Latest news with #Cutaways
CBC
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
What the anxious hero of my documentary can teach us all about happiness
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by director Denis Côté focuses on his film Paul. I used to see someone who would occasionally and impulsively call a certain "Paul." She was tired, she'd say, and needed a lift home. I raised an eyebrow for sure. This car ride to get her home was repeated until I asked the obvious question: who could this man be? She explained that, as a "simp," Paul offered her this service; his sole purpose being not only to help out but also to serve, since women deserve, in his eyes, every attention and every possible comfort. I learned that simps like Paul devote a large part of their time to serving women while asking for very little, if not nothing, in return. And as a filmmaker, I saw a fascinating territory to explore. But what kind of opportunity would it be? The film project itself was dangerous. Could I avoid voyeurism, sensationalism and the exploitative gaze while exploring Paul's rituals of power and consent in surprising BDSM dynamics? Yet, somehow, the challenge and risk of failure were exciting to me. The idea of making a patient observational documentary — similar to what I had achieved with my six bodybuilders in 2016 in the film A Skin So Soft — was also appealing. Shy, secretive and discreet, but possibly fascinated by the idea of one day seeing a documentary about himself, Paul agreed to meet me. I quickly came to know a man who was anxious and fearful, constantly searching for safe spaces, yet also very intelligent and able to put his past and present life journey into words. Throughout our meetings and the filming process, and even after editing this film, some of his intentions, actions and sense of intimacy remained in the dark — or at least a grey area — for me. The film cannot claim to understand everything about Paul. But with a no-budget approach and a crew of two, I tried to get a grasp of his colourful journey over the course of a seven-month shoot. Also invited into the project was a very contemporary reality: the strong desire to exist via social media, an addictive and obsessive world — mouldable and controllable. Paul and several of his dommes are keenly aware of the image they maintain on Instagram. Maybe it's because I'm from another generation, but I was really surprised to see the extent to which the real world only seems to exist to them within the virtual one! Paul creates a kind of perfect prison for himself where he feels complete, free and safe. By the same token, reality bores him and usually stresses him out. In love with the world of Alice in Wonderland, obsessed with the idea of making every corner of his apartment magical, excited by his friendships with dommes, haunted by his number of followers on Instagram — Paul lives in a candid if somewhat manufactured world. It was important for me to offer him a benevolent film, sometimes strange but never pitying or hyperbolic. I wanted a nervous and loving camera, always fixed on the slightest reactions of a character with buried and locked emotions. It wasn't always easy. Paul isn't extraverted, he doesn't spend much time with men, and it was hard to suss out whether he was truly interested in the project. He often seemed to be asking why me? I had to convince him that it would make for a nice film exploration on themes like anxiety, loneliness and self-validation. I'm very proud of what we did. I think we managed to achieve a good level of authenticity. Yet I was scared to show Paul the film, and worried that he would demand edits or additions. He was a bundle of nerves before our private screening, but he gave me a heartfelt "thank you" afterward and said that it "really covered every aspect of his life." We were both very relieved. While making this film, the dommes all understood that we were doing this for Paul, to help him and validate him, not to focus on these women's lives and motivations. Some are involved in the BDSM lifestyle and community, but I didn't want to make a documentary about that already visible and meta-visible topic, with all the usual sensationalistic clichés. Instead, I wanted to make a delicate and very intimate film, without judgment — as fluid and enigmatic as Paul's uncertain quest.
CBC
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Why I needed to tell the story of Pernell Bad Arm, the extraordinary man behind the #skoden meme
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by direct or Damien Eagle Bear focuses on his film #skoden. In the spring of 2009, I had just finished unloading sound equipment into the Lethbridge Shelter and Resource Centre for my cousin's band, Dead Skins. She worked at the shelter, and with other employees, they'd organized a show for the guests. As a fledgling filmmaker, I was dedicated to recording and documenting my cousin's band. I set up my camera and was ready to record the night. One of the workers came up to me, asking me questions about my camera and what I was doing. We chatted for a bit before the idea came out. "What if we worked together to create a film about the shelter to educate the people in Lethbridge?" Being an inexperienced filmmaker, I jumped at the idea. Making a documentary can't be that much more difficult than creating a music video for a rock band, I thought. All I needed to do was record some interviews and edit them together. A partnership was struck between the shelter and me, and we got to work. We had high hopes and no money. On the first day, I set up in a private room at the shelter. The support workers had created a list of people I should speak to. The first person came in and sat down. He was quiet and watched me get the microphone and camera ready. As I sat down, I realized I knew the technical components of filmmaking, but then I was struck with the question of "now what?" I meekly asked, "Could you introduce yourself?" He responded, "Pernell Thomas Bad Arm." He was Blackfoot and from my community, the Blood Reserve (Kainai). At the time, I didn't know how important these next few minutes would become. I continued filming interviews and visuals until I edited a meandering 30-minute video that had a lot of talking heads, but no direction or story. I had the intention of filming more interviews to round out the information. But that never happened. The film remained unfinished, and I eventually moved to Vancouver for film school. On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 2015, I sat at a table with friends, laughing and joking around. I had just graduated from film school and was excited by the prospects of working in the film industry. One of my friends was scrolling through their phone and laughed at an image. "I love this," they said and shared their phone with everyone. On the screen was a photo of an older Indigenous man with raised fists and fierce eyes staring right into the camera. It was captioned "Skoden." My heart sank. It had been several years since I had seen him, but I recognized him instantly. Pernell Bad Arm. From my time working at the Lethbridge shelter as a security guard, I understood the likely context in which the photo was taken. During that time in the late 2000s, we knew people would record and document those living on the streets, intending to humiliate and antagonize. They would share these photos and videos on the internet and social media. This type of content went unchecked and ran rampant. I assumed this is where the photo came from. I imagined someone or a group of people, late at night, seeing Pernell on the streets, then confronting and harassing him, pushing him up to the moment the photo was taken. I shared this with my friends. They listened and nodded along, understanding the inherent issues with the photo. But I could see they had a vastly different outlook on the meme. It was not a photo of a person in distress. To them, it was the exact opposite. It was a powerful image of an Indigenous man rising to the occasion to fight back — against racism, against settler colonialism and against the unrelenting machine that many of us Indigenous people find ourselves struggling against. They saw something empowering. The combination of the photo and the word, "Skoden," was seared into the minds of many Indigenous peoples. I saw this play out on social media, where the Skoden meme took on a life of its own, spawning variations and copycats. Sadly, Pernell passed away in the fall of 2015. Out of respect for Pernell, many people from my community who knew him, such as Mark Brave Rock (his best friend), Starly Brave Rock (Mark's daughter) and Amber Jensen (his caseworker), commented and posted to help humanize Pernell. They asked people not to share the image at the request of his family. Their efforts were amplified by an article written by Lenard Monkman at CBC Indigenous. The article told the story of the Skoden meme from the perspective of those who knew Pernell, and shared the family's wishes to stop the spread of the meme. The idea of making a film about Pernell to help further humanize his story had crossed my mind over the years. But I did not feel ready until I was confronted by an opportunity. In the spring of 2021, a production executive at Telus Originals reached out to me. He was meeting emerging filmmakers and asking for documentary pitches. I knew what project I should pitch and understood I had a responsibility to Pernell. He's from my community, and I had so much admiration for him. Despite what life and society had thrown at him, he maintained his caring heart. I remember one day, while working at the shelter, Pernell was sitting by one of the tables overlooking the backyard of the shelter. Suddenly, he jumped up and beelined it for the exit. As a security guard, this put me on high alert, wondering what would cause such a response. My mind jumped to conclusions. Maybe a fight was happening outside, or shamefully, I thought maybe Pernell was going to fight someone. I checked the security cameras and saw Pernell racing up the stairs that led to the overpass and disappearing out of the camera's view. I left to check out the window, and my assumptions were proven wrong. Pernell was helping an elderly man down the stairs. He was holding his arm, supporting him each step of the way. Once they got inside, he began to order me and another security guard around to help the elderly man: "We need to prep a bed for him; the old man needs to lie down. We need to get him water to take his medicine." I helped get the elder settled and stood in awe of Pernell.
