo (Tina Lameman), both of whom were incredibly influential on her identity as an Indigenous woman and her politics. Just like Robinson’s novel, Todd’s film treats theat past, present, and future as inherently intertwined, and the dead as always nearby, if invisible to most people. Robinson’s story of grief and loss and finding a way to make peace with it is what drew Todd to make the film and persevere through all these years. 

Three women stand together, smiling into the camera lens.
(From left) Writer-director Loretta Todd, lead actress Grace Dove, and author Eden Robinson.

Todd is Cree-Métis, and her filmmaking practice takes inspiration from the oral tradition, tying stories and words to sensory experiences. That’s evident in the filmmaking of Monkey Beach which is a visually sumptuous film made on a low budget, that will make you want to buy a ticket to BC as soon as it’s safe to do so. The way Todd visualises’s images of Lisa’s visions and flashbacks are visceral, and inherently tied to how you remember and think about the film. Although it’s ostensibly one young woman’s story, Monkey Beach introduces us to the whole community around her, and makes her emotional journey feel epic. As Todd noted, “I mean, you can’t have survived colonialism and not be epic. I try to convey that even when it’s still in naturalism.”

After the film’s roll-out across BC theatres and in much of Canada, I talked with Loretta Todd over Zoom about the challenges of getting the film made, the joys and hardships of shooting in Kitimat, and telling a story the Native way. This is an excerpt of our discussion; the full interview will be published in 2021 in our forthcoming ebook on Canadian cinema, The 2021 Canadian Cinema Yearbook. 

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Seventh Row (7R): Have you been getting feedback from audiences about the film feeling like a healing experience?

Loretta Todd: Oh yeah, it’s overwhelming actually. Just on our social media, it’s overwhelming. People have been going to see it two or three times. 

Films can’t replace oral tradition, that’s not the point of films. Oral tradition has its time-honoured history and purpose. But I can learn from the techniques oral tradition uses. 

When the First Nations House of Learning on the UBC was opened, they had an opening with all these very wealthy captains of industry, older white men, who stepped forward and donated lots of money, in the millions, to build that building. They were [being honoured at the opening], being given blankets and names in the formal way of the coastal people, because Dr. Jo-Ann Archibald [who co-founded the building] is from up the valley. 

They randomly selected people from the audience and called them up as that person got their name, and they [were told the] meaning of the name. They were told to remember everything that was said. When it was done, it was said, “All of you who were witnesses to this, you have to remember every word that was said. In 10, 20, or 100 years, when people gather to remember this, you have to come forward and share those words, or you have to trust them to your next generations to do the same.” They were using that tradition of the longhouse, oral tradition. I was thinking, “I’m sure glad they didn’t pick me, because how would I remember?” 

Then I thought, “Well, it was a beautiful day. It was sunny, a cloud went past the sun, a little kid went past, or a car horn, or a dog bark…” All these sensual experiences of that moment would help me return to that moment. That’s the genius of the oral tradition. It’s embedded, in song, dance, and ceremony, very rich sensual experiences in which the words are embedded.

In my filmmaking I’ve tried to do that, create these beautiful moments that use the technique of oral tradition. The oral tradition isn’t being replaced, but it’s being replicated in the experience of the film. As opposed to the literary devices of plot points and three acts being the things that drive the experience, for me, it’s the sensual experience of sound and visual combined. They create a feeling of safety so you can let emotions come out. 

I like the epicness of who we are. I don’t want us to be diminished by the screen, I want you to feel our epicness. I mean, you can’t have survived colonialism and not be epic. I try to convey that even when it’s still in naturalism. I admire people like Isaac Julien and Tracey Moffat who come from an installation practice. You can feel the epicness with which they place bodies in space, move bodies through space, and use space. I’m not coming from formal art practice like them, but I try to think about those things.

7R: I understand you wanted to shoot in Kitimat, and it really pays off. But I know there were a lot of challenges with that because it’s so remote, so shooting there is so expensive. What did you feel was the great benefit of shooting there?

Loretta Todd: If I’d had my way, I would have done it differently. I would have gone there and spent six months or a year, even before we started shooting, and maybe not needed some of the huge trucks we brought up from Vancouver. But on the other hand, it made it feel like a real film set. The actors were all professionals who have been on big film sets. They’re not divas, so they’d be happy in a van if that’s all we had, but it felt good to be able to at least have some of the trappings of a big film shoot, even on our modest budget. If I’d had time, I would have gone up with a smaller crew and found ways to create that environment without bringing big trucks up. 

On the other hand, people loved it! There was a film crew in town! We were spending money in the village, in Kitimat. Usually, it rains in September, but it didn’t rain, and we were expecting it to rain, so we all went up to the local Mark’s and bought rain gear and rain boots. Everybody spent so much money there! Same in the local stores in Kitimat. 

There was a whole issue of redistribution of wealth: if I’m going to benefit from this [film shoot], then the community should benefit from it. This story, it’s Eden Robinson’s story, from her novel, but really it flows from the ancestors, so it doesn’t belong to any of us; it belongs to the people and the land. It was really important to go there. 

I would go to people, and they’d say they were interested [in producing the film], but they usually stay within [smaller] budgets, and I’d go, “Well, if I did that I wouldn’t be able to film in Kitimat.” They’d go, “Why don’t you film somewhere else that wouldn’t be so expensive?” And I go, “Because then I wouldn’t feel like I was redistributing the wealth back to the village.” That was critical. That delayed the project over the years. 

The whole process happened so quickly [in the end]. The Indigenous Feature Film Fund at Telefilm has been growing and become responsive, so there was a chance. I applied and got it in late June, and all the pieces had to be put together to shoot that year. I had always planned to film in Kitimat in August, but with the paperwork not done yet, it just wasn’t going to happen. Interestingly, that August, there had been many fires in BC, so the air was thick with smoke even in Kitimat, and you couldn’t even see the mountains. But suddenly, in September, the wind came and blew all the smoke away. So in the month of September, which never happens, it was pretty much sunny the whole time, and quite warm. Because of that, we were able to be very productive and really show the beauty of the village and that place. 

It was a 20-day shoot. I wish I could have had more time. Some of the other films I hear about had 30-day shoots. I would have liked at least another 5 days to give the ease I needed. Some days, I could only do one or two takes on things. 

I think it [shooting in Kitimat] really enhanced the film. For one, I got to hire a lot of people from the community, so there was a good feeling of us being there. On my children’s series, I usually work with either 100% Indigenous crew, or about 75%, so if I could have, I would have had a whole Indigenous crew. I fought really hard to work with the people I had in the past, because it was a union shoot. Our people don’t necessarily go through the union route, even though they’re as experienced, capable, and knowledgeable. So there were some things that had to be worked out and some people I wanted to hire but couldn’t because the union was adamant. I brought as many people as I could. 

I emphasise diversity, so I work with diverse people, too. I was very lucky, Stirling Bancroft, who’s Japanese-Canadian, was the cinematographer. He has a good sense of who I am and a gentleness to him, and the people he works with have a gentleness to them. It was not your typical film crew. There was a kindness and a gentleness that pervaded the set. 

