Caught between 'two worlds'
Tkaronto: Shane Belcourt, a Métis leader's son who turned his life into onscreen art, debuts his film at the ByTowne this week

Thulasi Srikanthan
The Ottawa Citizen

Saturday, August 09, 2008

As high school students growing up in Ottawa, Shane Belcourt and Duane Murray went to theatres once a week, dreaming of the day their films would be on the big screen.

In their spare time, they spent hours filming and then editing amateur comedies with a video camera and an off-line editing suite in the TV room of Belcourt's Westboro home. This included making little movies for Belcourt's theatre class at Notre Dame High School.

Nearly two decades later, the duo, along with another Ottawa childhood friend, Jordan O'Connor, saw their dream come full circle as their first feature film, Tkaronto, opened at the ByTowne Cinema yesterday. The film runs through Monday.

"The movie set me on a path I always wanted to be on," said the 35-year-old Belcourt. "It legitimized myself to myself and the part where you stop thinking one day, one day, one day, I am going to be this or I am going to be that."

While Tkaronto (the original Mohawk word for Toronto) is based in Hogtown, the film's Ottawa's roots run deep -- Belcourt, Murray, and O'Connor were born and raised here. Murray is both the casting director and one of the central male characters, Ray.

O'Connor edited the film and composed music and handled sound design.

"We often comment with each other that a whole bunch of people from Ottawa that move to Toronto to pursue the arts wind up working with others from Ottawa," Belcourt said.

Written and directed by Belcourt, the movie explores the journey of a man, Ray, and a woman, Jolene, trying to make sense of themselves, their relationship to their aboriginal identities and their non-aboriginal spouses. In the movie, Ray deals with the dilemmas that come with being a first-time father and of aboriginals being tokenized by TV executives. Meanwhile, Jolene undergoes a spiritual journey to connect to her aboriginal identity and both face the question of whether their questions of identity will be answered if they were together.

Belcourt said the story, conjured up initially in "three days of mad typing," is 80-per-cent autobiographical. Like Ray, Belcourt is Métis and married. He was also, like Ray, handling his wife, Amanda Greener, being pregnant with their first child when the script was being written. She has since given birth to Claire Belcourt, who is now almost 11 months old.

"I think on its obvious viewing, it's about people trying to understand their urban aboriginal identity," said Belcourt. "But I think if you take it a step back, it's anyone who has mixed ancestry or mixed identity or anybody that is trying to fit into the North American thing but is still trying to maintain their sorta cultural identity within that."

Belcourt's life experience as a child of mixed ancestry also contributed to the story with his mother being a white Maritimer and his father, Tony Belcourt, being Métis.

Belcourt said his father's role as a prominent aboriginal rights leader in Canada meant he was conscious from an early age about aboriginal identity, politics and rights. The film, he said, seemed like a way to continue on the family business.

But while that might be straightforward, the journey for Belcourt as a person with mixed ancestry has come with its twists and turns.

"You always feel like you are in two worlds all the time."

In general, Belcourt said "you hear the 'damn Indians' on one side and on the other, the dreaded 'white man' " as the two peoples have a long history of conflict and misunderstandings.

This clash came to a head when Belcourt, who looks white, once visited a Nova Scotia restaurant.

At the predominantly white establishment, he heard the waitress and some patrons start talking about "those damn Indians," who are "lazy and never work."

The remarks infuriated him, leading him to speak up that his dad was "one of these damn Indians" they were talking about.

"He works, has all his life, so has his sisters, his father, his friends, my sisters, and me," he remembers saying. "That's 100-per-cent employment in one Indian family right there."

While the place quieted down after his remarks, the memory of that day has never left Belcourt.

"Should you feel more comfortable at a powwow where maybe you fear people lop you into the white tourist crowd or do you accept your outer looks and drop all the inner Indian stuff and be a whatever white Canadian?"

"When you are from both worlds, it's a constant navigation between the two -- eventually you get used to it."

Murray said the fact he knew Belcourt since he was 12 helped with his performance. Another helpful factor was his own aboriginal roots, Murray said.

"I have an aboriginal background that I know very little about, so part of it was an exploration of how that actually feels to have a background you know very little about," he said.

Murray said working on the movie affected how he looked at his identity and background, elements that were never in the forefront of his mind.

"I sort of went through life looking forward as opposed to 'where did I come from and what does that mean?' " he said. "Shane really made me ask those questions. It matters to so many people so why doesn't it matter to me?"

The film also represents a triumph for the three Ottawa men who left for Toronto when they were around 20 years old.

"In our day, 15 years ago, coming out of high school, the big, big (film scenes) were Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal in Canada or Los Angeles or New York," Belcourt said, adding that Toronto was an obvious choice as it was near their families.

"As an actor, where do you shoot commercials, where do you do voice work, where can you pick up an audition? So Duane had to move to Toronto," Belcourt said. "As a writer and director, where can you pick up work between your own projects, where do you meet with Telefim? Fifteen years ago, there was no other option than Toronto."

But even in Toronto, filming didn't come without struggle. The crew of 10 worked with a budget of approximately $25,000. Much of the money came from Belcourt and his wife, courtesy of two lines of credit. The tight budget was made workable by people taking on multiple duties. This included another Ottawa-born man, David Hannan, performing five duties, including that of production designer and first assistant director. Much of the catering was also done by family and friends and staff and friends' homes were used for sets.

"We didn't have a budget to control sets, we couldn't take out a wall, we couldn't repaint something, we sort of had to live with it as it was and work with it, but it also meant we were filming in places of natural lighting," Belcourt said.

But the men say a certain kind of freedom also came from the self-financing.

"We got to do whatever we wanted without anyone telling us what we could or could not do," said Murray. "The focus can get muddled in that sense. With this, Shane, Jordan and I had full control of the entire thing.

"It's not a perfect film by any means but we learned so much from having that freedom and making own mistakes and having our own successes with it."

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

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