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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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‘The system is so entangled in daily life’: Garrett Bradley on Time

Garrett Bradley discusses her new documentary, Time, a non-linear document of one woman’s emotional landscape over the 20 years of her husband’s incarceration.

An image of filmmaker Garrett Bradley in front of a still from her film Time, of subject Fox Rich. The text on the image reads: Interview.
‘The system is so entangled in daily life’: Garrett Bradley on Time.

Towards the end of Garrett Bradley’s New York Times Op-Doc, Alone, a woman imparts some blistering wisdom to the film’s subject, Aloné Watts, a young Black woman debating whether or not to marry her incarcerated boyfriend. The woman who speaks to Aloné is activist Fox Rich. “This system breaks you apart,” she tells Aloné. “It is designed just like slavery to tear you apart. And instead of using the whip, they use mother time.” Although Bradley never properly introduces the viewer to Fox in Alone, her insights and authority tell us that this is a woman with years, perhaps even decades, of first-hand experience with such a system.

In Time, a feature-length project that Bradley calls “a sister film to Alone,” we take a close-up look at Fox. The film is half contemporary black-and-white footage that Bradley shot, and half Fox’s own black-and-white home videos that span two decades. The result is a non-linear document of one woman’s emotional landscape over 20 years. At the start of those 20 years, Fox’s husband, Robert, was sent to prison for robbing a bank under desperate financial circumstances; Fox herself did a few years of time for aiding the operation. The home videos document Fox’s journey as a young woman adjusting to life without Robert, raising their kids on her own, and committing herself to activism. In the present day, Fox is a respected activist and businesswoman, and her sons have grown into men with promising futures. But she’s still in limbo wondering if this will be the year whenRobert finally gets out.

I spoke to Garrett Bradley over Zoom about gaining intimate access to Fox’s daily life, structuring the film as a love story, and how she attempted to make visible the invisible problem of incarceration.

7R: I gather that you had shot all of the contemporary footage we see in the film before Fox Rich gave you her archive of home videos. Can you tell me about your original vision for this film and how those home videos changed that?

Garrett Bradley: So much of it was coming off of making Alone, which is a short 13-minute film, that I see as being Time’s sister film. I went into the process thinking that I wanted to make a sister film to Alone that is also looking at incarceration from a familiar and a Black, feminist, Southern perspective. A lot of the aesthetic choices were coming from that previous film. 

When Fox gave me this incredible archive, it challenged a lot of those formal and aesthetic rules that I was creating, I think for the better. The film’s editor, Gabe Rhodes, talked through the material and thought a lot about the materiality and texture and colour spectrum of the archive relative to our newer footage. 

Iit was about trying to find entry points that were emotional and drove the narrative forward, and trying to weave all those things together. There were a lot of ways in which the archive informed the overall direction we took. The film would be nothing without the archive to a certain extent. It revealed things that I myself would never have been able to capture in an interview or even in the present day.

7R: How did it challenge your conception of the material?

Garrett Bradley: I think that Fox’s youth and her free spirit was not something that people could feel and understand just in her telling me who she was. It was something we could really feel and see in the archive. 

It [the archive] offers this really incredible opportunity to illustrate the full dimensionality of the family. Who we are as people is not just the moment that we meet each other. We are an accumulation of all the things we’ve experienced up until that moment.

Two images from Time, both of Fox Rich. The top image is of Fox as a young woman, the bottom of Fox in the present day, 20 years later.
A young Fox Rich in the home videos (top) and present day Fox Rich (bottom). Images courtesy of Amazon.

7R: How did you think about the concept of time in the structure of the film? We jump back and forth in time, and you don’t overly signal where we are in time at any given moment.

Garrett Bradley: I think that the way in which we were able to achieve that was to really steadfastly focus on the mythological way of telling a love story, of really focusing on love and unity. That allowed us to be perpetually moving forward but also go backwards at the same time. If the film was coming from a direction that was squarely rooted in statistics or facts or the legal system or the bureaucracy, a lot of the details of the case itself, it would have been not only difficult [to structure], but also inaccurate. But love, even though it’s seemingly abstract, is something that truly, not to sound corny, stands the test of time and can be entered at any point throughout the film.

7R: How did you think about what the structure of a love story is and how to convey that?

Garrett Bradley: I think that the structure of it is that it never stopped! (laughs) It started, and then it never stopped, you know? Nothing was going to separate them. Part of the story is how they did that. How does one accomplish keeping your loved ones close to you over the course of 21 years? How do you keep your faith in love itself over the course of that time? We see Fox go through the ebb and flow of that emotion and the effects and consequences and sacrifices that it takes to maintain that goal over the course of that time. That is what is guiding the film, to a certain extent. That’s what creates scenes.

7R: Can you tell me a bit more about how you planned the shoot with Fox? The film is so stylistically meticulous and thought out. 

Garrett Bradley: I shot list actually.  I’m often right next to the cameraperson that I’m working with, zooming myself, or racking focus. It’s usually just the two of us. I’m intimately involved with where the camera’s going and how we want to see things. Not all camera people like to work that way, but I’ve been really fortunate. 

With every documentary filmmaker, there’s that question of, you’re going to have to stop at a certain point, and you don’t know when you’re going to be at that point. For me, I just had to say to myself, every day, if this is the last day of shooting, what will I have thus far? What’s something that I can accomplish that’s not aspirational, that’s not hyper-focused on some perceived or predetermined ending of what the film should be? 

If there’s one thing that people [take] away from this film, I want it to be that the system is so entangled in daily life that one cannot separate themselves from the bureaucracy and the pain of the prison industrial complex when you’re a part of it. So I focused a lot on her [Fox’s] daily life and the family’s daily life. The moments in their life that were important to them  still showed us when the absence or the presence of the system had a daily effect.

7R: How do you shot list a documentary?

Garrett Bradley: I’m not just entering somebody’s life, and I don’t see them as subjects. I get to know people, and I let them get to know me. I want there to be a level of vulnerability and understanding with one another, so much so that I can ideally anticipate how they’re going to move through space.

How does Fox move through her office? Where does she like to sit? The Xerox machine is over there, and her chair is over there, and the computer is over there. I was really trying to understand her behaviour so I could anticipate things and make intentional formal choices. That’s different than not knowing, and therefore, having to be there for every single moment of a person’s life, and usually behind them, chasing after them.

7R: I loved the scene where we see Fox give an impassioned speech. You often cut to the faces of the people in the audience, intently listening and being moved by what she’s saying. Can you tell me about how you approached shooting that speech?

Garrett Bradley: We had two cameras. Actually, a huge source of inspiration for that was Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970), a beautiful film. The opening of that is at USC, and it’s a conversation with white students and members of the Black Panther party who are discussing what white allyship is. 

It’s a really important film for this current moment. So much of the way in which those moments are captured is about really revelling in the faces of the audience and really wanting to be with people. I wanted viewers to feel as if they are placed in that room with Fox and the audience. 

[Shooting Fox with] Dutch low angles comes from looking at propaganda films, posters, and imagery and thinking about how we create heroes in our culture. I was working off a lot of the same aesthetic premises.

7R: How did you approach shooting the scenes of Fox waiting for phone calls about her husband’s legal case and being put on hold? The waiting feels so fraught and excruciating.

Garrett Bradley: While we were shooting, there wasn’t much to do. I think it goes back to this thing of being able to anticipate behaviour and being really confident about where you’re putting your camera. I didn’t feel like we needed to do anything. I felt so intimately connected with Fox, and I felt the camera was not looking at her; we were with her. 

It was kind of the same thing with the edit. There wasn’t a whole lot of overthinking that needed to happen. It [had to be] a real-time experience. I wanted viewers to be with Fox and experience time in its most literal sense with her in those moments. Time is not literal throughout the rest of the film.

7R: I really loved how you chose to introduce Fox to the audience in the present day, with a scene of her talking with a cameraman who’s shooting her for a commercial, but she’s directing him. We meet her as a woman with agency over her own image. Why did you choose this as an introduction?

Garrett Bradley: I thought it was really important for exactly those reasons. I wanted people to meet her on her terms right away. 

When we were editing, there were a lot of questions around, “But Garrett, where are you as a filmmaker? Are you letting her take over the framing and understanding?” From some viewers in early stages of the cut, there was distrust of what the truth was and who was in control, which I thought was really fascinating. 

I think it reveals when we become comfortable, as viewers, about who’s in control and who isn’t. When we have a strong Black woman who’s in control and is of herself and of her surroundings, all of a sudden, we take issue with it or become uncomfortable with this idea of objectivity or neutrality. I clearly was there, as a filmmaker, because I’m choosing what to show, what not to show, and how to show it. Which is the other 50% of it. 

Fox Rich and her husband, Robert, kiss in their car in grainy black and white home video footage.
Fox Rich (left) and her husband, Robert (right), in a home video. Image courtesy of Amazon.

7R: Fox’s husband, Robert, is rarely seen in the film. How did you make sure we felt his absence?

Garrett Bradley: That that was a huge part of the conversation: how to speak to and illustrate issues around erasure and invisibility without reinforcing the same problems. We had to point to it through empty chairs or the emotion articulated through the family itself. But we also made sure that, at the end of the film, there was a moment when we hear from Robert. We see him, and he has an opinion and something to say. That was so crucial. 

Part of the incredible and unfortunate challenge, and one of the failures I feel, honestly, as a filmmaker, is that incarceration is this seemingly invisible issue. It’s very difficult to get into prisons and to see what’s going on there. The access is extremely limited. There’s 2.3 million people who are incarcerated in the country, and the fact that people aren’t completely outraged by the state of it, as a system, is because they can’t see it. 

When we think about war nowadays and what was happening in Vietnam, people were protesting and were outraged by the war in Vietnam because, for the first time, they could see it on their TVs. And then quickly thereafter, they were met with greenscreens and a neutrality and absence of what was happening. People tap out. 

Angola, which was where Robert was incarcerated for 21 years, was made up of several different plantations. It was named after the people who were enslaved and brought over from Angola. It was consolidated into a single plantation, and then it was turned into a penitentiary. It’s 18,000 acres of land, which even our drone could not capture the magnitude of. There are so many ways we can think about where we are in this moment. So much of it has to do with image-making and the lack of it, as well.