I was really adamant about hiring from the village. I always give a big shout out to the women in the village who worked in the locations department. I think most of them had other jobs, but they took leaves of absence so they could work on Monkey Beach. Locations [people] are there before everyone arrives and stay after everyone leaves. They worked the hardest and longest, and they mean so much to the film. 

There’s so much boat work in the film, and we were able to charter a lot of the fishing boats. The fisheries are down, so people aren’t able to make as much of a living from the fisheries as they used to. Those people were bringing knowledge of currents and how the ocean and tides are up there. They were necessary to keep the cast and crew safe when we were on the water.

7R: I saw the film, and I immediately went, “I want to be in BC right now!”

Loretta Todd: One of the reasons I was pushing to film there was because, in the past, I’d had this idealistic belief that we can transition from resource-based to more knowledge-based economies, and certainly. cultural industries are knowledge-based economies. I thought, “They make TV shows in Newfoundland, so why not places like Kitimat?” I had this idealistic idea that maybe Monkey Beach could be a catalyst. 

When I was trying to [raise] money [to shoot the film], I did this whole [presentation] on film-induced tourism: the investment in a film is triggered by the idea that it could bring tourism. Sometimes, it’s deliberate, like with Mamma Mia, the Greek government, or one of the provinces, put money into the film to encourage tourism to that area. Sometimes, there were beautiful places in a film where a wedding was held, and then that place was booked for five years after. Whale Rider were very smart, because before they even released the film, they took it to travel writers and did screenings with travel writers, so the travel writers were already writing about the village where it was filmed and New Zealand. By the time it opened, [the film] was already seeded with the idea of this place being unique. For five years after, that village got a lot of tourism. 

The issue is, are you prepared for that tourism? Do you have the facilities, resources, and means to react to that tourism? For a while, I tried to promote that as one of my business models, looking for investment for the film as a potential economic benefit to the community. 

I always wanted the land to be a character in the film. People say that all the time. It certainly is in the book. I had to find ways of filming it that’s not just the obvious ways of making beautiful imagery. I was influenced by the film Moonlight, where there’s almost a parallax softening of the background. That’s because of a certain type of lens. I was able to use that lens, and of course, Stirling just loved using that lens. Sometimes, like when Tabitha and Grace are in the parking lot outside the restaurant, you notice the background is almost alive. I wanted to get that feeling that the land is a witness to the events, to conversations, to people’s lives — this idea of the land as witness, as watching, and listening, and hearing all these happy and sad things that go on in human lives. 

In the Cree culture, we see ourselves as the weak ones, as kind of pathetic, and it’s the plants and animals that sustain us and take care of us because we are the ones who are the weakest. In Haisla tradition, it’s different, but there’s still this idea that they [nature] don’t really care about us, but at the same time, they do: they’re sentient and have consciousness. I wanted to give that feeling of the consciousness of the plant nation.

Lisa sits by a fire in Monkey Beach.
A still from Loretta Todd’s Monkey Beach.

7R: How did you think about when the audience should figure out that certain characters are dead? Were you worried about audiences who hadn’t read the book, about whether they would be able to differentiate?

Loretta Todd: That was a discussion with Stirling for sure: how do I represent ghosts? There was a bad review from a guy on IMDb who trashed how Monkey Beach represented ghosts and said there was no consistent way ghosts were represented. There are these western cinematic tropes around ghosts and horror. 

In Native culture, ghosts are everyday. Eden talked about this idea in an interview a few years ago. She called it double exposure: people who have the ability to see beyond the material. It’s not spectral things floating in space; it’s just over there. That’s how I’ve been taught. It’s even sadder when you lose somebody because we’re taught that they’re just over there. We’re told that we’re supposed to let them go so they can go on their journey. At the same time, when I lost my mother, my dear old friend who has since passed away himself, Leonard George, said, “You have to let her go,” but he also said, “She’s not that far away.” That’s always given me comfort when I feel grief. 

Maybe with more time and art direction, we might have been able to arrive at something more specific. There was just a little bit more pale makeup with Tabitha [who is a ghost]. I wanted to have more light on that character to suggest there was something ethereal about them. But in the end, I kept with this everyday thing. Other than when we first see Pooch, I’d had an idea of an effect on that character that didn’t quite work out, so I dialed it down to what it is now, that he’s in between two worlds.

7R: The flashbacks in the book and film are so important. How did you think about adapting them for the screen and what that means about how you’re depicting the past and the present?

Loretta Todd: They were all going to have a different look. The past, this idyllic-ness that Lisa’s always trying to relive or restore, that’s where she’s happiest. I wanted that to be very vivid and colourful, almost a candy-coated kind of look. A painterliness, but without the usual sepia that’s the past. Then the present day was going to be a more faded version of that. Everything was going to feel worn. 

There really wasn’t the time to do that art direction to that extent. I needed to have a clean crispness to everything. In Smoke Signals, the director did a whole thing where when they’re going from past to present, there’s something that links them. Someone’s running for the bus in the past, and then in the present, they’re on the bus. In earlier versions of the script, there were these very elaborate [transitions].

There were many versions of the script. I actually had a version that was mostly set on the boat with Lisa going to Monkey Beach and certain things took us to the past and present. But that script couldn’t seem to get traction from Telefilm. I just decided to make it more this idea that the past and present are fused. A lot of times, people will say, in Native culture, there’s no past, present, or future. They all co-exist. I was trying to give a sense of that. We move between the past and present.

7R: I’m wondering about the sound in the film, which you said you were thinking about as in the vein of oral tradition. I love that you can always hear the ocean in the background.

Loretta Todd: You can’t get away from the ocean in Kitimat. The sound is there all the time. Unfortunately, so is the sound of the LNG plant that’s across the water, that drone. Actually, that drone became part of our soundscape, too. There’s also a sound that comes through the trees because there’s always wind through the trees, so there’s many layers of sounds there. 

I worked with post-supervisor Matt Drake. He’s very talented and has worked with other Native filmmakers, so I chose him and felt good about it. We had a lot of very organic meetings where we would go through sounds. I would search the internet looking for sounds and other sound edits that inspired me. Some of it was written in the script. The writers were very clear on sounds in the script. It’s part of the storytelling because it’s what moves time and space. 

In the book, there’s a lot of voices. I couldn’t really bring that element in, because it was a bit of a Stephen King horror element of those voices going, “Give me blood, give me blood.” We did have that in earlier versions of the script, but when it got cut back, if it doesn’t have this whole context, so it would just look stupid. 

I still wanted to have the idea of voices. One of the best scores I’ve ever heard was in the film Arrival, which was the big influence on this. You can almost hear voices, but you don’t know what they’re saying, so the voices become like music, and they help you transcend time and space. Ultimately, that’s the point of the film, so that was really important to me. There were layers of sound [to suggest] other presences.

Lisa looks into the camera lens in Monkey Beach.
Grace Dove as Lisa in Loretta Todd’s Monkey Beach.