CBC
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Our film uncovers over 140 years of lost stories from the incredible women who lived in the same house
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by direct ors Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt focuses on their film The Nest Julietta Singh: I've always had a fascination with the idea of home and with practices of homemaking. I grew up on Treaty 1 territory in central Winnipeg. I was the child of two immigrant parents. My mother was born in Ireland to a German-Jewish mother whose life was indelibly shaped by the Holocaust, and my father was a child survivor of the Partition of India, the lasting effects of which South Asians are still trying to untangle to this day. As a racialized child in a world that felt exceedingly white, where Indigenous struggle was visible and felt, I was keenly aware that I was not in any sense "at home." Now an immigrant myself who resides in the United States, "home" has remained a vexing idea, an ongoing crisis and a political promise. What I mean by this is that there are many ways of being at home, of reimagining home, that can reform our intimate, social and political lives. And it's from this place that I set out to make The Nest, an epically collaborative and cross-cultural experiment. In the winter of 2020, thick in the pandemic, I began to research the history of my childhood home, a place of intense filial struggle in my youth and a place my mother has lived in for over four decades. She purchased The Nest, a languishing beige brick mansion on the banks of the Assiniboine River, in 1980 for the cost of the land, against my father's wishes. She spent the rest of her life devoted to its restoration and preservation until, at age 80, while running the home as a bed and breakfast, she fell backwards down a flight of stairs to the third floor. Left partially paralyzed by the fall, her life in that grand colonial home would never be the same. The Nest began as a way of helping my mother say goodbye to the place by situating her amidst a world of other women whose lives had unfolded in the house. It was also a way of collaboratively reclaiming lost matriarchal histories, and of recreating my own conflicted relationship to the place through the process. Little did I imagine when I set out on the project that it would become a feature film. Nor could I have dreamed that it would become a history-altering undertaking that would challenge settler colonial narratives and tie me indelibly to Métis, Deaf and Japanese communities in Winnipeg, fundamentally changing my relationship to the city of my youth. Through archival research and gathering oral histories, I learned new and mind-blowing stories of the house's forgotten pasts: its ties to the Red River Resistance and the legendary Métis matriarch, Annie Bannatyne; its connection to the Manitoba School for the Deaf and Mary Ettie McDermid, the first Deaf teacher in Western Canada; and the quieter domestic legacies of girls and women like Mrs. Okazaki [the wife of consul-general Kumao Okazaki] and her daughter Masa, who lived in the house when it served as the Japanese Consulate of Manitoba. At the time of all these wild discoveries, I was taking pandemic walks with my filmmaker friend Chase and regaling him with my findings. At some point, he declared: "This is my next film project!" Not long after, we stumbled on a fallen bird's nest and took it as a green light from the universe. (The little cup nest still lives on my mantle.) As a writer, I was of course daunted by the prospect of diving headlong into a feature film. But I knew Chase's obsessive commitment to collaboration, and I had become deeply enmeshed with all the participating community members and felt there was something unequivocally visual about inviting communities back into the house to reimagine and reclaim their own lost histories. Chase Joynt: Yes, this walking story and my reaction to Julietta is very true! I knew immediately, and with great clarity, that her authorial vision and steadfast commitment to telling stories otherwise was fertile ground to build a film. From the earliest stages of project development, we committed to a constraint: to tell these 140-plus years of interlocking stories within the confines of a single space. Like all boundaries, extraordinary potential emerged from this frame. We began to explore how we could invest in architecture, production design, cinematography, wardrobe and music composition such that the audience could feel they were being transported through time, while also recognizing they were staying rooted in one place. Our approach extended far beyond the material to consider, more philosophically and experientially, how we are intimately stitched together in ways we are not taught to assume or anticipate. For me personally, The Nest offered an exciting departure from making films about trans life to thinking more capaciously about transness as a method of cinematic approach, one that can hold stories on thresholds which endeavour to communicate more than one position, time period or subjectivity simultaneously. For us collectively, the project began long before we went to camera and continues to transform long after the experiences translated onscreen. It is from this position, the potential for documentary to be understood as practice far beyond product, that we hope The Nest offers its most enduring imprint.