7R: How did you approach crafting the film’s ending? There’s a delicate balance there between portraying the joy of a family reunited but also ensuring that you keep the injustice of an ongoing fight and everything they lost in two decades in focus. 

Garrett Bradley: I felt like there could be a whole other film about what happens next, about Robert’s re-entry process and about the family’s next journey. It was important for me to end the film where it did as Fox and the family had accomplished what they sought out to do. 

The last few scenes of the film are a last attempt at getting [viewers] to question the worthiness of that sentence, the worthiness of time spent and given. What did it really accomplish? My hope is that, at a minimum, you understand the privilege of one’s own access to intimacy. 

7R: How did you think about the sound design in the film?

Garrett Bradley: I work with Zack Howard, who has mixed and designed a lot of my films. I love sound. I love playing with it. I try to start working with it as early as possible in the editing process because I think we respond to sound as much as we do to images. 

We thought about certain themes we wanted to exist throughout the work, including cars, highways, and movement. We inserted those throughout the sonic landscape even when they weren’t necessary in a literal sense.

Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction

Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction is a tour through contemporary creative nonfiction, aka hybrid or experimental documentaries. Discover films that push the boundaries of the documentary form.

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LFF Interview: 180° Rule reveals the secrets and lies of a patriarchal society

Farnoosh Samadi on her provocative new film, 180° Rule, which confronts the horrific consequences of robbing women of their agency. Read more coverage of the London Film Festival.

Director Farnoosh Samadi in front of a still from her film, 180 Degree Rule. The text reads: Interview.
Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule reveals the secrets and lies of a patriarchal society.

When I saw 180° Rule at TIFF, I knew I had to get in touch with writer-director Farnoosh Samadi and pick her brain about what I’d just watched. The film is a meticulously-crafted drama that devolves into a psychological thriller when tragedy strikes partway through. It’s a provocative film, and it’s already polarising critics, but I admire its boldness. I appreciated the film even more after I saw Michel Franco’s New Order at the festival, a film that tries to be provocative by showing grizzly violence, but only comes off as excessive and insulting. Take note, Franco: the complex and harrowing moral choices the protagonist in 180° Rule faces are far more provocative than any of the violence in New Order.

Samadi also co-wrote one of the best short films of the year, Exam, and like that film, 180° Rule is a story of a woman in Iran who suffers under the ever-increasing weight of a dangerous secret. “When I decided to make my first feature film, I thought of making a trilogy about lies, secrets, and their consequences in the lives of the people.” Samadi wrote to me over email. “This is the main idea of my short films, too, and it’s such an important concept to me.” In addition to her three shorts — The Silence (2016), Gaze (2017), and The Role (2018) — Samadi has co-written several films with acclaimed Iranian director Ali Asgari, including the feature film Disappearance (2017). Their latest collaboration, the short film Witness, screened alongside 180° Rule at the London Film Festival. 

In 180° Rule, (which was loosely based on a true story that happened to a friend of hers), we follow school teacher Sara (Sahar Dolatshahi) leading up to and in the wake of a fateful decision: she chooses to defy her husband when he forbids her from going to a family member’s wedding. He was going to accompany Sara and their young daughter on the car journey to the wedding, which would take them out of Tehran and into the countryside. But when a work engagement comes up that clashes with the trip, he decides that if he isn’t going, then nobody is. Dolatshahi plays Sara as a woman who’s weary of patriarchal society but strong-willed all the same; it’s no surprise that she doesn’t take no for an answer. Instead, Sara says goodbye to her husband at the airport, and then drives to the wedding with her daughter, her husband none the wiser. 

A closeup of Sahar Dolatshahi as Sara with a bandage on her head.
Sahar Dolatshahi in Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule.

Samadi described to me the patriarchal society in Iran as “a society that is fighting between tradition and modernism. On one hand, a woman has rights such as working outside, driving, etc., and on the other hand, she needs her husband’s permission for a short trip.” This fight is dramatised through Sara, an opinionated woman who has freedom insofar as she has a job and a driver’s licence, but whose life is still somewhat dictated by her husband. Yes, Sara rebels against him by secretly defying his orders. But the joyful scenes of her enjoying the singing, dancing, and food at the wedding are a pitiful trade-off for the horror, shame, and guilt that follows the next morning. In fact, even in this fairly low-key section of the film, a taut thriller-esque score creates dread that prefigures the hardships Sara is about to face. Samadi told me, she “wanted the audience to feel the panic before discovering the reason.”

I’m skirting around talking about the pivotal plot development that comes 30 minutes into 180° Rule because it’s best you go into the film not knowing the specifics — all the better to experience the same shock and helplessness that Sara feels. “The pace of the film is something close to the reality of our lives,” Samadi wrote to me, elaborating on her decision to include this plot ‘twist’ and whether or not she wants to provoke her audience. “Everything changes very quickly and is chained to the force and regulations of our society… I knew it would be a shocking film from the start. Rewriting each of the key dramatic scenes, I would go through an awful emotional ride and would lose a complete working day before I could get back together. So I think it was obvious to me what it could do to the audience.”

Rather than suggesting that this ‘twist’ is some kind of cosmic punishment that Sara deserves for rebelling, Samadi uses it as an extreme setup through which to explore the horror of being a woman in a society that doesn’t respect your agency. It’s a tragic accident, but it happens at the wedding — if Sara hadn’t rebelled everything would be OK — so the rest of the film grapples with Sara’s responsibility for what happened in the eyes of those around her. The film isn’t too interested in asking whether Sara is at fault or not; she feels immense guilt, but, as her family reassures her, it’s nothing she could have foreseen. Instead, Samadi explores how a society that places moral responsibility on women to do as they’re told breeds shame and guilt and places unfair responsibility — both in the eyes of others and in the eyes of the law — on women.

A family gathers happily together at a wedding, all dressed in white.
Sara’s family at the wedding in Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule.

“In a male-dominant world, us women are left with chests full of secrets and untold stories,” Samadi wrote to me. “It doesn’t end with Iran. In all male-dominant communities, women are under so much suppression and pressure.” This weight lies heavily on Sara throughout the last two acts of 180° Rule; Dolatshahi looks constantly ill and exhausted. Not only is Sara processing the tragedy, she’s also panicking over how to explain it to her husband who will undoubtedly blame her. She settles on an elaborate lie that she can only keep up so long. In Samadi’s words, “We [women] learn to lie because we can’t bear the consequences.” Some viewers may bristle at how extreme and perhaps even callous Sara’s lie is, but as Samadi told me, “We all act differently facing the same circumstances. We might behave strangely because we are raised in different cultures and with various mindsets, so morality may have numerous meanings for us.”

In order to critique patriarchal society writ large, Samadi decided to expand the story to include a parallel story to Sara’s: Sadaf, a pregnant student at Sara’s school, comes to Sara for confidential as Sadaf is afraid of how Sadaf’s family will react to the pregnancy. Like Sara, Sadaf finds herself in a dilemma with no good solution: either ask her family for help and be punished, or deal with it alone and risk harming herself. 

Sara's husband looks toward the camera, concerned.
Sara’s husband in Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule.

Samadi explained, “The story of the young pregnant girl is [related to] the script I wrote for, Disappearance (2017) [directed and co-written by Ali Asgari]. I had the impulse to use my previously-made characters from my other films, so I added the pregnant young girl [to 180° Rule] and chained her story to Sara’s. Even this tiny parallel narration would be a moral challenge for the audience. Which one is right: to say or not to say? I personally love this sub-story. A part of this film is about the mothers and daughters in various ages and their problems in this society: Sara and Raha [Sara’s daughter], Sara and her mother, Sadaf and her mother.”

Farnoosh Samadi is by no means done telling bold and provocative stories about secrets and lies. In fact, she’s planning a trilogy. “When I decided to make my first feature film,” she explained, “I thought of making a trilogy about lies, secrets, and their consequences in the lives of the people. This is the main idea of my short films, too, and it’s such an important concept to me. The story of 180° Rule was long with me, and I thought it was a perfect first episode of the trilogy… Right now, I’m [working on] the next episode of this trilogy. This episode is a psychodrama with a male leading role who is keeping a secret which has enormous [consequences] in his life. The main plot is already done, and I am preparing to start the screenplay.”

READ: More coverage of the London Film Festival >>

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‘This film is a cemetery’: Kirsten Johnson on Dick Johnson is Dead

Kirsten Johnson discusses Dick Johnson is Dead, her surreal documentary about her father’s dementia, and how it made her think differently about life and death. The film is now on Netflix.

A still from Dick Johnson is dead in which Dick Johnson lies on the pavement after being struck on the head by an air conditioner. In the foreground of the image is director Kirsten Johnson, who is superimposed onto the still. The image also features the text, 'Interview.'
‘This film is a cemetery’: Kirsten Johnson on Dick Johnson is Dead. Images courtesy of Netflix.

In Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, she cut together a collage of outtakes from her 20 years as a documentary cinematographer, including footage of subjects ranging from Edward Snowden to survivors of war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina. Johnson herself is rarely glimpsed on screen, but we feel her behind the camera, making choices about when and how to shoot scenes that range from the banal to the horrific. Cameraperson is a study in documentary ethics and the role of the voyeur who drifts into someone else’s life and trauma, captures it, and then leaves it behind.

Johnson’s latest film as director, Dick Johnson is Dead, is a bracingly frank self-portrait in which she turns the camera on herself and her titular father, a jovial psychiatrist who has just been diagnosed with dementia. It’s also an absurdist comedy: in between vérité scenes of father and daughter spending time together, the pair attempt to cheat death by staging Dick’s death over and over again, with the help of stunt performers. One of the first scenes sees Dick walking absentmindedly on the street, only to be struck on the head by an air conditioner falling from an apartment window. In another, he falls down the stairs of his home and lies motionless at the bottom. As morbid as these scenarios are, Johnson brings levity to them by revealing the process by which they were staged. We see a woman explaining how a fake blood dispenser works, a stunt man enthusiastically pitching various causes of death, and Johnson and her father chatting and laughing together behind the scenes. 

Johnson is constantly pulling the rug out from under us so we question the images we’re watching; she’s unafraid of highlighting how ‘documentary’ cinema curates and redesigns real life just as much as fiction films do.. For example, the film starts out with conventional voiceover narration but eventually cuts to footage of Johnson in her closet recording that voiceover, sometimes doing multiple takes to try out different intonations. In doing so, she gives a physical form and fallibility to the omniscient narrator. This is reemphasised when we see her recording narration about her father’s death as if it’s in the past, only for her to open the closet door to her smiling and very-much-alive father.

The film is full of little surprises like this that question how we think about death, especially when a disease like dementia takes a person slowly over the course of many years. In a later scene, Johnson presents Dick’s funeral as if it’s real, but then cuts to Dick himself watching the staged-for-the-cameras funeral through a window in the church door. His presence brings levity to a sombre scene; Dick is still here to witness his loved ones celebrating his life. But this jars with the image that follows: one of Dick’s best friends, Ray, who spoke at the funeral, sobs in the corner of the lobby. Dick may not be dead yet, but Ray is still grieving the impending loss of his friend’s mind, soon to be followed by his body.

Dick Johnson is Dead is both the film it is and a film about its own making rolled into one. Johnson doesn’t let a single frame pass without revealing her motivations — selfish or selfless — for capturing it. She features on screen her conversations with Dick (who is very much a collaborator in the project) and with his healthcare workers about whether or not to embark on the project. We witness Johnson deliberating over what to do before she calls off a roadside stunt when her father becomes confused and scared by the fake blood and the nearby traffic. In one moment, Johnson even states aloud that she’s being paid to do this — something I don’t think I’ve ever seen declared so bluntly in a documentary before.

I spoke with Kirsten Johnson over the phone about Dick Johnson is Dead, documentary sound design, finding a label for her film, and how she’s always “searching for ways to include that truth that usually gets left out.”

Seventh Row (7R): I typically start interviews by asking a director about the genesis of their project, but what’s so cool about Dick Johnson is Dead is I don’t need to do that. You’re very upfront about the how and why you made the film in the film itself.

Kirsten Johnson: (laughs) Exactly, I stole that question from you! I love that you got that. That is often a question one is asked when one makes a film. A thing has emerged that is unexpected, so the question is, where did this come from? I always think that ideas come from many sources. In many ways, this film is still a mystery to me.

7R: One of my favourite things about Dick Johnson is Dead is that the film reveals its own process. You’re constantly peeling back layers of artifice: you include footage of yourself recording the film’s narration; you talk about the fact that you’re being paid to do this. Why was it important for you to do that?

Kirsten Johnson: Life is process. We often set ourselves up to think that things are fixed or things in the future will be different. [We tell ourselves that] people will change and then we can love them… all these things that are out of sync with the actual process of life. 

Part of it was just accepting our own unknowability, even to ourselves. Why am I mad right now? Why am I suddenly crying? I think any long-term friendship or longtime love, if you look at the process of it from some particular perspective — whether that’s looking back at it or looking at your hopes for it — is full of all these contradictions. It’s not what you thought it was going to be. Making a film is the same way. 

People always say, “Oh this film wasn’t what I was expecting it to be!” Yeah that’s right! That’s any interesting film. We deliberately went into this film [Dick Johnson is Dead] saying we won’t know what this film is going to be because the dementia is ahead of us. We don’t know when death is coming. How do we take all this not knowing, and take this craft of cinema that we love to, engage with and be unafraid of the not knowing?

7R: But this is also a film with a budget and elaborate staged sequences. Did those elements clash with you embracing the unknown?

Kirsten Johnson: For one, it’s amazing that we ended up getting a budget for this film, because it’s such a risky, strange film. Of course, once we got a budget, because our protagonist has dementia, he can’t do all those expensive things I wanted him to do! 

We had this crazy travel budget to take us to Hong Kong and Ghana, and suddenly we can’t do that. But that I knew. I knew it [the process of making the film] was going to keep throwing me those kinds of curveballs. 

What we [decided] was that I would shoot in unexpected situations. [For example, when] my dad needed to sell his house, I wasn’t ready for it; he wasn’t ready for it; I was in shock… so I’m filming in that situation. Then OK, [I ask myself,] what were the meaningful things that happened in [that situation]? Then I’ll build a death back into it. So we would let real life lead us, and then we would go back in time to a moment of significance within that documentary evidence and attempt to craft this fictional moment of death within that. Sometimes, it worked, and sometimes, it didn’t. 

We were also thinking a lot about camera language and the fact that Cameraperson exists, so people know something about who I am behind the camera. Maybe they’ve seen that film; maybe they haven’t. But this film also establishes that I’m behind the camera [as Johnson is a visible and audible presence in the film]. So what would I do if my father had a heart attack and an ambulance came? Not what would someone do, but what would I do? 

By the time we got to [shooting the fantastical sequences set in] Heaven [which are shot on a soundstage], my father’s dementia was advancing such that we realised that slow motion could help us. We could slow down the speed of cinema, and then his smile would last longer. He could suddenly dance if we were doing it in slow motion. We were thinking, How can the craft of cinema give us the tools to deal with what has now changed?

We also went to Skywalker [Sound Studio] three different times for sound mixing. Really early on, we tried different sounds over the deaths. It was like, do we take it comical? Ooh, the thunk [sound of the] head on the pavement really is a death blow. Do we make it easy? Do we make it hard? We learned how sound could do that [first, and] then went back out [to shoot] like, Ooh I’ve got an idea for a stunt, let’s do this! 

Dick Johnson sits amongst a mountain of cotton on a soundstage, surrounded by film crew.
Dick on a soundstage shooting the Heaven sequences of Dick Johnson is Dead. Image courtesy of Netflix.

7R: That’s so fascinating about the sound! Could you talk to me a bit more about how you approached sound design in the film?

Kirsten Johnson: Pete Horner did the sound mix on Cameraperson. He came onto it really late in the process and [his work] changed it so much. One of the first things he said was, “Do you really want the beginning of the film to be so annoying?” And I was like, “What?!” We’d struggled with that little bit of text at the beginning of the film [that explains the conceit of the film]. I’d written it and rewritten it. We’d committed to the text, but it wasn’t working. 

Pete said, “All you’ve done is you’ve extended the sound out from the shot that follows,” which was the sound of a motor scooter in Bosnia going “EEE.” It was this really annoying sound. And he was like, “Maybe you want to invite people into this movie. How’s this?” He put birds in the forest [over the text]. It was the first time I could read the text at the opening of the movie, and I was like, Oh that’s a lovely text! It’s fine! It was so comical because I’d been fixated on image and not hearing sound, trying to rewrite that text and failing without realising there was this terrible, annoying sound behind it. 

For the scene [in Cameraperson] with the baby, I filmed that baby struggling for his life for hours and hours and hours. It was impossible to distill that feeling into so short a time. And then Pete was like, “Let’s remove all the sound once the baby is born. Take away any sounds the baby makes.” And then the audience is just hanging on wondering, Will this baby breathe or not? Then 45 seconds is actually a really long time. He taught me all these things about how sound affects the experience of time in a movie. 

He [Pete Horner] did something with [the scene of] my mom in Wyoming [in Cameraperson]. [It’s a scene where she’s outside, and] it’s really windy. He put 11 different kinds of wind on it, and then he put a subwoofer [an amplifier that can play low-pitched sound frequencies] on it. He was like, “I really want it to be like she’s being blown off the planet. This is her death.” There were some things he’d done where I just wished I’d known it was possible before we locked the picture edit. 

[On Dick Johnson is Dead,] we decided let’s go really early, before we have any ideas. We went into a session [with Pete] with no fictional material and just looked at the documentary material and asked, How can we change the documentary material? 

The horn that Ray [Dick’s friend] blows [at Dick’s staged funeral], that’s not the sound that Ray’s horn made. We realised that we could make a sound that could go to the edge of a place where it’s like, Is that real? Is that not real? And then cut in people’s reactions [to the real sound]?

7R: Sound design in documentaries isn’t talked about that much because the idea that you’re changing the sound to something that isn’t technically ‘real’ is kind of taboo. But I love that idea that documentary sound design is a way to translate the feeling of a larger piece of footage into a shorter piece of footage.

Kirsten Johnson: That’s right. Because filming a documentary is experiential. Watching it is experiential. But the difference between being the body in the space and time and being the person sitting watching it [is vast]. How can you bridge that gap? I’ve learned a lot about how sound can do that differently than how image can do it. And I’ve brought that to this movie.

7R: One moment that really struck me was when we meet Joanne, the woman who makes your father chocolate fudge cake. At the end of her appearance on film, there’s text on screen informs us that she died shortly after. It made me sit differently with the footage I’d just seen.

Kirsten Johnson: That was just a moment when we were laughing and making cake, and now she is no more. And that’s the way life often is. It’s these banal moments that are the vital moments. They’re the moments that you treasure that you can’t get back. Nobody can make the cake like Joanne can make the cake! (laughs) You’re never going to taste her chocolate cake again. 

I wanted to honour Joanne. The thing you said about how there’s a sacredness around the sound in documentary… those questions around what can you mess with, what do you need to honour [came up here, too]. If you’d left that cake scene not knowing that Joanne has died… it’s a fine scene: it’s nice; it’s just friends having chocolate cake. But once you realise that [she’s dead, you realise that] this film is a cemetery. 

Several of the producers lost their parents over the course of making this film. The crew, as well as the people on screen, went through grieving and death while making the film because that’s what living is. We were searching for ways to include that truth that usually gets left out in a film.

7R: Do you think that you approached capturing and editing images of your father differently than you would someone younger or healthier because you knew these were the last images that would exist of him?

Kirsten Johnson: Definitely, because we were actually losing spaces and places and capacities. I have an image of my father driving a car, but he can no longer drive a car. 

There was also this sense that we were Frankensteining him back together. The dementia was pulling him apart and stretching out his relationship to time. In real life, he might be repeating and repeating a phrase, but in the movie, I could use those as takes and cut out seven of them and have a conversation. There were questions of how much of the dementia do we leave in, how much do we rebuild him?

Dick stares just past the camera, mouth agape in awe, a feather boa around his neck.
A closeup of Dick Johnson during one of the Heaven sequences of Dick Johnson is Dead. Image courtesy of Netflix.

7R: There are all these bait and switches in the film, where we think we’re watching an event unfold, but it’s then revealed that we’re seeing someone act out an event that hasn’t even happened yet. Like the fake funeral and the narration. How did you think about structuring these moments to play with the audiences’ expectations? 

Kirsten Johnson: Myself and Nels Bangerter, the wonderful editor I work with, were just like, assume the audience is smarter than you. We all know how thrilling it is to have a film do something that we don’t see coming. We were really interested in messing around with those kinds of things and finding a way to do that. That was an active quest. How do we do that in the service of comedy? How do we do that in the service of honouring the real people who exist and questioning what death actually is? 

I really did change my relationship to thinking about death and memory in the making of this film. My father is no longer himself in certain ways, and yet he still is. On a very simple, medical level, there are all these different [levels of death]: there’s death of the breath, death of the heart, death of the brain, the death of memory… Even if you completely medicalise it, it’s [death is] still spread out over a much longer spectrum of time than any of us would expect. 

I’ve sat by a couple of bedsides where people are doing the death rattle, which is this crazy sound where it sounds like someone’s drowning. It will just go on and on and on, and then all of a sudden, they’ll stop breathing for a while ,and then suddenly they’ll sit up again. It’s this total mindfuck: where is life and death? 

I think about it so much for everyone in this pandemic. There are families not able to be with their family in the moment of death, or even in the two weeks preceding the moment of death. In this moment in time, where is death located? A million people have died on the planet and have we grieved them in any way? Can we see their faces? Do we have their stories? No. Right? 

And yet I believe that this global grief is going to impact us. We will look back on this time, and it will have a significance that we don’t understand yet. We don’t even know when we get to look back. We’re in the long middle of it. We don’t know when the end of this is. 

Those are all the questions that I’m asking of the audience. It was never just about me and my dad. It was about how do we use cinema to ask big questions together?

Dick Johnson lies on the street playing dead as filmmaker Kirsten Johnson perches above him, motioning with her arms as a way to direct her crew.
Kirsten Johnson (right) directing her father, Dick Johnson (below), on the set of Dick Johnson is Dead. Image courtesy of Netflix.

7R: One of my favourite moments in the film is the lovely little detail of your father enjoying a bowl of chocolate ice cream. How did you work out what vérité footage you wanted to include in between the staged scenes?

Kirsten Johnson: You’re seeing a professional chocolate eater display his technique with a spoon in that moment! (laughs) That is 88 years of love of the game. My father loves eating chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream. If I was to ask, who is my father? It is a person who loves chocolate. That is one of the most profound descriptors of who he is among many other things. 

It’s also that thing of really acknowledging, in the moments of most difficulty and uncertainty, such as this moment in history, that there are still great pleasures available to us. We honour the pain and suffering that happens in the world by just really enjoying a spoonful of ice cream.

7R: The term documentary has so many connotations that it can feel quite restrictive for a film like yours, which takes such a unique approach to the form. How do you feel about the label?

Kirsten Johnson: With Cameraperson, I was always being called a cameraman whenever I went out on the street with a camera, so I finally claimed [the term] ‘cameraperson’. I’m really interested in looking for new language, and I’m also happy and interested to use many terms for things. Someone said to me, “This film is a memoir,” and I was like “Oh, of course it is!” But that hadn’t even occurred to me. I like that this film could have many names. 

Because of the great expansion of creative nonfiction that is happening in the documentary ecosystem right now, I think that we’re all really excited about what we can do. Look at the work of Chloé Zhao for example, The Rider and Nomadland. There’s no question to me that Frances McDormand’s acting [in Nomadland] was better because she was surrounded by people who had lived through things and she had to rise to their lived experience. It was different than doing that with a bunch of actors. She was not relying on the things that she usually relies upon. 

Take All These Sleepless Nights, as an example. I took a bunch of students to see that, and they were like, “This isn’t a documentary!” I was like, “You’re telling me this isn’t a documentary of the emotions you feel when you’re young?” And they were like, “Yeah it totally is.” I don’t know what you want to name it, but I love this film, and I can’t name any other film that transports you to youth in the same way that film does. 

I’m interested in multiple names for things. Like life and death, documentary and fiction is all too simple, too binary, and too small. I actually would love it if you came up with a name for this movie, if you gave it a genre. That would be really fun for me.

7R: The term I’ve taken to using for films like yours is creative nonfiction. 

Kirsten Johnson: ‘Nonfiction’ still feels to me like… what is that? The negatively defined thing. But it’s not bad. We’re going to find something!

Dick Johnson is Dead is now available on Netflix.

This is an excerpt. Read the full interview in our ebook on creative nonfiction…

Explore the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction

Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction is a tour through contemporary creative nonfiction, aka hybrid or experimental documentaries. Discover films that push the boundaries of the documentary form.

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An in-depth conversation with the women behind Mouthpiece

Director Patricia Rozema and actors Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, all of whom co-wrote Mouthpiece together, discuss adapting Mouthpiece from stage to screen, telling an unapologetically Canadian and feminist story, and much more.

This interview is an excerpt. The full interview is only available in The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.

This article was originally published on June 9th, 2019.

The best movie of 2019, Mouthpiece, is Canadian, set in Toronto, and written and directed by women and about women. Director Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) — in collaboration with Toronto theatremakers-actors-writers Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava — has effortlessly adapted a piece of physical theatre into a naturalistic film that gets up close and intimate with the characters. Mouthpiece’s innovative conceit is that the main character, thirty-something Torontonian Cassandra, is simultaneously played by two actors, Nostbakken and Sadava. This dual performance, where the actors sometimes mirror each other and sometimes diverge or even conflict, allows them to represent two sides of a complex woman who is constantly in conflict with herself. It’s a meditation on the things we think and the things we do, and how they can be contradictions, how every moment is charged with multiple emotions.

Set over the course of a couple of days in the dead of winter, Cassandra grieves the unexpected death of her mother (Toronto theatre treasure Maev Beaty), as she tries to write the eulogy. It’s made even more difficult for her because her last interaction with her mother was a nasty fight, and their relationship was always tense: Cassandra both worshiped her mother and was frustrated by her because she was unable to see her own worth and meet her own potential. As Cassandra grieves, she also goes through an existential feminist crisis, realising that so many of her choices have been a reaction to or rebellion against her mother; it goes so deep she doesn’t even know where the rebellion ends and she begins.

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After Mouthpiece premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, the film was selected as one of Canada’s Top Ten films of 2018. We at Seventh Row declared Mouthpiece our favourite Canadian film to have premiered in 2018 on our podcast about Canadian Cinema, and we went in even deeper on Mouthpiece on this week’s podcast. Continuing our coverage on this amazing film, I talked with writer-director Patricia Rozema and writer-actors Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava about their collaboration in adapting the play Mouthpiece from stage to screen and telling this timely, feminist story.

Turning Mouthpiece the play into Mouthpiece the film

Seventh Row: What made you decide to do a film of the play Mouthpiece?

Patricia Rozema: I saw it and just loved it. I didn’t know what kind of film it would be, but it would be a great jumping off point. My jumping off points are often dance or a field. It always is a very different thing that makes the movie so it wasn’t a stretch that this very different, very abstract, very lean play.

Amy Nostbakken: It’s the two of us playing one woman, wearing white bathsuits with nothing on stage except a white bathtub and microphone. We play all the characters and everything you see in the film, we do and we create the settings. One of the interesting parts of the translation from stage to screen was we did a preliminary shoot to make sure that we could act on film. We asked for it.

Patricia Rozema: Because everybody said, “How are you going to do that on film?” So I thought, “I’m going to do a little movie to show the investors.”

Amy Nostbakken: So we went to Patricia’s house and got into her bathtub and did the opening scene of the play, translating that into film. In the play, we sing a song in the dark, and then lights up, and we say, “I’m 30 years old. I live on Palmerston Ave. I woke up this morning, I masturbated, and checked my messages and found out that my Mom’s dead.”

It’s very texty. We say it in perfect unison. We describe everything. It’s just us, static, in the bathtub, doing a few simultaneous gestures.

To translate it to screen, I remember cutting it down, and cutting it down — now it’s still too wordy — and cutting it down for screen, and finally, it was no words. Of course!

Amy Nostbakken: We had the money to go, and our editor [Lara Johnston] read the script, and she said, “So much talk at the beginning!” So we threw it all out before we shot. It’s the whole thing: you show, don’t tell. When you can see, you don’t need all that text to talk.

Norah Sadava: In the play, you don’t see anything. We are putting you in a place, so it necessitated that we describe it. It’s hyper-stylized. And the play is largely sung. There’s a lot of singing in it. We sing harmony, a capella, our two voices, for almost the whole thing.

Patricia Rozema: The play is 60 minutes, but for the film, we added stuff.

Norah Sadava: We had more musical sequences in the screenplay than ended up in the final cut. We thought we could translate the music from the play into the film, but Amy ended up composing a completely new soundtrack.

The language of sound in cinema is just different than the language of sound in theatre. So we learned as we went along, trying to translate things, and figuring out which could stick and which couldn’t.

Mouthpiece
Still from Mouthpiece.

Patricia Rozema: Also, we shifted tone when we added the mother [to the film]. She wasn’t really fleshed out in the play. When we got together to write the screenplay — I’m a mother, and my mother died when I was their age — I felt like I had something authentic to add that wasn’t weird fakery for me to insert myself into this thing.

We just talked and brought out stories of their mothers, and my mother, and me as a mother, and put it all together. But it shifted in sympathy a little bit towards the mother. We could feel the great loss of her potential, the life she could have had and didn’t. In that shift, the music [in the play] was a little bit brassier and in your face, a little younger and angrier.

Norah Sadava: The whole play was a little big younger and angrier. Sweating, and muscles, veins, pulsing and popping.

Patricia Rozema: It found its way in between our age differences in terms of tones. So that’s where the music I think had to change as it couldn’t be as brassy or brash.

Norah Sadava: The play is also acutely about a woman going through a feminist awakening, finding out she’s a hypocrite, and dealing with the realities of that. The movie has that in it, but it’s also about grief, which the play just doesn’t really deal with.

Patricia Rozema: And unfulfilled potential.

Amy Nostbakken: We are looking at that through a feminist lens. We get to see two sides of this woman, but there are, of course, more than two, but all the time we are going, with the sex scene or getting dressed, “This is where we are spending our time? What do I wear? No, not this. Am I on the top or the bottom? What do I look like? Look at that stupid face I’m making. That’s not a real orgasm”

Norah Sadava: And not trusting her own voice, not figuring out how to speak without having all this raging insecurity, or beating oneself down, or not trusting to just speak.

Patricia Rozema: That’s what young women have really responded to, the self-compassion that it advises. It acknowledges how we beat ourselves up.

Adapting Mouthpiece from stage to screen in collaboration with Patricia Rozema

Seventh Row (7R): When you were adapting it, what was the process?

Patricia Rozema (PR): We just went to a little cottage I have by a lake, and they gave me a list of ingredients, and I bought food, and they did the cooking. And then we just talked. We had the computer out. I was mostly doing the computer, but sometimes, I would hand it over.

We would come up with stories that felt relevant to being a mother, to being a child of a mother, what it would be like to have a mother die, stories of how uncles died, and amassed human experience.

Everything came from our lives, and I love how these guys work. I didn’t know that at first, but it felt like that when I saw the play. I had such respect because it was so real, and it wasn’t posey, and we are all pretty suspicious: “You think that sounds smart, but that’s fake bullshit.”

Norah Sadava (NS): We took the play script, broke it apart, kept parts of it that we wanted to work with, and then adapted that dialogue to flesh it out to have a whole scene, for example, with the best friend, instead of, in the play, the best friend just leaves a message on her answering machine. What are they doing? They are smoking a joint in bed.

Then we get to develop these whole other characters, how they come into the story, and what part of Cassandra they support. And then we took some scenes that we had written in the play that we had not used. The grocery store [scene] was something that had been in the recycling bin from the play.

Patricia Rozema: And we went to the grocery store, and we walked around and imagined, “What would a crazy person do?”

And it was still pretty loose, what the point of the scene was when we got there, right? We arrived late to the idea this was about the ‘fierce mama’ image. There were other purposes to that scene at first, and then we landed on, “OK, she’s a super-hero, fucking amazing, you know…”

Norah Sadava: She can shop like no one else. And then some of the stuff was totally new content that the three of us developed by figuring out what the plot holes were.

We also knew we wanted a meatier narrative thread that had an arc that could hold the movie. So some of this stuff was totally new and was never in the play.

Patricia Rozema: And we kind of overestimated, I think, maybe, the need for that. Just having the hook of what happened at Christmas? Why does no one want her to say the eulogy? That was almost enough to pull everything together.

And then, giving the mother a story, about what happened to her attempt to get back into the workforce, that that was enough story to hang all of these events and moments and emotions on. We had another story in that we ended up throwing away in editing.

Norah Sadava: When we were coming to new stuff, it was like, “What will we get the chance to say?” We want to talk about childcare and the fact that women are not able to go back to the workforce because it’s not equal. How can we put that in, also? The things that we’re fired up about and we wanted to figure out how to jam them—

Patricia Rozema: Shoehorn them in there! Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that is a clear shoehorn.

Norah Sadava: I love that.

Patricia Rozema: I love that, too. But it was really hard in editing to make it feel like it had to be there. “Oh, there’s Ruthie!” We did think about that, is that true, did this happen, and what are we saying, and does it make us laugh or cry? Mostly laugh. We think it’s funnier than anyone else in the world. When we watch it, we laugh our heads off.

Norah Sadava: So much of the play and the movie is based on our lives in Toronto, biking around in the winter and getting caught in the streetcar tracks, and being in the hot mall with too many clothes on. It was really important to us. Patricia and [cinematographer] Catherine [Lutes] were both really excited to show Toronto.

Watch our cinematography masterclass with Catherine Lutes and Ashley Connor

Patricia Rozema: I haven’t done that since my first film, so that’s so thrilling to me. Usually, I’m walking around with a map, and the ADs [Assistant Directors] are pointing you in the direction, and you pick a location, and you’re not really sure the significance of it, and there I was: it’s Toronto. I know it, and the whole crew knew it, and it was really relaxing for me. In fact, I told the production designer, Zazu Myers, “This film is aggressively Canadian. So if there is something that can’t be anywhere else, put that in.”

There are little moments at the Christmas party where we had to fill a bit of a blank space in the party talk, and I asked [the actor] to make up a story with a snowblower and racoons and Canadian Tire. So that’s what you got.

And the Eaton Centre. We went guerilla in the Eaton Centre. They told us it was going to be $50,000 to shoot in there, so we just put a coat over the camera and shot.

Usually, when I work, the script is a little bit more settled… well it varies, but a little bit more stuck to in the process. These guys ad libbed a little bit here or there.

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Norah Sadava: Patricia would also just put us in a scenario and go, “OK, now, fight!!”

Patricia Rozema: Wrestle! When they were wrestling in the snow.

Norah Sadava: And push each other down! Take her down now!

Amy Nostbakken (AN): Or we were in the bathtub, and she was like, “OK, now, drown her!”

Norah Sadava: It was not scripted.

Amy Nostbakken: We were there going. “OK…” And we were shooting that scene early on, and I don’t know the protocol.

Patricia Rozema: Do I have to actually kill her?

Amy Nostbakken: Like, am I going to ruin this shot by going, “Really, how should we do this?” Instead, I just went for it.

Patricia Rozema: So fantastic. That, for me, is a real joy, to have people who don’t have a real strong sense of how things should be done. Because as soon as I feel like something should be done in a certain way, I discover, “Where did that rule come from? Why did I think that?”

So to have people who haven’t been on a thousand film sets and have a set of assumptions about process or style is really liberating for me and everybody. It makes the film freer.

Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava star in Mouthpiece directed by Patricia Rozema
Still from the film Mouthpiece directed by Patricia Rozema, based on the play Mouthpiece by Amy Nostbakken and Nora Sadava

Seventh Row (7R): My understanding is that the play Mouthpiece is physical theatre, and the film Mouthpiece is naturalistic, which is a very different acting style.

Patricia Rozema (PR): What is physical theatre?

Amy Nostbakken: Physical theatre, to me, reflects the process. You start with the body first, and you don’t write the lines first. You improvise everything. In order to create the character, you enter the body so you make those tiny decisions, what part of the body do they lead from, how fast do they walk. Do they walk in straight lines, or meandering?

Norah Sadava: Do they always look out of the corner of their eyes?

Amy Nostbakken: You make a bunch of choices, and you enter an improvisation with it, and you see what text comes out after you physicalize. So the end result, in terms of physical play, can be you are just watching theatre. But to me it speaks about the process. Most physical theatre, you end up doing a bunch of larger than life movement, which is of course true of Mouthpiece the play, which is extremely physical and gruelling and big.

It means that all the characters are kind of one-dimensional, other than Cassandra, because you are just doing little snapshots. In order to essentialize who a person is, you sort of create a one-dimensional cartoon of that person. So the aunt, and even the mother, the friend, it’s very punchy. And then when we translate it to screen, it’s like, “Oh yeah, they’re real people.” You have to be kinder to them.

Patricia Rozema: I discover that over and over in my filmmaking. When I did When Night is Falling, it’s a woman who is set to marry a guy, and then she falls in love with another woman. But there’s a preacher who is terrible about it and damning and says, “You can’t do that,” and “You people!” and all this sort of stuff.

But then, as soon as I was shooting the scene, he didn’t feel like a real person. I had to be nicer to him. I had to understand and be kinder to that terrible man who represented so much horribleness to me and my personal life. But good quality fiction demanded I was kinder to that character.

Norah Sadava: There was definitely. on set, especially when there was text that was right from the play in the film… we’ve done the play for four years, and it’s in us in a certain way, like muscle memory.

Amy Nostbakken: The play is so tight, tiny little movements we do together in sync. We breathe together.

Norah Sadava: So the camera would be rolling, and we’d do the thing like we do in the play, and then Patricia would go, “That was good. We got that. Now, do it like a normal person.” And you’d be like, “Oh yeah!” We had to unlearn, and then try to find it again, in a way that felt natural. It took a few times of that happening before we were like, “OK, now we understand. The play has to go.”

Patricia Rozema: Not the play, but the performance style. I have a very difficult relationship with theatre because it’s so big, and I love a raised eyebrow telling you the whole story. Or nothing. A stone face.

[Director Robert] Bresson calls actors models, and he says that the story should work if they do nothing. Never rely on the acting itself. What a sequence of shots are telling you is the film itself. And I kind of believe that, and the acting is a bonus. But it should be ever so subtle. I don’t know how I went to something that was so gestural, honest, and true, but something that big, and to think that it could be a movie.

I saw the play again after we made the movie, and I kind of had a little bit of a panic attack in retrospect: how did I think that could be a movie, and a realistic movie?

Norah Sadava: Everyone else who Patricia talked to about making it into a movie was like, “No! It won’t work.”

Amy Nostbakken: Just the conceit, two people playing one. It’s not going to happen.

Patricia Rozema: They say how are you going to do that? You just do it. But how? Well, you just put two people there. But that’s not real? I just said, “Yeah, that’s true.” I’m happy that I dared, and we all dared, and Oh Canada, that TeleFilm, Breaking Barriers, Ontario Creates, and then our beautiful angels — we actually went to real life human beings who love the arts who gave us their own money to do it. Thank god we had them.

Norah Sadava And it happened really fast. We went to camera within a year of meeting.

Patricia Rozema: It was just us coming up with stuff. You don’t even know how rare it is to have a whole film team, a whole film crew, and no one saying, “Wait a minute, that’s not what we talked about.”

Norah Sadava: Even on set. We were talking to everyone [like the costume designer and production designer] because we know this character, and we’d been living it for three years. We were like, “She’d never wear that. It’s ugly. Or it’s too good looking: put some more holes in it; it needs to be dirtier. Stop fixing my hair; it’s supposed to look shitty!”

Patricia Rozema: Do you know how hard it is to find actors who will do that? Who won’t have their hair brushed every minute? I’ve fought actors my whole life that want to be coiffed, to be lovely looking.

Norah Sadava: My mom said, “You know what’s one of my favourite things about the movie? How gross your hair looks all the time.”