7R: You talked a lot about the merging of western influences and Native ideas about storytelling. When you’re making a film, who are you thinking about as your audience?

Loretta Todd: People always ask, who’s your audience, and I guess my audience is first and foremost the Indigenous community. But Indigenous people watch all kinds of films, too. Eden’s influenced by Stephen King. For the series Trickster, one of the guys who worked on Orphan Black was brought in. I’m a sci-fi nerd. 

In a [near] absence of Indigneous film, I used to watch as many as I could when I went to festivals, or if I could find a way to watch them. The Vancouver Film Festival used to, and still does, have a strong Asian component. So I’d watch a lot of Asian films. The Japanese ones, in particular, I used to watch and be really moved by, so I think that’s something that I always look for: different ways of experiencing time and space in cinema. 

I want everybody to have ways into the film. I want everybody to find something of themselves in the film. We all have families; we’ve all grieved and have lost. Monkey Beach really speaks to that. I try to respect the audience. But I knew people were going to say, “That’s not the book!” or some older, white audiences might not like when they say, “Fuck the oppressors!”

7R: That was one of my favourite scenes!

Loretta Todd: I know! Actually some of the biggest supporters of the film have been older white people who are lovers of literature. So some of them must be liking it. 

I do think [my audience is] the Indigenous community because, in the case of casting Grace [Dove], I was thinking of the young Indigenous girls who will want to be like her. 

I always say this film is very much in the context of colonisation, residential schools, genocide. That’s the time in which it’s situated, and it’s the time that has fractionated families and affected people’s abilities to be together. But at the same time, I think the character Lisa embodies that medicine; she carries a medicine. I think, 1,000 years ago, there was another Lisa who had that medicine, and had to carry it to her community and embrace it, and in 1,000 years’ time, there will be another Lisa again. To me, it was about Indigenous women embracing their medicine, medicine being within. 

I wanted every Indigenous woman who sees the film to feel that sense of embracing their medicine. In the same way, I wanted non-Indigenous people to see the film and go, “Wow, Indigenous women are powerful; they have medicine.” And also that they themselves can say, “Hey, we may not have that medicine, but we can have something healing in ourselves, too.” At the end of the film, when she [Lisa] stands up and she looks out, I want Indigenous women to feel that. 

Recently, I posted about winning this award [at the American Indian Film Festival] and how hard it is for me to brag or sell myself. It’s one of the reasons I’ve probably struggled all these years. I’m a runaway; I ran away when I was 13, so I don’t have many social graces. I’m not very good in those settings where you go and promote yourself. So it’s been hard for me to embrace that. But there was a quote Michelle Obama said about these young musicians getting comfortable with a little greatness. So these big awards: to me, this is a really important Native film festival, the American Indian FIlm Festival. I want in that moment at the end of the film, for all those young Indigenous women to feel comfortable with their greatness.

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‘Camp works best when it’s played straight’: Bruce LaBruce on Saint-Narcisse

After premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Bruce LaBruce’s Saint-Narcisse screened across Canada at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema. LaBruce talked to us about updating the Narcissus myth, tackling taboos, twincest, and taking inspiration from 1970s Quebec cinema.

Director Bruce LaBruce (centre in black and white) superimposed on a still from Saint-Narcisse in which The Twins meet for the first time.
Director Bruce LaBruce (centre in black and white) superimposed on a still from Saint-Narcisse in which The Twins meet for the first time.

What if Narcissus looked into the pond and his reflection walked out of it so that they could bang each other? In Saint-Narcisse, Bruce LaBruce updates the Narcissus myth to 1972 Quebec, where a leather-clad motorcycle-riding Montrealer, Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval), suddenly finds himself face to face with not just his image in a lake, but his identical twin, a monk named Daniel (also Félix-Antoine Duval). Twincest ensues, but that’s just one of the many bonkers and hilarious plotlines in this film that’s part camp, part melodrama, about biological and metaphorical families, in the home and the church. 

Raised by his grandmother in Montreal, Dominic discovers a letter from his biological mother after his grandmother’s death, and heads out to Saint-Narcisse on a road trip to self-discovery — with a collection of neckerchiefs on hand and some very stylish boots. In Saint-Narcisse, he discovers his biological mother (Tania Kontoyanni) is considered a witch, and she lives with someone who never ages (in truth, she replaced one lover with a younger look-alike), Irene (Alexandra Petrachuk), who may or may not be his sister. Meanwhile, in a nearby monastery, Daniel spends his days playing volleyball, praying, and frolicking naked in the lake with his fellow monks, and he spends his nights with Father Andrew (Andreas Apergis), clad in sumptuous purple velvet robes, who is equal parts child molester and attractive lover. 

Even before he meets his twin, Dominic spends his days taking polaroids of himself, and then masturbating to those images. He repeatedly rebuffs the advances of Irene, but finds himself spying on Daniel with fascination. When Dominic and Daniel meet, there’s a costume sight gag that’s so bizarre and off-the-wall that I was in stitches. At one point, Dominic, straight-faced, explains to Daniel that being raped by the priest is not the same as having sex with his identical twin because “we’re family.”    

I’m not sure that all of the threads in Saint-Narcisse come together to a psychologically or emotionally satisfying end, but it’s a hell of a ride along the way. The acting in the film ranges from very impressive to laughably bad (or is that just camp?) that you wonder whether actual professional actors were hired. Duval shifts his physicality and demeanour so effectively that you’re convinced The Twins are played by two different actors, until they both end up with shaved heads — but half of his line deliveries are stilted. Apergis’s Father Andrew ranges from believably predatory and still attractive to Daniel, to so over the top, toward the end, that he strains believability as a human. Nevertheless, some of that unevenness is probably the point, and allows LaBruce to explore taboos — from abuse to twincest to the oppression of religion — with impressive ambiguity, acknowledging conflicting emotions and power structures.

Like Ema, Saint-Narcisse is a strong contender for the most “WTF did I just watch” film of the year, and a hell of a ride you’re not likely to forget. When the film screened at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in November, I talked with LaBruce via Zoom about creating the film’s aesthetic, balancing challenging taboos with entertainment, and why he loves 1970s Quebec cinema. 

Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of Saint-Narcisse?

Bruce LaBruce: The working title of the film was Twincest. My films often address issues of taboo and fetish. That was one that kept cropping up. I made Gerontophilia in Quebec in 2013, which was about gerontophilia, a fetish that some people have for the elderly. 

I tend to try to look at these fetishes from an unconventional angle. I try to see the romance in these fetishes that some people find disgusting or bizarre. There’s often a human component to them that people don’t recognise. With fetish, there’s often a reverence or a sense of devotion to the love object. I try to find the human angle, and also to present them ironically in terms of romance or romantic comedy. 

I started with the premise of twincest, which is a subgenre of porn. I also make porn films, but I wanted to make a more accessible, mainstream film on the same subject. That was the starting point. The idea of narcissism also seemed like a topic that is everywhere and hasn’t been explored all that much. So it was a kind of loose, cheeky retelling of the Narcissus myth.

