Pressed for time, director Shane Belcourt found his voice with Tkaronto
BY JASON ANDERSON
Adapted by French explorers and mapmakers from a Mohawk phrase that translates as “where there are trees standing in the water,” this city’s original name is unknown to most of those who now dwell here. But chances are the places, people and feelings captured in a new film that bears this moniker will not be so unfamiliar, even to viewers who might think the movie’s central questions about Aboriginal identity have no impact on their own lives.
A funny, thoughtful and sensitively rendered first feature by Shane Belcourt, Tkaronto made its premiere at imagineNATIVE last October. Thanks to the festival and distributor KinoSmith, the movie is getting a well-deserved national release that includes a run at the Royal. Though it’s already had success on the continent’s circuit of Aboriginal-oriented fests, Tkaronto has something to say to other audiences, too, a fact that has surprised and pleased Belcourt.
“I always felt it would speak strongly to the Aboriginal community,” he says in an interview last week. “But people come up to me after screenings with all these other stories of mixed ancestry and mixed marriages. I had a Japanese guy come up to me and say, ‘My wife’s pregnant and she’s white and I wonder about these things, too.’ This mixing of people’s identities is so common now — people feel a real personal connection to this issue.”
Shot in 17 days on a miniscule (and self-financed) budget, Belcourt’s low-key charmer presents modern-day Toronto as a meeting ground for two visitors who share a few intense days. The son of a Metis politician father and a white mother, Ray (Duane Murray) is a cartoonist who’s come to town to pitch a TV show with the dubious title of Indian Jones. He’s also wracked with anxieties about the impending birth of his first child. The sister of a friend, Jolene (Melanie McLaren) is a painter with a disintegrating marriage and a desire for guidance. A charismatic elder who speaks pointedly of “blood memory” and the necessity of prayer, Max (Lorne Cardinal) poses tough questions to both of them.
That these questions emerged at all was another surprise to Belcourt. A writer, musician and filmmaker who shares Ray’s background — his father is Tony Belcourt, president of the Metis Nation of Ontario — Belcourt had given himself a due date to get a feature film done. As he explains now, his wife’s pregnancy provided a very specific deadline: “I thought, ‘OK, the only time I’ll be able to use all of her credit and my credit to make a movie is now — once the baby is born, that window is closed.’”
Though his timeline was set, he still wasn’t sure what kind of movie would merit the squandering of his child’s future education funds. It only became clear when he started writing. “Putting my heart on my sleeve and exploring my identity issues — that came out of left field,” he says. “It wasn’t supposed to be that. We couldn’t afford to have an explosion or make a movie with big shots of the Grand Canyon so it was just supposed to be a drama about two people meeting. But then I thought, ‘What are they going to talk about?’ Once I started writing the dialogue, the characters just blew open in that way.”
He adds that the time pressure meant “we had no time to second-guess, to rewrite or to distance ourselves from the immediacy of the emotions.”
Incorporating real-life situations, anxieties and conversations, the film that Belcourt made, in all of eight months, turned out to be intensely personal and deeply felt. Even so, Belcourt wonders whether there’s something at work within Tkaronto that goes beyond the matter of individual expression.
“I think the core thing that’s really happening is almost this secret discussion, one that everybody talks about behind closed doors but isn’t allowed to express,” he says. “There’s a heartbeat in the movie that’s not mine — it’s more like a collective heartbeat. What’s propelled it forward is this teaching that comes from way back and maybe needs to come out in an artistic form now.”
Yet for all the potential heaviness of the themes, Tkaronto is given a sense of lightness by its easy going humour and Belcourt’s eye for lyrical imagery. (It’s easy to see why he cites both Woody Allen and Terrence Malick as heroes — Jordan O’Connor’s graceful, jumpcut-friendly editing adds more visual flair.) When the movie debuted in front of a full house on imagineNATIVE’s closing night, Belcourt was mostly worried it wasn’t going to get any laughs.
“I’m a guy who likes to joke around,” he says. “Here’s this movie and it’s done and I’m feeling, ‘Yay, the projection went smoothly! The movie’s over! We made it to the end!’ But the audience was totally quiet. I’m thinking, ‘They hated it — what a disaster!’ Then as I’m walking up to do the Q&A, I see a lot of Aboriginal people in the audience wiping away tears or expressing emotion. I guess I was still the outside person making a film, not experiencing it as an audience member. It took me a while to adjust to that reality.”
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