Patricia Rozema: Someone else said, “I love the perpetual bedhead.”

Amy Nostbakken: When I see all the stills coming up for the PR, I’m like, “Yeah. It’s not very flattering.”

Norah Sadava: But it is important to us, on an activist level, to portray women in a way that’s truthful and not groomed and glossy, just human.

Seventh Row (7R): One of the opportunities when you are adding these other actors is that you actually get to interact with other characters. How did that change things for you when making the film version of Mouthpiece?

Norah Sadava (NS): It was fun. We barely acted with Maev [Beaty], as the mom, because most of her scenes are with the younger actor who plays Little Cassandra.

Amy Nostbakken (AN): The one I remember was [when she gives me] the [pink] sweater and then [I’m] screaming at her face.

Patricia Rozema: And also, “So you want me to whore myself out for a few extra bucks?”

Amy Nostbakken: They are all kind of combative.

Norah Sadava: I remember, several times, the actors we were in scenes with were going, “OK, which one of you am I allowed to look at? Am I allowed to see both of you? You’re the one. You’re not here. For them to figure out, it was hard.” Everyone, in the end, got it, but there was the learning process, like with the dad, the guy she sleeps with, and with the best friend Jess, going, “You’re not here. I’m ignoring you.”

Amy Nostbakken: It was weirder for them. For us, it was just, “I’m playing this scene.”

Patricia Rozema: Norah’s talking to them, and I’m smashing things.

Amy Nostbakken: We both get to play it out. What’s cool about the conceit of two women playing one is because you have two, you know, as Patricia was saying, we’re skeptical. We have a barf-o-meter that has a low threshold. Cassandra herself has a very low threshold of emotiveness: she doesn’t want to seem one way, whatever that way is.

Because you have two, one can get totally emotional when the other one doesn’t give a shit, or vice versa; one’s really pissed off, and the other one is flattered. It gives you license to just play out that one reaction. As a writer, I’m thinking in that way. That’s a joy to play. You just have to go for it, and you don’t have to doubt yourself.

Patricia Rozema: You can have a non-one note character even if each of you are only playing one note [at a time].

We had one reaction that I really liked during a rough cut, which was that it was thrilling to imagine that your best friend is inside you. I loved that idea.

Seventh Row: That’s interesting because they are so combative. She’s grieving, but she never hugs herself until the end.

Patricia Rozema: And there’s the bathroom [scene], after sex, when she’s wiping her tears.

Norah Sadava: But she still says, “Aw, blotchy face.” But definitely there’s no coddling of each other, because she’s all fucked up in her head. She’s not hugging herself.

Patricia Rozema: The idea was that when they come together, at the end, as one, that that is longed for. That that will be more satisfying if they are never quite together. The only closeness they show is when they go into sync, when they’re doing stuff in perfect synchronicity. We were trying to create a longing for unity so that the ending would feel completely earned.

Norah Sadava: I think that Maev [Beaty] said [Cassandra] is her [own] best friend when we were shooting [the scene where we’re] laying in bed, watching the romantic comedy, and joking with each other. There’s a little bit of kindness in some moments, but it is mostly combat.

Patricia Rozema: I felt very lucky to make this movie, to have this artistic authenticity and energy, and to make it in my own city, and talk about things that are urgent and of the moment. It’s very freeing.

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Discover the best Canadian films of 2018 and 2019 through conversations with the filmmakers, guided by the Seventh Row editors in our inaugural annual book, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.

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TIFF Interview: Michelle Latimer on Indigenous agency in Inconvenient Indian

Michelle Latimer discusses Inconvenient Indian, her award winning essay film, and reclaiming cultural images of Indigenous people. Keep up to date with our TIFF ’20 coverage.

Editor’s Note: Shortly after this interview was published, the CBC published an investigation into Michelle Latimer’s claims of Indigeneity, which appear to be false. We have kept the interview live as it’s one of the few records of Latimer’s thoughts on her work and her claims to Indigeneity before she stopped talking to the press. We are aware that there may be false claims in this article.

An Indigenous man in a traditional headdress surveys the landscape in Inconvenient Indian. In the foreground of the image is director Michelle Latimer. The text on the images reads 'Interview'.
TIFF Interview: Michelle Latimer on Indigenous agency in Inconvenient Indian. Background image courtesy of TIFF, foreground image courtesy of the NFB.

The 2020 Toronto International Film Festival was the year of Michelle Latimer, the only filmmaker boasting two works in the lineup: a documentary, Inconvenient Indian, and the first two episodes of her narrative TV series Trickster. Her two works were also among the very best to be programmed at the festival, with Inconvenient Indian picking up two prestigious awards: the TIFF 2020 People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary and the Canada Goose Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature. It’s our pick for the best film at the festival.

Latimer’s thought-provoking documentary Inconvenient Indian opens with an Indigenous man, whose body is covered in polka dots, on horseback in the middle of a vast field, when he suddenly spots the Toronto skyline in the distance. It’s one of many reminders in the film that colonialism never ended, that Indigenous people still exist and live today, and that our stories about both have been so controlled by settlers as to often obscure this reality. Inconvenient Indian is an interrogation of the stories told about Indigenous people — who authored them, who controlled them, what their legacy is — and how that impacts Indigenous lives today.

Adapted from Thomas King’s book of the same title, King appears in the film as our guide whom we follow through downtown Toronto, en route to the Fox Theatre. There, he sits amongst an audience of other Indigenous people to watch a version of the film we’re watching, a reminder that Latimer, too, is telling stories, manipulating images to ask the audience to think, and that she’s guided by King. 

Loosely following the structure of King’s book, Latimer begins the story where the book begins: Custer’s Last Stand, a legendary battle in Montana in which Indigenous people actually triumphed. Instead of repeating accepted facts, she shows us how these so-called facts are related to people today. In a stately museum, we see a parent and child looking at a painting depicting the event; Latimer cuts to what seems like a film of the event, only to reveal an audience at the battle, which is actually part of a re-enactment. This is the story being re-told again in the present day. She makes us aware of how and where stories are told, like the way the stately architecture of a museum makes us believe the information presented in it.

Inuk filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (Angry Inuk), who is one of the many artists appearing in the film, once explained to me that “we’ve [the Inuit] have been the subjects of documentaries for even longer [than Inuit have  been making them].” In Inconvenient Indian, Latimer engages with the history of settlers depicting Indigenous people on screen. Images from Nanook of the North, the first documentary ever, made by a white man who filmed Inuit people as his subjects, are contextualized by Arnaquq-Baril’s voiceover. 

Arnaquq-Baril explains the way the hunting methods depicted in the film were deliberately inauthentic to how Inuit hunted at the time, because the filmmaker wanted his Inuit subjects to appear less technologically advanced than they actually were. Latimer corrects the record in her film by following a modern day Inuk man as he hunts for seals using modern technology. In the archival footage of Indigenous people that appears in the film, Latimer searched specifically for moments when the Indigenous subjects acknowledged the camera, when she could make the audience aware of their agency. 

Looking beyond documentary footage, Latimer also engages with Hollywood films of yore that feature Indigenous people, usually as two-dimensional villains. A montage of these films becomes particularly poignant when she loops the most offensive dialogue, forcing us to hear it repeatedly, so that it sinks in just how bad these depictions were. And if you think things are better now, Latimer and King visit Hollywood’s oldest costume house in LA where you can see racks and racks of Indian costumes, as if North America isn’t a continent with many, many first nations. They happened to be shooting there during Halloween, and within minutes of starting, they saw many settlers wearing Indian costumes, which is in the film. 

At the same time, Latimer repeatedly reminds us that Indigenous people aren’t something of the past, whose traditional clothing can be seen in museum cabinets, but a vibrant, living culture of today. She shows us acts of cultural revitalization, from language acquisition projects to other educational endeavours. And she introduces us to Indigenous artists from across Canada and across vocations.

Taken together, Inconvenient Indian is a thrillingly vibrant piece of nonfiction filmmaking, eschewing talking heads and other signposts of power and authority in favour of a more impressionistic style. Latimer puts us in the thick of things, whether that’s a seal hunt, Hollywood films, or traditional Inuit tattooing. It doesn’t aim to educate from on high, but to ask audiences to question what they know. Where do settlers get their ideas about Indigenous people from? And how can Indigenous people take back the narrative in their own lives and continue to uphold their cultures? Perhaps even more importantly, Inconvenient Indian makes you want to learn more. It confronts you with your own complacency and complicity without ever accusing the audience. And that’s an amazing feat.

I first met Michelle Latimer at Sundance a few years ago, when the first few episodes of her Canada Screen Award winning TV series, RISE, premiered at the festival. She was so smart and articulate that I knew we couldn’t do just one interview with her to discuss both of her TIFF works. Here, you’ll find my in-depth conversation with Latimer about Inconvenient Indian; when Trickster premieres on CBC in October, we’ll publish a second interview with her about the series. In our wide-ranging discussion, she talks about how she approached adapting King’s book, creating the film’s many memorable sequences, and the importance of the ImagineNative Film Festival.

Seventh Row (7R): What made you want to tell this particular story?

Michelle Latimer: I read the book many years prior. I wasn’t considering it for a film; I was just reading it. It’s sort of considered a seminal text in the community. I went to Standing Rock. It was interesting to see all the things the book talked about taking place in Standing Rock through that occupation. 

When I came back from Standing Rock, Jesse Wente and Stuart Henderson approached me to adapt the book into a film. My initial reaction was, I can’t do that! I have no idea how to do that. It was a few conversations before they convinced me I could do it, and even then, I was pretty intimidated. 

I spent a year developing a treatment, and I went through about three different iterations of that treatment. It was only when the publishers sent me the illustrated version of the book that I started to really, really think about the power of media, historically, in our storytelling, and that was kind of a breakthrough for me.

7R: How do you approach writing a treatment for a film like this? I can’t imagine what it looks like to adapt a book into a documentary.

Michelle Latimer: The first iteration was quite didactic and academic. I broke the book up into themes. I started with a wall of cards, and I’d just put the themes [on them] and start to brainstorm potential visual scenarios that would illustrate those themes. Then, it was a process of editing it down. 