Félix-Antoine Duval stars as The Twins in Bruce LaBruce's Saint-Narcisse. In this still, he is looking at himself in the mirror.
Félix-Antoine Duval stars as The Twins in Bruce LaBruce’s Saint-Narcisse.

7R: What did you want to get at about narcissism that you felt was underexplored?

Bruce LaBruce: It’s [narcissism is] so ubiquitous now. It’s everywhere. It’s so normalised. That’s why I set it in the early ‘70s. If I set this film in the contemporary world, about a character who’s taking pictures of himself all the time, it wouldn’t seem strange at all. It’s totally normalised. It stands out so starkly when you see it in a different era when that wasn’t the norm, and it does seem quite bizarre and unusual. Narcissism now is almost like a white noise. It’s everywhere. 

There’s a lot of talk about toxic narcissism in psychological terms, but I think narcissism is a lot more complicated than that. In the film, there’s good narcissism and bad narcissism. The characters of the mother, Beatrice, and Father Andrew, both have narcissistic personalities because they both pursue their own desires without taking into consideration how profoundly it might affect the people around them. That’s a certain kind of narcissism that’s not so good. 

The twin narcissism you can maybe understand, even the twincest, because if you were presented with someone identical to you, and you had intimate proximity with that person, people can wrap their minds around the fact that there might be sexual interest there.

7R: What made you want to choose this particular setting of both Quebec and the ‘70s for Saint-Narcisse?

Bruce LaBruce: Quebec is the only place in Canada that has generously supported me. (laughs) It’s hard for me to get my films financed in Ontario, for some reason.There’s such a strong cultural identity in Quebec in the arts and culture. They appreciate work that’s really unusual or challenging or based more on the idea of European art cinema. 

Quebec cinema from the ‘70s has always fascinated me. Paul Almond is the filmmaker I’m referencing the most, and he made a trilogy with Geneviève Bujold — Isabel, Act of the Heart, and Journey — that really explore taboos. Isabel has these incestuous implications, and it’s kind of a spooky film set in a rural environment. In Act of the Heart, you have Donald Sutherland as a priest having sex with Geneviève Bujold on the altar of the church, and then she goes to the park and sets herself on fire. When I saw that on TV on the CBC as a kid, it had a profound effect on me. I was so intrigued and confused: what could drive them to such passions and self destruction? 

This idea of sexual repression and the family and the church is built into Quebec culture and has been explored a lot in Quebec cinema. Bons débarras is one of my favourite Quebec films, and it has almost incestuous implications between the mother and daughter. I was really thinking about that, too, with Beatrice and Irene.

7R: How did you build the aesthetic for Saint-Narcisse? With the costumes, production design, and cinematography, it’s such a rich world you’ve created.

Bruce LaBruce: It is the biggest budget I’ve ever had to work with, which is still not that big, and we only had 22 days to shoot it. I wanted it to look like and have the atmosphere of a ‘70s Quebec film. To that end, we got Michel La Veaux to shoot the film; he’s been around since the ‘70s as a filmmaker and has worked with all the great ‘70s Quebec auteurs like Michel Brault, Francis Mankiewicz, etc… He really brought that authenticity to it. 

We tried to do it all in camera and not in post, so he chose lenses from the era; we used these enormous zoom lenses. The way he lit it was by using lighting kits that are more consistent with that style from the ‘70s. The art director, Hercule [Desjardins], just had a real sense of the era and the costume designer, Valérie Gagnon-Hamel, did, as well. It was a really great team effort. Everyone was really dedicated to pulling off this look.

7R: I feel like Saint-Narcisse is a celebration of the neckerchief.

Bruce LaBruce: Yeah, Valérie was amazing, she had all these little details in terms of the costumes. She had a lot of fun. For me, Félix’s boots are very important in the film.

7R: Yes!

Bruce LaBruce: I wanted it to look stylish, and she brought a real sense of style to it.

Andreas Apergis (left) stars as Father Andrew an Félix-Antoine Duval (right) stars as Daniel in Bruce LaBruce's Saint-Narcisse. Here, they are wearing their monks' robes in church, staring up at a painting.
Andreas Apergis (left) stars as Father Andrew an Félix-Antoine Duval (right) stars as Daniel in Bruce LaBruce’s Saint-Narcisse.

7R: How did you design the church and the monks’ robes? It’s sort of a gothic space, but also very sumptuous.

Bruce LaBruce: Valérie [Gagnon-Hamel] and I worked really closely. I worked with all the department heads pretty closely. Valérie gave me all these samples of fabric and stuff. We even consulted with Michel La Veaux on what fabrics would work best in a dark interior that would stand out from the background. 

The locations also were just hugely important. We had one monastery that we were going to shoot in, which was massive, in Oka, but they didn’t like the script very much. I think they actually might have Googled me. So we weren’t able to use that. But the locations people found a nunnery that was recently sold to the Quebec government, and it had never been used as a location before. We were extremely lucky to get that because it’s a beautiful location with the huge, vaulted, painted ceilings, and everything. Hercule had to butch it up, make it more masculine. That was partly done through lighting and partly through adding more masculine visual motifs.

7R: How did you approach casting the film?

Bruce LaBruce: Maxime Giroux, the casting director, brought in actors he considered appropriate for the roles. For the twins, we looked at maybe 15 actors. Félix [-Antoine Duval] really stood out for me. It’s a film about narcissists, so it had to be someone with classical beauty, but also, he had a warmth and curiosity about the role. He was really open to exploring it. He was also just super nice, and I like to work with nice people. 

Andreas Apergis, who plays Father Andrew, just blew me away in his audition. He nailed it so hard. The female roles were a bit more difficult. There’s that earth mother thing that Beatrice has which is a bit elusive. And Irene is just this fresh faced, open girl with a cynical edge. It was challenging. But I think they’re both great in the film.

7R: Saint-Narcisse is very funny, so I’m wondering how you think about putting that comedy together. Some of it is sight gags, like the naked priest who is wearing nothing but sneakers. I laughed so hard at that I was in pain.

Bruce LaBruce: I try to do it pretty subtly. There’s even gag lines in the film. I’m really quite skeptical about bad gag lines in action movies and stuff that often seems so corny or gratuitous. I try to incorporate some of those kinds of lines like when Irene says, “Then go fuck yourself.” It could be corny, but I try to make it make sense in the scene as something someone would actually say. And it’s the way she delivers it, too. Her other line, “He only takes pictures of himself, I mean who does that?” could be too on the nose, but it works because it reinforces how bizarre that kind of behaviour is. 

I think the script, which I collaborated on very closely with Martin Girard, has that melodramatic component, but it does dig into the psychology of the characters. We didn’t have a lot of time for shooting so we didn’t do a lot of takes, but I would get them to do a more over-the-top take, which we ended up rarely using. 

Overall, it was more about being pretty natural, their acting, within the range of melodrama. If you watch old Hollywood melodramas now, which I love, the acting is so broad it’s kind of crazy. Their acting [in Saint-Narcisse] was more consistent with the psychosexual films of the ‘70s, that are more serious in intent.

