Aboriginal filmmaker delves into ‘outsider sense’ of urban life

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This article was published 15/01/2010 (5207 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF you’re an aboriginal in a big city, where do you find your culture and spirituality?

If you’ve got native blood, does that automatically give you a mystical connection to nature?

And if you take a nature hike with aboriginal relatives, only to get freaked out and run away like a coward, does it mean you’re a loser as both a man and a Métis?

That’s some of the territory covered in Tkaronto, an ultra-low-budget, award-winning 2007 movie by Toronto Métis Shane Belcourt.

The film follows Ray, a balding, cynical Métis writer from Vancouver who "doesn’t look Indian," and Jolene, an Anishnabe painter who lives in Los Angeles.

Both in their 30s, struggling with their respective marriages and identities, the two meet in Toronto and spend a few days rambling, talking and potentially falling for each other. Lorne Cardinal (Corner Gas) plays an elder to whom Jolene (Melanie McLaren) turns for guidance.

Belcourt, 37, is in Winnipeg for two weeks as the first-ever aboriginal artist-in-residence at the Winnipeg Film Group. He’s giving a cinematography workshop, advising filmmakers and working with aboriginal youth.

The quiet, reflective Tkaronto, a drama with witty touches, is playing at Cinematheque this weekend. It’s largely autobiographical. Just like Ray (part-Chippewa actor Duane Murray), Belcourt was anxious during filming about becoming a first-time father with his non-aboriginal wife.

And like Ray, who is quizzed about his heritage by crassly ignorant TV producers looking to qualify for funding, Belcourt has often been interrogated about his "aboriginal-ness."

"That kind of aggressive, almost blood-quotient questioning, I have experienced," he says.

Tkaronto grew out of conversations the writer-director had with urban aboriginals around his own age, most of them educated and successful, but confused on a spiritual level.

"There’s an outsider sense," says Belcourt. "I may have this big-city thing down, but I’m also this aboriginal person, trying to understand what that means in a more whole way."

Like the Ray character, Belcourt is the son of a nationally prominent Métis leader and activist, Tony Belcourt, and a white mother. The filmmaker and his siblings were raised in Ottawa. All have taken artistic paths.

"What Louis Riel said is so great: ‘Our people will sleep for 100 years, and through the artists they will rise.’ I really believe more things are happening through art than politics, in any community. More is being said in art. Political things just seem so compromised."

One of Belcourt’s heroes is Woody Allen. He planned to call his first feature Toronto, partly as a nod to Allen’s Manhattan. Then he discovered the city’s original Mohawk name, Tkaronto. The title suggests that the city can be a contemporary aboriginal place.

The director, who dropped out of film school at York University in part because he couldn’t afford 16 or 35mm film stock, says digital cameras and editing equipment are now making film accessible to almost anyone.

"That really bodes well for people from marginalized communities who might not have the family pedigree to get into the film industry, or do film school," he says.

In an industry where $3 million is considered low-budget, Belcourt made Tkaronto in 17 days for a minuscule $25,000, by maxing out his and his wife’s lines of credit. The main shooting location was his own house. The film was edited in his friend’s basement. "We didn’t have to answer to anybody except ourselves," he says.

Belcourt is one of about a dozen aboriginal filmmakers chosen to contribute a short on the theme of nationhood to the Canadian pavilion at the Vancouver Olympics. His short, Boxed In, is about a Canadian woman of mixed heritage, puzzling over which box to check off on an official form that asks about ethnicity.

With funders including the National Film Board and Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, the two-minute short had a bigger budget than the 102-minute Tkaronto. While Belcourt was honoured to participate, he says he’s more comfortable in the low-budget indie sphere.

"It didn’t feel like home to me," he says.

 

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca