By Shane Belcourt - writer/director/dp
April 26th, 2007
When you look at me what do you see? A white guy, maybe? Blue eyes and wavy brown hair, maybe French or maybe just a hodge-podge of whatever white Canadian blah. I can’t stop you from seeing what you see, just like you can’t stop me from feeling what I feel, or what I see, or what I’ve always known. I’m Aboriginal. My Dad is Metis, and no that doesn’t mean he is half of anything, he is a full-on Metis. And oh yeah, my Mom is white, I mean real white, like blond hair blue eyes kind of white. But I never thought of myself as white, I always thought of myself as me. And for me, that means Metis. And this my dear friends is what my debut film Tkaronto is all about (but I’m telling you I’m starting to feel more and more everyday that this isn’t “my” film at all, but for a lot of us, it’s “ours”).
For those that know me they know I am two things in equally painful measure. One, I’m a full-on excitable guy that loves life and runs towards everything with my shoes untied. The other side is that I’m anxious as hell, morose at times, and fretful that my life wont add up to much of anything at all ever. It’s a chicken and the egg kind of deal now, I don’t know what started what, but there it is. But the running part is the part that got this feature film into action.
Two years ago my wife Amanda and I bought a New Year’s Resolution book. Kind of silly fun, but it is fun. We sit up on New Years Day (if I admitted that it was New Year’s Eve would that make us really lame?) and we fill out these resolution cards. The first year I wrote down “get my finances and debt in order”. It was all over the place, but I got it together. This year I wrote down “make a feature film.” And I told Duane and Jordan, that “no matter what we’re making a goddamn feature film this year, we own the gear, we have the line of credit, we have no more excuses. Time is now.” See, on December 30th I turned 34 and I felt desperate, I was running out of time.
So, Duane and I kicked into high writing mode gear, had about 5 or 6 false starts and then banged out a romantic comedy – real fun and hollywoodish, would have been great. After we wrote it we sat down with Jordan and broke it down … it wasn’t good. It was REALLY expensive, completely out of our super low, ridiculously low, indie film budget (my line of credit and some credit cards). So, given that it was March 13th and we needed to shoot this and have a rough edit before June 1st to make the ImagineNative Film Festival we were out of time to re-do or start anything new. It was over, it was finished, I was devastated.
That night though, lying in bed until 3 in the morning, my chest heavy, I just could not give up, I had to do something. The week before I was away at the Weeneebeg Film Festival (up in Moose Factory, ON) for a showing of a couple of our short comedies and I met and hung out with some amazing people. It was an all-Aboriginal hang out, and like all-Aboriginal hangs, it felt like home and family. However, there was one moment that stuck in my craw up there. I was sitting with Navjo filmmaker Nanobah Becker talking about the films I had made and the film I was going to make next (the now failed romantic comedy) and she asked me why there isn’t anything Aboriginal in my films. I told her something along the lines that when I play music I “tell the truth” and when I make films I “have fun”, that music was something sacred, something profound for me, but film was something fun, something for sale, something I can do commerce in while still being artistic, and when I think about doing something overtly Aboriginal in film I think of doing a big historical epic or something. She looked at me like I was from Mars. Or maybe she looked at me like I was looking at myself after I said it: “I am terrified of what I would say if I wrote from the heart in film… like she does. Like everyone else that is at this film festival.” I smiled and we laughed and talked about other things but I think that was the moment that the jig was up, because listening to yourself say things out loud can be soul shaking.
So, on March 15th, I sat down and started writing. 15 days later I had the first draft of Tkaronto done and I started sending it out. I was saying, flat-out, we’re making this film no matter what. I was also completely and utterly terrified to let anyone read it, but I was absolutely certain that I was going to make this manifest – being terrified of what you’ve written was something new to me. Being funny ha-ha was scary in the ‘I hope people laugh’ kind of thing, but this was a deeper terror, this was actually personal.
The film I wrote is about two people that meet in the city and walk around talking about their lives and they make a deep connection with each other. Sounds lame, but it’s actually really good. But what it’s really about is Aboriginal identity, Aboriginal people who grew up in the city that ask themselves “am I allowed to call myself this?” I guess you could say it’s about me and some people I met, and how we all talk about this stuff, like my sister and me, and it just all came pouring out. Maybe it came out because I’m about to be a father (September 27th projected due date) and I just don’t know what his or her identity is going to be given that my wife is Jewish. How can you know something, just flat-out feel it your whole life, but when it comes to explaining it, using something crude like blood quotient, it just comes out all wrong? Maybe the film’s only about “is it okay to be me?”
And so here we are. The script is written and now we’re going through a re-write to clean some clunky parts up. People that have read it have related to it strongly, particularly people with mixed ancestry, and especially those with a mixed-Aboriginal heritage. Now we’re putting the production team together and thinking about some ideal cast … things are falling into place. I am terrified about a lot of things, but I’m beginning to get into the zone of stepping forward and, well, standing on my mark. I feel like I am my father’s son fully now, I’m a Belcourt, and this is what we do, we step forward and tell it like it is, and we’re a political people. So, what I thought was going to be a last gasp of filmmaking ambition has turned out to be a first step towards something truly meaningful. From a “me” to an “us”. It’s an acceptance of an inheritance, and with it, a responsibility.
So, this is where it begins.