I cut out quite a bit of the more heavy-handed dialogue. The kind of humour that’s in it, it’s a camp humour. For me, camp works best when it’s played straight, when people play the dramatic scenes straight. 

My editor, Hubert Hayaud, who is amazing — he just thoroughly got the film —  and I would cut out some of the more over-the-top takes where people were maybe getting too melodramatic. We tried to keep it in the range of dramatic believability.

7R: When you’re thinking about the twins, how different did you want them to be? To some degree, at the beginning, I thought they could be two completely different actors, and then they converged a bit.

Bruce LaBruce: Yeah, I’m really happy that some people tell me that, at some points, they felt like different actors. It’s such a tribute to Félix. But we also kept the CGI twin effects to a minimum. There’s maybe 6 or 8 face replacement shots; the rest is split screen, which is the standard for old twin movies like The Parent Trap or the old Bette Davis twin movies like A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer. Also a body double, which gives it a more naturalistic effect. 

The scene where the twins make love, we had initially planned to have four or five hours to shoot it, and I had an elaborate shot list. But then, because of time constraints, we had like an hour to shoot it. I had meant it to be a little more expressionistic, but we just shot Felix and the body double making out together and then edited it so it’s hard to tell who’s who. It gives it an authentic intimacy, I think. It doesn’t seem like a special effect.

7R: Did you guys work together to think about how the physicality of the two twins should differ?

Bruce LaBruce: Dominic has been raised in freedom so he’s more loose and unselfconscious, and Daniel is a little fidgety. We worked on his body language. He’s a smoker; he’s reluctant with his sexuality; he knows subconsciously that he’s been exploited, but at the same time, he does have genuine sexual feelings for Father Andrew. 

I think that is more realistic in terms of what happens often with sexual exploitation. Even Oprah acknowledged that what’s disturbing about the sexual exploitation of children is that they experience pleasure. The implications of what’s happening to them is almost beyond their comprehension. It’s a disturbing and complex psychology. So he has both those feelings of genuine sexuality and love with this man, but ultimately. it takes his twin, an objective outsider and also his other half, to explain to him that it’s inappropriate. 

Before they make love, we only see Dominic’s sexual fantasy, when he has sex with the girl in the laundromat, and that’s obviously almost like his pornographic fantasy. But we don’t know much about his sexuality. We shot a scene where he has a girlfriend and breaks up with his girlfriend, but we cut that scene and left it as a bit of an open question what his sexuality actually is.

Tania Kontoyanni (left) as The Mother and Alexandra Petrachuk (right) as Irene in Saint-Narcisse, directed by Bruce LaBruce. Are they lovers or mother and daughter or both?
Tania Kontoyanni (left) as The Mother and Alexandra Petrachuk (right) as Irene in Saint-Narcisse, directed by Bruce LaBruce. Are they lovers or mother and daughter or both?

7R: That’s interesting because he’s not interested in his sister, but his twin is interested in his sister. 

Bruce LaBruce: I just think that’s a great joke because there’s at least three scenes where she tries to kiss Dominic, and he or something always interrupts. When finally, she can’t hold back any longer, and she offers this wide open kiss, it’s not Dominic. It’s an ironic comment on the arbitrariness of love and that the twins are interchangeable. 

It’s more about the fact that there is that weird prohibition set up, because, from the beginning, Dominic doesn’t know whether she’s his sister or not. When Daniel comes in, he doesn’t have that prohibition, because he knows exactly who she is. And also, he’s never had a chance to explore his sexuality, so it makes sense that he would take that opportunity to experiment. But there’s a lot of irony there and a weird poetic justice to it.

7R: The successful kiss felt right out of Twelfth Night.

Bruce LaBruce: I love that comparison.

7R: There’s a good history of twins as a way to explore queerness. Were you thinking about those other influences when writing and making Saint-Narcisse?

Bruce LaBruce: That’s really interesting because it never consciously occurred to me, but of course, I’ve read Twelfth Night and seen it performed. You’re right, there’s that Shakespearean element to it. And examples in Hollywood films, as well. 

There’s a lot going on in terms of queer politics, and in some ways, it’s politically incorrect because people don’t necessarily want to see characters who start out [in a] queer [relationship] and experiment with heterosexual sexuality. But the film mixes it up so much that it becomes kind of polyamorous by the end. 

There’s so many parallels going on in the film, like the parallel between the mother-and-daughter implied incest — even though Beatrice isn’t her actual mother, she’s her mother figure, but there’s an implied sexual intimacy — and in the monastery, there’s the symbolic father and incest with his son. So those two worlds are kind of parallel. You also have the implied brother-sister incest and then the actual brother-brother incest. 

7R: You’ve talked a lot about exploring taboos. How were you thinking about using camp as a way to explore taboos in Saint-Narcisse?

Bruce LaBruce: Both camp and melodrama afford you a lot of room for those kinds of impertinent [ideas]. The script sets up a whole scenario where all these taboos are presented in an elaborate way. Camp is partly about that kind of melodrama and that kind of outrageousness that can [help] you get away with certain things. 

One of the most famous Hollywood melodramas, Peyton Place, is based on the stepfather raping the daughter. So it’s kind of built into the genre, those kinds of taboos and people becoming so overwrought because those taboos are transgressed.

7R: I wanted to ask about the final scene of the film, the song choice of “Family Affair” by Sly and the Family Stone, because it’s really great. What a great way to close the film.

Bruce LaBruce: We were lucky to get that song. The producer managed to make some kind of deal. It just occurred to me in editing, and then we tried it, and I thought, Is it too on the nose or ironic? But the lyrics fit the scenario so well, talking about two different children. And it’s also really from the era; it came out in the same year the film is set, 1972, as is the opening song, “Where Evil Grows” by The Poppy Family. 

“Family Affair” is so consistent with the tone of the film where it’s kind of romantic and sad.  The idea of ironically using songs, especially on TV series, sometimes, it’s done well, and other times, it’s really overused. I was a bit reluctant, but I thought it was a nice way to end the film. 

The ending is kind of ironic: the family comes together, which is what you expect to happen in the film, but there are so many sexual permutations going on that it’s a kind of strange family reunion and with the new offspring and everything. You don’t know which twin exactly is the father, and you don’t know, are Beatrice and Irene still intimate? It raises so many questions but ties it together with a gently ironic romanticism. It leaves people with something nice to leave the theatre with.

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Cheryl Foggo reclaims Black Canadian history in John Ware Reclaimed

Director Cheryl Foggo on how telling the real story of John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed can help us understand the Black Canadian experience today and Canada’s history of racism. The film is currently screening virtually at the AGH Film Festival in Ontario until October 25.

Director Cheryl Foggo (right) and Fred Whitfield on a horse as cowboy John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed.

It’s one of Canada’s best kept secrets that there’s a rich history of the Black diaspora in the Alberta prairies dating back over a century ago. What little is known about that history has been condensed in the popular consciousness to the story of cowboy John Ware, an enslaved American who moved to Canada and became a successful rancher. But even the historical accounts of him are limited to a single book, John Ware’s Cow Country by Grant MacEwan, published in 1960, written by a white man, and full of racist stereotypes about Black masculinity. Cheryl Foggo’s moving, enlightening, and appropriately infuriating new documentary, John Ware Reclaimed, attempts to reclaim not just John Ware’s story from the biased history books but the history of Black Canadians in the prairies.