I was looking for something to tie the larger narrative together, a spine. I wanted it to be metaphoric, dreamlike, or heightened. That’s when I started reading Thomas King’s children’s books. Interestingly, one of them is illustrated by William Kent Monkman, and they’re all coyote stories, trickster stories. Somehow, seeing the children’s book unfold, I thought it could be a spine for the larger themes to branch off from. 

When you have hundreds of themes, you just whittle them down until you have a dozen. We shot a bit more than what we used in the film, but, generally, my favourite scenes are what ended up [in the film]. I wanted to privilege image over voice, so it would be things you could see that illustrate the ideas in the book.

7R: What kind of collaboration did you have with Thomas King? Obviously, he’s in the film, but how else did he get involved?

Michelle Latimer: He was involved from the very beginning. The production company had optioned his book and were working with him. He was always really generous with me. He kind of said, “I’ve written the book. It took me five years to write it. This is your film. I’m there to support and be involved as much as you want me to be, but I don’t want to be involved as a creative voice.” 

He was very playful. We went to California together. It was his idea to walk down the Venice boardwalk in the headdress with feathers. He’s a very playful person and very game and actively involved in that way. 

Thomas King sits in a movie theatre in Inconvenient Indian.
Thomas King sits in a movie theatre in Inconvenient Indian. Image courtesy of TIFF.

7R: What was the collaboration like with your cinematographer?

Michelle Latimer: I have worked with Chris Romeike for many, many years. I know his style, and he knows what I like. He shot some of the first things I’ve ever done 10 years ago. So there was an unspoken language that we have. This was the first time we’ve used dollies and sliders and a Ronin steadicam contraption. It’s the most I’d ever employed higher production tools. Normally, we’re just run-and-gun verité. He’s a beautiful handheld shooter.

7R: How did you come up with the opening sequence in which the Indigenous man in polka dots comes over a hill, and sees the Toronto skyline ahead? 

Michelle Latimer: It was inspired by two things. One is that the cover of the book [The Inconvenient Indian] has an Indian in a headdress looking at a cruise ship, sort of like a steamship from the industrial era. I thought, Oh that’s really interesting, but I wanted to modernise that even further. I was thinking about how, as a Native person living in an urban centre, we often go unseen. Unless we’re doing a shawl dance or a round dance at a protest, people don’t even know that we’re there. They consider us regulated to reservations or rural communities when there’s such a huge population of urban Indigenous people. 

I also wanted to remind people: our cities are built on this land, and there were people here well before the cities were built. That’s not an actor I hired [in the opening scene]; it’s one of the riders [on horseback] who was in the [Custer’s Last Stand] recreation in Montana. I asked him, “Do you mind doing this thing for me, riding your horse and then getting off…” and he said, “Sure!” That was really fun because it uses a real documentary scenario but fictionalised in a way that tips its hat to the structure of the film.

7R: You must have had to use visual effects for the cityscape.

Michelle Latimer: Yeah, what he’s looking at, in real life, is actually the battlefield of Custer’s Last Stand. But when you look at it, if you go to Montana, it’s just a rolling vast valley. So we literally shot him cresting up the hill and looking over this actual historical landscape that’s really just empty, and then we CG-ed that whole cityscape, which is a mockup of the Toronto cityscape.

7R: The film starts with the story of Custer’s Defeat in Montana, as seen in a painting in a museum, and then you go to the reenactment of that famous Battle of Little Big Horn. Those juxtapositions of images are really thought-provoking. Why did you want to start there?

Michelle Latimer: The book starts pretty early on in that historical pathway. It’s in some ways chronological. I was somewhat following the structure of the book. I knew I wanted to start in these very didactic historical reimaginings, what we know to be true — Columbus settled in North America — and start there. But then, I remember in Thomas’s book, he says, OK, let’s go back; what if history only started in 1984 or something? I forget the exact year. What if we look at that? 

I knew that was what I wanted to do. Look at this old history we’ve been taught to be true, and then sort of twist it. I really split the film up into history, old history, and the ways we document and monument it, and then Hollywood, media, the birth of cinema. And then into the modern day land and people in protest for Indigenous rights. It also follows the loose structure of the dead Indian, the live Indian, and the legal Indian, which Thomas outlines in his book.

7R: How did you think about shooting Toronto in the film? There’s a real attention paid to the foreign-ness of these large, tall buildings. When you go into the museums, the Royal Ontario Museum in particular, it made me realise what a colonial building it is, just architecturally. 

Michelle Latimer: Absolutely. I wanted there to be a very formal feeling when you went into those [buildings]. Whereas when we’re in nature, it’s more organic and the camera’s more fluid. But in those formal landscapes of the gallery or the Royal Ontario Museum, the camera’s on sticks or sliders or a dolly; they’re very formal kinds of shots. 

I wanted to show the grandeur. It occurred to me that some of the reasons why Indigenous history maybe hasn’t been told up until now — there’s a great retelling happening now, but prior to that — is we don’t have monuments or big cement plaques. We didn’t do that. We tried to preserve the land. That was the beauty for us. You would look at a rock, or a culturally-modified cedar tree if you’re out in the British BC, and those were really subtle things that marked land and marked place. 

Our history is in aural culture, and it’s of the land. It’s not because some big plaque is there naming people who settled. That was what I was trying to recognise: the difference between cement monuments, historical recording in a way that’s architecture that’s supposed to never be degraded, versus in the landscape, where nature takes over and man is not the central focus; the land is.

7R: The way the film is structured asks you to actively question what you’re watching: what’s real and what’s reenacted? How did you think about what images you wanted to use, what to shoot, what archival footage to use, and what images to use from existing films?

Michelle Latimer: I’m so glad that you feel that when you’re watching it because that’s what I was trying to achieve. That’s an intense question because there’s a lot of levels to that. But generally, I was interested in this idea of the historical truth vs. the truth that isn’t told. 

When he [King] outlines the Montana Custer’s battle in his book, I knew that was one of the first places we [would have to go in the film]. I was like, I have to see this. And I knew, conceptually, that I wanted to present that reenactment almost like it was a piece of dramatic fiction, and then reveal that the audience is there, and this is actually taking place as a reenactment. 

For the archival, I was really interested in the gaze. There’s such a history of ethnographic documentation of Indigenous people by non-Indigenous filmmakers, I really wanted to look at the moments when Indigenous people knew they were on camera, recognised that, and challenged it, even if it was something as simple as looking down the barrel of the camera to acknowledge that they realise they’re on film. That sounds like an easy thing, but it’s actually really hard to find that footage. 

I went through hundreds of hours of NFB [Canada’s National Film Board] archival [footage] just to find the moments where you get a sense of, Oh they see themselves being reflected back in the camera. And then, I was also thinking about the moments when that camera or that recording device is being used to subvert or change [the subject]. 

I’m thinking of the clip where the Pueblo woman says, “Hi, I’m a Pueblo, and I went to the Albuquerque New Indian School.” I put all three takes of that [in the film]. It’s quite long, and it makes me uncomfortable every time I see it, because you’re aware of the editorial voice. If you’d edited the clips, she’d just look happy and great, but when you watch all three takes, you see the whitewashing process of the camera, of narrative, of what stories end up being in the mainstream media vs. what is left out. Those are, for me, the most exciting parts of the film.

7R: So you found all that by looking through hours and hours of footage?

Michelle Latimer: Yeah, and I’d already been commissioned by the NFB a few years back in 2015] to make a three-minute film based entirely around archival footage from the NFB archives. That was Nimmikaage, which was part of a series [the Souvenir series]: myself, Kent Monkman, Jeff Barnaby, and Caroline Monnet all made a three-minute film based on NFB archival for the Pan Am Games. 

In that process, I started to find myself coming up against these ideas. Like, Oh, I can’t find any moments where women are looking at the lens of the camera; this feels really objectifying. I worked a few weeks on that film, and it was in that process that I started to go, Wouldn’t this be interesting, to really explore this on a much deeper level? I got to do that with Inconvenient Indian.

7R: Could you talk about the framing narrative of the movie theatre. How did you want to show people watching the footage we’re watching?

Michelle Latimer: Thomas King is also a photographer. He’s taken a lot of photographs along his journey as an author. At first, I thought I was going to use a photo exhibit of his work as a framing device. But then, I started thinking a lot about the representative reflection. When I was a kid, I would watch TV, and I never saw Native people, unless it was an Indians and Cowboys shoot-it-out western. That was not something I related to the people I knew or the community I grew up in. I wanted to show that. 

There’s a passivity that could be read into it, like, Oh, Thomas is just passive; he’s just sitting there watching this movie. But it’s not passivity. He’s actually the conductor of the orchestra in some way, orchestrating the images. 

I also wanted to ask the audience, as you’re taking in images, as you’re taking in this story, how is it changing how you feel [about your role in the story]? Just as it would change me, when I’m sitting there seeing my community not being represented or watching Indians be shot in the head by cowboys. How does that shift something in me? Now, here I am as an Indigenous filmmaker, creating these images that I’m showing to an audience, and there’s sort of a subversion in that that I’m really interested in. 

I don’t want people to walk away from this film like, Oh, I learned something; I feel really educated. I want people to walk away and feel provoked, and really question their own unconscious biases.

7R: It sounds like RISE was really instrumental in shaping this film. How did getting to do that project before contribute to Inconvenient Indian?

Michelle Latimer: It was great in that I had to work across a huge amount of material in RISE, because it was eight one-hour documentaries, looking at Indigenous resistance but in many different forms. RISE had a format it had to stick to. It was hosted, 45 minutes. We always knew people would be talking on camera because it was a mix of veriteé and interviews. And in the case of, especially [the] Standing Rock [episode], we were chasing a developing story, as documentarians, not journalists, but still chasing a story that we didn’t know how it would end. 

This was very different. There was no story to be chased. It was a story we were crafting so it was more of an essay film. I didn’t have any format I had to fit into with this. I could respond in any way. I wanted to privilege the images over the voice, look at the poetry of how images and sound fit together to tell a story. I wanted it to be more elevated and cinematic in a way I couldn’t do in RISE because it was a different type of storytelling. So in a way, it [Inconvenient Indian] was a sort of palate cleanser or a response to how I worked in RISE. I wanted to lean away from that response in a way that was more like a poem.

7R: How did you think about presenting old images from films, both Nanook of the North and then the Hollywood films, where you pick out certain offensive lines. And then also archival footage from residential schools, too. There’s really interesting things you’re doing with sound and looping sound and how you edited it together into a montage.

Michelle Latimer: Nanook, it’s not really changed, it’s exactly a clip from Nanook. I think what changes it is having Alethea [Arnaquq-Baril, who made Angry Inuk and produced The Grizzlies], who is a filmmaker from Nunavut, actually give us the context of that. Because there was a time where there weren’t even Inuit filmmakers. To have her behind the lens saying, “No, this is who my people are, this is how we live,” was really powerful. 

When we get to the Hollywood section, I’m really interested in repetition and rhythm in films. I think there is a sort of rhythm to how we repeat stories. They are retold over again at the expense of erasing the stories that are not as mainstream. That’s where the violence happens: when a story becomes almost monolithic, so it’s the only one told of a people. 

I wanted to play with that and also the idea of cinema as a tool of time. We play with time; we change things; we edit things. The editorial voice is the voice with power. For so long, Indigenous people were not the editorial voice of their own images. 

It’s one thing to know about residential schools; it’s a whole other thing to see that it was documented on celluloid and video. When you see those children’s faces, and hear what the politicians of the time were saying, that rhetoric was normalised. 

It makes me wonder, What’s the rhetoric we hear in day-to-day news, in our newspapers, in our media, that we just take as normal, that in 50 or 100 years from now people will say, I can’t believe the Prime Minister said that? But now, we think it’s OK, just as people did with John A. Macdonald. It really asks us to look at where we are now and think about our collective responsibility to how we move forward in our storytelling and our media. And how that translates to policy.

7R: How did you think about the sound throughout Inconvenient Indian? Both the music and the sound are so important in the film.

Michelle Latimer: The sound designer Brennan Mercer has designed all my films, since the very first one. He also is a beautiful musician. I had always dreamed of doing something with Brennan where he would come on earlier. 

Normally, the sound designer comes on in the post-production phase and has a limited amount of time to get things together. But that never really worked for me, because I feel like the sound designer is a key collaborator, as important as the DoP [Director of Photography] or editor. On this film, I advocated for Brennan to come on at the same time as we started the edit, or around the rough cut phase. 

He had all that extra time where myself, him, and our picture editor, Katie Chipperfield, worked fluidly to create landscapes together. Katie would edit something where we would see someone turn their head, and we’d go, OK Brennan, just so you know, we edited this head turn. You could add some sound there, so it would segue to this. 

We were working very collaboratively. Brennan would mock up a soundscape for us, and we would put it into the picture and work with it, and we’d send it back to him and say, “This isn’t working.” I don’t know if I could work any differently because it was so gratifying. The sound is so important to the rhythm of the film.

7R: You’ve got a bunch of voices in the film, some who also appear in the film. How did you decide who you wanted to get as participants in the film and how did that come about?

Michelle Latimer: That was part of the process of editing down the themes. I had come off working on RISE, so I was aware of a lot of people who we didn’t necessarily profile in RISE, but I was interested in what they were doing. I wanted to show a swathe of people — hunters living off the land, versus people working in a lab doing digital video game making — to show the breadth of that evolution of work and cultural renaissance. 

I knew I didn’t want anyone speaking on camera. I programmed for HotDocs for years. I’ve always found in western filmmaking there’s always this expert interview talking head, and I just hate it so much! It’s like, one, we’re in a visual medium so why am I sitting here watching this head talk to me? And two, there’s this idea of you’re educated, you’re smart, and you get to be privileged. I didn’t want to do that in this scenario. It was really important to treat it [the participants in the film] almost like a chorus or community of voices telling a piece of the same story.

7R: Were they all people you had met making RISE?

Michelle Latimer: No, I would say they were an example of people in my life, like artists I had met at ImagineNative. That’s when I first met the digital video game creator [in the film]. There were filmmakers I know from the community. All those people represent different corners of my life, artists I’ve come into contact with or work that I’ve been interested in. It was an opportunity to really spotlight them.

7R: Most of the film is set in and about Canada, but you went down to Montana and also to LA. Was that just because of Hollywood? And I guess you were there at Halloween?

Michelle Latimer: Yeah, that’s right. Thomas King grew up in Oklahoma, but also in California, which is where his mother is, so we went with him and his brother there to one of his hometowns. And also because of Hollywood: I was very interested in the rise of the Hollywood western and what that did for cinema. 

We just happened to be there for Halloween. I knew I wanted to look at appropriation around Halloween. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be sports teams or Halloween, the whole headdresses at Coachella thing. And then the West Hollywood Halloween Parade was there. It was honestly an experiment. I remember telling the producers, I don’t know if we’re going to get anything here. 

I live in Canada. I don’t remember the last time I went to a party and saw a guy in a headdress dressed up in redface, I really don’t. Although we do have our Prime Minister I guess! (laughs) Maybe I should retract that because I don’t want to seem like we’re holier than thou [in Canada]. 

I remember going to the Halloween parade and being so shocked because we weren’t five minutes in that parade, and we saw that couple walking in the black headdresses. There were more people in headdresses that we filmed that didn’t make the cut. I was shocked. I was like, Wow, this is a plethora of appropriation! It was sort of horrific, but also a documentarian’s dream! (laughs)

7R: When you go into the film costume warehouse and see all those costumes for Indians in westerns, that was really scary. The images are just so well chosen in the film that I’m constantly wondering how you figured out that that’s what you wanted to shoot.

Michelle Latimer: It was just a lot of research. Catie Lamer, one of the line producers on the film, was an associate producer on RISE, so she and I have worked together in the past. She’s a fantastic researcher. Once I had my themes down, I was like, This is what I’m looking for. I’m looking for instances of Hollywood appropriation. Is there a Hollywood costume house? Can you look into this? And she came back like, There’s this amazing one, Hollywood Western Costume. 

You start with a hunch. That hunch grows into, well, there’s actually a few options. Then you go, What are the best options? That particular costume house has existed since the early 1900s and maybe even the late 1800s. It’s the oldest Hollywood costume house. 

The guy that owned it, prior to owning that, owned a trading post in the midwest, and he started by trading with Indigenous people. He would bring traditional moccasins to Hollywood, and they’d be like, These are amazing; they’re so authentic; we can put them in the movies. And he would be like, Do you want me to try and get you some Indians as extras? And they were like, You can do that?! 

So he actually made a lot of money through his involvement with Native communities and his trading. He moved to LA, opened up this costume house that basically had authentic things. There were pictures in the archives where there were teepees lining Hollywood Boulevard; Native people [had come] to audition to be in the pictures. 

7R: Towards the end of the film, there are several scenes showing cultural revitalisation, with the school where people are learning their language and the school trip to go fishing on their home territory. It almost feels like hope for the future.

Michelle Latimer: Yeah, and it’s tied to the past. The thing about western culture is the past is in the past. It doesn’t affect today. We have a more circular way in how we tell our stories and our history, in that our ancestors walk with us in the now, and that is how we move into our future. History is not linear where you can say, Well, that was before; this is now; and that will come after. It’s all connected. 

For me, showing the next generation who will mould and shape the future, learning traditional things from the past, is a way of showing that all of this exists right now. The power we have as a community, and as a people, is in our choices right now. I often hear people say, It’s not my fault; we’re doing the best we can; I can’t take credit for what my grandparents did; I’m doing the best I can, and it’s never going to happen again. But history has repeated itself many times so we have to take ownership of what’s happening now.

7R: I interviewed you back at Sundance when RISE was there, and one of the things you were talking about then was how to decolonise the colonialist medium of film. How did you think about that on Inconvenient Indian?

Michelle Latimer: That’s always a struggle for me in everything I do. For Trickster, we put some really big things in place because we had a huge crew. For me, the medium is the message. By using a circular narrative, by not using talking heads, by not privileging experts over regular community people: all those things are decolonisation on a certain level. [In Inconvenient Indian, it was], by putting our Trickster character, who really questions gender, putting all that up front. It’s all in the layers and subtext. I’m very joyous about that. 

On a working level, my working practices are always changing. Trying to bring more Indigenous people into roles behind the camera, trying to get permissions when we’re on lands that are not my traditional lands, trying to work with elders if it requires ceremony or certain prayers ahead of time, feasting to honour the community we’re in. I always feel like it’s never enough, like there’s always more I could be doing. For every project, it’s a hefty task, but it feels necessary. It’s so tough because it’s [filmmaking is] such a hierarchical, colonial system. It’s like you’re trying to dismantle something that exists inherently of itself.

7R: You said you met other people at ImagineNative, which is also something I heard another Indigenous filmmaker, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers say. Why is that festival such a hub?

Michelle Latimer: This isn’t even an overstatement, it’s just the truth: I probably wouldn’t be making films if it wasn’t for ImagineNative. I had applied to medical school, and I was doing medical school interviews. Deep down in my heart, I wanted to make films, but I was too scared and didn’t think I’d be good at it. 

ImagineNative had a make your first film mentorship award. I applied, and I got it. The summer before I was potentially supposed to start medical school, I made my first short film through the Lift ImagineNative mentorship. It changed my whole career trajectory. 

ImagineNative was a place where you could meet people from the community, where you could have training opportunities, but you could also exhibit your films. As an artist, you create something, but then it needs to find its audience. ImagineNative had linked all of those things together and continues to do that 20 years later. 

Filmmakers like Alethea, Danis Goulet, and Helen Haig-Brown (Edge of the Knife), we all came up together making films at the exact same time. And here we are, 20 years later, still supporting each other, reading each others’ scripts, watching each others’ rough cuts. It’s so beautiful, especially to see those other, specifically female, filmmakers; we’re creating our own space in the world for our work.

7R: That’s so exciting to hear. I’ve gone to ImagineNative as an outsider, and it always seemed to me like a hub.

Michelle Latimer: Yeah, it’s really amazing. I can’t say enough about it. And it’s become global. We’ve really connected with Maori filmmakers, filmmakers in Sweden and Finland. And it’s just been amazing.

READ: Our interview with Michelle Latimer on RISE >>

READ: More coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival >>

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