Foggo replaces Grant MacEwan’s mythology of John Ware with a newer, more modern, and more nuanced take, which highlights both Ware’s humanity and the very real struggles he faced. She casts real life cowboy Fred Whitfield as John Ware, and together, they create iconic images of a cowboy in action in the gorgeous Alberta landscape. Through animation, Foggo grants us access to the love story between John Ware and his wife Mildred. The animated images depict the two always hanging onto each other, almost curled together, as if sheltering from the storm of the wider world. Through original country songs written by Foggo’s daughter, Miranda Martini, as well as songs by Corb Lund, Foggo further sets the tone for John Ware’s story. 

Fred Whitfield rides a horse as John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed, directed by Cheryl Foggo. Image courtesy of National Film Board of Canada.
Fred Whitfield rides a horse as John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed, directed by Cheryl Foggo. Image courtesy of National Film Board of Canada.

What interests Foggo about John Ware is not merely the opportunity to reclaim Black Canadian history, but to understand its effects on the present day. Foggo’s film is thus peppered with dialogues between Foggo and her friends, family, and people with connections to John Ware, in which they reflect on how his legacy has affected them. The silence about the history of Black Canadians in the prairies is tied up with the silence about Canadian racism. 

Part of Grant MacEwan’s narrative about Ware minimized the racism that he faced in Canada, partly attributing his success to a path that was less obstructed by racism. “I absorbed that narrative that Canada was racist-free,” explains Bertrand Bickersteth, an academic of Black Canadian history who appears in the film. “So it was very confusing when I would have these racist encounters. What’s going on exactly?” Foggo’s conversations in the film are painful but frank about how damaging the silence about Canadian racism can be. It’s not just that non-Black Canadians excuse themselves from doing the work of being anti-racist; the silence about Canadian racism gaslights Black Canadians. 

Uncovering the true history of John Ware has been a decades-spanning passion project for Foggo. It began as a fictional play based on his life, John Ware Reimagined, in which she imagined scenes from his life based on what was known about it. The strong response to the play led Foggo to want to uncover more of the actual facts about John Ware and his contemporaries, to discover the complex man behind the myth. Foggo’s ancestors in the area knew John Ware’s children, which made this an especially personal journey. The film sparks an archeological dig on one of John Ware’s former properties and sends Foggo looking at old newspapers, documents, and eventually, trying to trace John Ware’s DNA to figure out where he came from and how he ended up in Canada. Foggo’s search also expands beyond Ware himself to the story of his wife and children, especially his daughter Nettie, who is an inspiring and impressive character. 

John Ware Reclaimed is one of a handful of new Canadian docs this year that aim to reclaim the history of marginalized people — from Inconvenient Indian, to No Ordinary Man, to Sex, Sin, & 69 — and it’s also one of the best and most creative in its storytelling. It made me, a native of the ‘centre of the world’ Toronto, want to learn more about Albertan history and about the history of Black Canadians. It’s also just a wonderful film about fascinating people — both in the present day and the past — that speaks to the richness of Black culture and history in Canada that is so rarely explored in the mainstream.

After the world premiere of John Ware Reclaimed at the Calgary International Film Festival, I talked to director Cheryl Foggo on the phone about her journey of telling John Ware’s story, how she created a new mythology of John Ware, and how his story continues to resonate today. The film also screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival and will play in Ontario at the Art Gallery of Hamilton Film Festival this week. It’s a must-see.

Cheryl Foggo examines a photograph of the real John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed.
Cheryl Foggo examines a photograph of the real John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed.

7R: What do you see as the difference between the roles of your play, John Ware Reimagined, did and what the film, John Ware Reclaimed, does?

Cheryl Foggo: I do a lot of different kinds of writing because I want to share the story of Black life in the prairie provinces throughout our history, and I want to share it with as many different people and audiences as possible. You do get a different audience for the theatre than what you would get for the film, or for a book. Obviously, there’s some overlap.

I knew that the play would stimulate interest in him. Because it was a work of imagination, I wanted to communicate his life on different levels and to different people.

7R: The film creates a new mythology around John Ware, which compared to the play, is more fact-based than imagined.

Cheryl Foggo: In the play, I do have some scenes that are based on events in his life, but they’re completely made up with dialogue. I have dialogue between him and Mildred. I appear in his lifetime: there’s a character named Joanie that’s based on my life, and Joanie appears in their world. And they, specifically John Ware, appear in her world. So that is a kind of magical and fantastical exploration of his life. 

I wanted to examine all the mythologies around John Ware and look at them through what I hope is a more accurate lens in the film.

7R: You use animation in the film to tell the story of John Ware and his wife, Mildred.

Cheryl Foggo: There are very few photographs of Mildred available. I’m fascinated by her and her life and what it must have been like for a city girl from Toronto to have chicken droppings on her boots. I wanted the animation to feature her in a way, to give me another place to go when talking about Mildred and her life. 

I do have that presence of John Ware in the film, with Fred Whitfield, and I wanted more of a moving, animated presence — not just still photos — for Mildred.

7R: How did you decide on a style for the animation and for showing your actor who is playing John Ware in those romantic landscapes?

Cheryl Foggo: I knew early on that I wanted to have an actor. I was more concerned about having a cowboy who looked like he could manage on a horse. Having Fred Whitfield, who is an actual Black cowboy, was a gift. 

The idea for the animation came a bit later. We had first talked about a more abstract style, but as we got further along, I felt that I actually wanted to see Mildred, and to have the images based on her image. Because I’m not an animator myself, I had to rely on the skill of the animator. They did a great job of incorporating my suggestions and really hearing what I wanted and needed. As we went along in the process, the animations became more realistic and less abstract.

Rodeo champion Fred Whitfield as John Ware in John Ware Reclaimed, directed by Cheryl Foggo. Photo by Shaun Robinson.

7R: You have actors and non-actors reading out various news items from the time. How did you decide what you wanted to include and how to do that?

Cheryl Foggo: I wanted the audience to get a sense of who John Ware was to people who knew him. All we have of that are people’s diaries, journals, entries in those community books that were quite common in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and newspaper articles. That’s how we get to know what he was like as a neighbour, a boss, or a dad. 

I had many to choose from, and I wanted to represent different aspects of his life. I wanted some from his children. I wanted some from neighbours. I wanted some from newspapers that would talk about his skill as a horseman and his stature in the community. I wanted the one that was about his response to being [called] a racial slur in a bar because I wanted people to understand what his response to racism was like. I wanted to illustrate different aspects of his character, and I thought this would be a good way to do it.

From the very beginning, when I made the pitch for the film, I said that I wanted the people who shared those anecdotes to be people who were connected in some way to John Ware’s life. Lawrence Hill is there because his father wrote about John Ware, and it was through articles like those, through [historian] Daniel G. Hill, that I started basing my collection of material on John Ware. I wanted people who had acted in the play or created music for the play to be part of that, as well. I have Janelle Cooper and Kirsten Alter [who acted in the play]. 

In the reenactments of John Ware’s life in the Duchess area [the second location where Ware lived in Alberta], that’s Jesse Lipscombe, who was the first person to play John Ware in the play. There’s two John Wares in there. Not too many people have noticed that, which is good. I don’t want people thinking, Hey that’s a different guy!

I wanted the musicians, my daughter Miranda [Martini] and Kris Demeanor, to be there. I also wanted Corb Lund, not just because he’s a western singer-songwriter whose music I enjoy, who is also a fan of John Ware, but because his family was connected to John Ware. His great grandfather was a neighbour of John Ware. 

I picked every single person who delivers an anecdote for a very specific reason. I even tried to connect those people to the places where the things they’re talking about happened. Lawrence Hill’s reading happens in Milestone’s restaurant in downtown Calgary; that was the site of the hotel where the original [racist slur] incident took place. Corb Lund is on land that was very near his great-grandfather’s land; it was on the site where John Ware’s last evening with neighbours took place. Janelle Cooper, who shares an anecdote about the Ware wedding that was published in the newspaper, she’s sharing that on the porch of the house where John and Mildred were married. So every location in the film is also connected to his life.

Still from film John Ware Reclaimed: Kris Demeanor and Miranda Martini perform '18 Hours' from the play 'John Ware Reimagined
Still from film John Ware Reclaimed: Kris Demeanor and Miranda Martini perform ’18 Hours’ from the play ‘John Ware Reimagined.

7R: Can you tell me about the songs that your daughter has written and performed for the film?

Cheryl Foggo: When I was first working on the presentation John Ware Reimagined, before it became a play, in 2012, I called Miranda, who was a student at UBC [University of British Columbia] in the creative writing department, at the time. One of her streams was songwriting, and she was already a songwriter at that time. 

I told her about the presentation, and I said I needed a country song with soul that told the story of the spring flood of 1902 when the Wares lost their home. About a week later, she called me back, and she sang me the song ‘Spring 1902’, which is the last song you hear in the film. That’s how the musical components of John Ware Reimagined began. 

From there, when I started working on it as a play, she [Miranda] wrote some more songs which you also hear in the film. We brought on Kris Demeanor, who also appears in the film, as a co-musical director and co-songwriter. He has also written some amazing songs for the play which aren’t in the film. Finally, I asked Miranda to write a song for the Ware’s marriage, over the animation in the film where we see John and Mildred dancing. That was the last song she wrote, called ‘Open Door’.

Miranda is a long-time collaborator of mine. She really understands what I need when I give her a couple of phrases and tell her what I want the story of the song to be. She nails it every time. She is very in tune with my needs around music. I use music in almost all of my projects. It’s a very important aspect of my own life. 

A still from film John Ware Reclaimed: Cheryl Foggo discusses her family history with her brother Richard.
A still from film John Ware Reclaimed: Cheryl Foggo discusses her family history with her brother Richard.

7R: Can you talk about the scenes where you’re talking with your brother and with Bertrand Bickersteth, a scholar of Black Canadian history? You’re connecting what was happening in John Ware’s life to how that sadly still resonates today.

Cheryl Foggo: It was very important for me to capture the truth of that. Mistakenly, many people believe John Ware succeeded because there was no racism. The truth is, he succeeded in spite of it. People also mistakenly believe that racism has not been a significant factor in the lives of racialized Canadians, and that is also a real misconception. I thought it was important to spend some time shining some light on that painful aspect of the lives of Black Canadians.

7R: In both those conversations, you talk about how the Canadian mythology around how not racist we are compared to Americans is a form of gaslighting. You talk about how racialized Canadians often wonder, if I’m experiencing racism, is this the first case of racism in Canada?

Cheryl Foggo: That’s 100% what it is. It’s gaslighting.

Still from John Ware Reclaimed: Cheryl Foggo with Author/Professor Bertrand Bickersteth
Still from John Ware Reclaimed: Cheryl Foggo with Author/Professor Bertrand Bickersteth 

7R: That’s such an important point, and potentially could be very hard to talk about. How do you create those conversations? Because you and your subjects are very open, but the gaslighting must create a lot of silence around those things.

Cheryl Foggo: It was a very painful conversation I was having with Richard, my brother. I was really caught off guard by how emotional I felt in that conversation. I just had flashes of him as a little boy, experiencing the things he was describing. I felt incredible sadness that that was a part of his life. Of course, it was a part of my life, as well. But I think we are able to process experiences for ourselves that we actually find more painful when we observe them in people that we love. That was a very difficult conversation to have on camera. At a certain point, we forgot about the cameras and were just talking. 

With Bertrand Bickersteth, the scholar that you mentioned, it was the very same thing. Those kinds of conversations are very familiar to Bertrand and I. When we get together, we have those conversations. It was just like the two of us talking. I saw Bertrand at the premiere of the film last night, and that’s what he was saying: it was just us talking. It’s one of the many things we talk about.

I felt incredible empathy for Bertrand when he was talking about his childhood and the confusion that that gaslighting brings to children. I was recalling my own childhood in which I would internalize those experiences and just assume that there was something so off about me, that I would have these experiences in a country where it was impossible to happen. It’s really, really horrible. And sadly, it still happens. I still talk to young Black people who experience that confusion and that kind of gaslighting. 

Director Cheryl Foggo on location for John Ware Reclaimed, still by Shaun Robinson
Director Cheryl Foggo on location for John Ware Reclaimed, still by Shaun Robinson

7R: Because you’re having difficult conversations on camera, so your relationship with your director of photography (DoP), Douglas Munro, must be so important.

Cheryl Foggo: Yes, it is. It has to be a relationship of trust. I felt a lot of trust in Doug in that conversation with Richard, which was actually fairly early on in the process. Doug had spoken about how impactful those conversations were on him. He hadn’t heard about those kinds of things. He was surprised and horrified. It was actually part of the bonding that was taking place between Doug and I as we carried on through the process.

I knew Doug before. He had been the DoP on a film my husband was in a long, long time ago. But it is a vulnerable situation. And there has to be a relationship of trust in the room.

Part of it was facilitated because my producer, Bonnie Thompson, was someone that I absolutely trusted in the room, as well. 

7R: Part of tracking down his story meant tracking down scholars and people in the area who are white people and may not be sensitive to the racist narratives about him. You don’t want to contribute to the problematic narrative by letting them speak, but also you have to rely on them for information.

Cheryl Foggo: It is very nerve-wracking to cold call white folks who are in a realm of John Ware’s story that I am not in. They’re in that rural realm of his story. I got incredibly lucky with both the Mallory family and the Fisher family. The Fisher family being the people who currently own the land that John Ware was on in Millarville. The Mallory family being the people who had Nettie’s archives in their home, who safeguarded them all these years. And the Douglass family, as well, who are near the Duchess farm of John Ware, where he had his last days. I got very lucky with all three families.

But I have had experiences that were less than warm, less than pleasant. It is something that I have to steel myself for each time. I also have had many experiences where people drop the N-bomb just at the mere mention of his name. That has happened so many times, and it’s so disgusting.

7R: On the one hand, you’re uncovering this untold story. But there are so many hard things about it.

Cheryl Foggo Yes, there are many people who become furious when I object to them calling John Ware the N-word. And I’m talking furious. At the minimum, many people who are very defensive and who still defend its use. I’m hoping that the film will help in that regard. 

You see my brother Darcy early in the film as the baby in the family footage in the yard. He once was coming out of a building at the University of Calgary after a rehearsal of John Ware Reimagined so many years ago. He bumped into someone he knew, and that person asked what he was doing there, and he said he was there for a rehearsal of the play because Darcy is a stage manager. And that person said, “Oh, yes. I know that story very well. They called him the N-word, but there was nothing wrong with it.” All the stuff I talk about in the film is a very common experience still, and it’s very horrific.

7R: In the film, you talk about how you can’t just look at the historical record as a product of its time, because even then, people knew better.

Cheryl Foggo: That’s the thing. Many people knew better. Many people in John Ware’s time did not call him the N-word. People who excuse it by saying that’s what everyone called him, that’s a flat-out fallacy. I would go further and say that even those who used that language behind his back, they knew better, too. They just didn’t care. 

7R: I really liked how you included Indigenous people and history in the film whose ancestors may have had relationships with John Ware, as well as talking about the complex relationship between Indigenous people and settlers, and the way that they used to, in John Ware’s time, consider Black people ‘white’ because they speak English.

Cheryl Foggo: I wanted to include that perspective. I think we spend a lot of time, in Canada, talking about the binary between white and Black, white and Indigenous, white and Chinese. But the truth is, we had relationships with each other, very extensive and complex but for the most part, very supportive relationships between Black and Indigenous, Black and Chinese, Chinese and Indigenous. This is an important part of our history that’s very underexplored.

7R: At the end of the film, you talk about how you’re not finished with this story and plan to continue researching. So what has changed since you finished the film?

Cheryl Foggo: I’m hoping that the film will prompt the next steps. There are some developments in the DNA — not so much in my research, but in the technology of examining old, degraded samples of DNA. That is ongoing, and I’m quite hopeful about it.

I’m also hopeful that the film will prompt another archeological dig or two. There are two properties that could be excavated. All we had was one day. I’m hoping that the importance of that research is highlighted by the film. I’m also hoping that once the film moves to the US, you simply never know, someone who knows something could see the film. Someone who has a clue could come forward. 

That kind of thing happens all the time. I’ll do a radio interview, and someone will phone in to say, My great-grandfather knew John Ware, and this, that, or the other. One example of that is we did some media in Vulcan, Alberta in 2013, when we were going to go down there with the presentation of John Ware Reimagined. You see a little snippet of that in the beginning of the film. We had two presentations: one in the morning, and one later in the day. Someone left a note saying, “I have a cook pot that belonged to John Ware. Would you like to have it on stage with you?” Of course, we said yes. We went and got it and had it on stage with us. It appears in the film in about ten different scenes: when Fred Whittfield is at the fire, behind Corb Lund, in the scenes with Miranda singing. Through that, I met a person who knew Nettie Ware.

Recording session with Cheryl Foggo
Recording session with Cheryl Foggo for John Ware Reclaimed. Courtesy of NFB.

7R: It seems like your interest in the history of Black Albertans extends beyond John Ware. 

I would say the bulk of my research and the output of my research, both creative, non-fiction, and journalistic, is based on the Black migration [to Canada] of 1910. I’ve written a book called Pourin’ Down Rain, which just had its 30th anniversary reprinting. It was the very first book I ever wrote, and it’s still alive because the content is still really not known. People outside of Alberta, and even people in Alberta, don’t know that we have Black history here. My next steps are around that. I’ve done a lot of work on that history, and I often tie that in with my creative works, as well. 

One of my young adult novels, One Thing That’s True, part of it is set in a Northern Alberta Black settlement. I really do incorporate that history into my work. 

I am also peeling back the layers of Black history that was here before my family came in 1910. I’ve written about Annie Saunders, who was a Black entrepreneur in Southern Alberta, before John Ware came, running three businesses in Pincher Creek, Alberta. I think this history is so interesting and so important, and just not well enough known.

I really appreciate people from Toronto, actually ,specifically, who reach out to me and are interested in sharing this Canadian history.

7R: Because you work in so many different forms, what do you feel you can get from making a film that maybe isn’t possible in a book or in a play?

Cheryl Foggo: Each form has its own particular beauty. Each form has a different level of difficulty and challenge for me, and they each perform a different function. Part of it is just wanting to continue to challenge myself. Part of it is wanting to reach different audiences. 

There’s something incredibly visceral and powerful about live theatre, when you’re in a room with people, and you’re collectively experiencing something together. You almost become like an organism. That’s extremely powerful and that is not an experience that is available through a book or a film. But it also has a smaller audience. Unless you have Broadway or West End Blockbuster, with theatre, it’s just not going to be seen by that many people. And now we’ve seen with COVID, that theatre is very vulnerable, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that form moving forward.

With a film, you can bring someone to life, and you see them moving in front of your eyes. That’s permanent. Theatre is also very ephemeral. You do a production once or twice, if you’re lucky, and then it’s bye bye. That’s gone. A book is a permanent record, but it is not moving and living in the same way as either film or theatre. However, you are much more in control; you are the god of that world when you’re writing a book. 

A film and a piece of theatre have many more moving parts. There are many more people that you have to rely on. As you pointed out, your DoP on a film like mine is really critical, and your editor. In theatre, you’re really dependent on the technicians: the sound designers and the costume people. Anyone can mess up and really impact your work. Or anyone can do something brilliant that you weren’t thinking about and really enhance your work. They’re much more collaborative. 

7R: What’s next for the film?

Cheryl Foggo: We’re going to open up to community screening across the four western provinces. Lots of requests have come in. Early next year, we’ll be rolling it out in Ontario, Quebec, and further east. Eventually, it will also be on NFB.ca website where anyone can see it. We also have a US strategy and think there might be some interest in other parts of the world, as well.

It’s not a film about the past. It’s a film about who we are now because of the past.

7R: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Cheryl Foggo: I always want to mention the women in John Ware’s life and how important they’ve become to me. We talked a little about Mildred, and his daughter, Nettie, who is a figure who looms very large in my consciousness and is a person that I admire so much. One day, I hope to bring to life the family of Mildred, because that’s another really fascinating aspect of Canadian history that has roots in both Ontario and Calgary and Southern Alberta. The Lewises were from Ontario, and were a whole cast of characters themselves. They deserve a TV series.

In the scenes that are shot in the Mallory house, there’s a cabinet that you can see behind us when we’re talking. That was built by John Ware’s sister-in-law. She was an amazing carpenter. She was also a poet, and she could ride a horse like a man. She was amazing.

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