CBC
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
The fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights in Canada is a story of love and resistance
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by director Noam Gonick focuses on his film Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance. We wanted Parade to be a call to arms: powerful, emboldening testimonies from dozens of radical queers combined with unearthed activist films, video art, NFB stock shots, news clips, personal archives and audio interviews — all interwoven into a kind of history of Canada's 2SLGBTQ+ movement. How do legacy films like this get made? It took a gutsy producer like Justine Pimlott — herself a queer filmmaker — to get us green-lit with enough time and space for editor Ricardo Acosta to craft the story. This was a deeply collaborative project. (During the process, there were a few experiences — you won't find them in the film — that I conjured to help me tackle the task.) While the title, Parade, speaks to Gay Pride in all its political and apolitical manifestations, for me, Parade is a subtle nod to the mystifying gay multi-hyphenate Jean Cocteau, whose ballet Parade inspired the first written use of the word "surrealism." Cocteau was addicted to opium, and his influence, sometimes scandalous, on the subsequent generation of French writers is the stuff of legend. So perhaps it's appropriate that Parade delves into problematic corners of the Canadian queer journey. One of the darkest was the 1977 murder of 12-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques — a crime which was used to tarnish the gay community. This was one of the trickiest chapters in our film to get right. My family spent that summer of 1977 in Toronto. As a kid, I'd spend my days wandering the Egyptian collection of the ROM, unaware of the killing on Yonge Street's "Sin Strip." In the Annex's Jean Sibelius Square, down the street from where we were staying, I was briefly kidnapped by a woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She took me to her apartment and asked me if I knew what love was. I surprisingly encountered Lilith years later while in film school. She immediately remembered the incident. She thought I said my name was "Name." Several chapters in Parade could easily be entire films on their own. One of these was "SILENCE = DEATH." When Queer Nation fought back during the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, my boyfriend at the time, Mark Turrell, and I found ourselves in an angry mob that threw peanuts at then-federal health minister Perrin Beatty in the Hotel Vancouver. I remember feeling sorry for Perrin — he looked so dejected, his shiny head shaped like a peanut. Mark would later die, surrounded by his parents and friends as we read passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He was a young artist who wanted to be the next Aubrey Beardsley. Pondering which milestones to include in Parade wasn't easy. Some stories didn't have enough archival visuals to support them, others had full films about them that Ricardo had already edited. One such story was that of Jim Egan (the subject of Jack & Jim), whose letters to the editor of various publications in the early 1960s and late-in-life Supreme Court challenge were groundbreaking. Shortly before he died, I found myself on the edge of Vancouver Island waltzing with Jim at a party alongside his partner, Jack; also present were a closeted lumberjack and a flamboyant hairdresser. The music was big-band swing, and I was a rave promoter, so our dancing was awkward. I held on to his thick polyester suit, trying to follow his back-and-forth steps while Jack looked on, laughing. Some of Jim's energy might have rubbed off on me that night. They lived in a house full of teacup chihuahuas. I regret not immortalizing those dogs on film. After film school, I returned to the city of Winnipeg (Treaty 1), where I was born — not sure where one went to apply for a job as a filmmaker. I fell in with a crowd who were organizing a gathering of gay and lesbian Indigenous people in Beausejour, Man. They were about to change the world's lexicon with the introduction of the term "two-spirit." These were the people I played pinball with at Giovanni's Room, the local gay bar in Winnipeg: Connie Merasty, with the inimitable voice and extra-wide-rimmed glasses; Francis, who was born on the same day in the same year as me; Dave, who smiled all the time; and Dorlon (RIP), a Cher impersonator who scared me but looks great dancing in Parade in a vintage clip from David Adkin's Out: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Youth. I have a lesbian comic cousin named Robin Tyler. We met while researching Parade. She organized the March on Washington in 1987, was a friend of Harvey Milk and was one half of one of the first same-sex couples to get married (then divorced) in California. She tells great jokes in Parade. Some of the visual material in the film came from my own archives. Elle Flanders commissioned me to make a Jumbotron video for Toronto Pride in 2008. No Safe Words was supposed to be about Abu Ghraib and the hazing homoerotics of conquest, torture and war. But the piece transitioned into an exposé of police in Pride. When I filmed documentation of the installation from the vantage point of Alexander Chapman's apartment overlooking Yonge Street, we were gobsmacked by the presence of squad cars and men in uniform. Alexander is also in Parade. Some of the interviews in the film feel like you're eavesdropping on conversations we've been having for years. Others, like the one with Rodney Diverlus from Black Lives Matter Toronto, were with people I met two seconds before the interview began, walking through the studio door. While conducting interviews, it's your fevered memories that enable you to sit across from formidable world-changers and ask them to share their own incandescence.
CBC
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How I learned the beauty of a simple life from my 90-year-old aunt who lives alone in rural Manitoba
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by direct or Amalie Atkins focuses on her film Agatha's Almanac The first time I filmed with my aunt, Agatha Bock, she arrived in Saskatoon by train to play a part in one of my earlier films, The Diamond Eye Assembly. Ready for anything, she had brought a suitcase with farmer's sausage wrapped in the Winnipeg Free Press, her red Pyrex bowl, a perogy-cutting pineapple tin and all my grandmother's handmade aprons. She shows up, every time, as her full self. During that project, I realized that in my next film, she should simply be herself, unscripted. Moving through her world already felt cinematic. Agatha's farm is only an hour from where I grew up in rural Manitoba, but it always felt like another world, shadowed by old oaks, thick with ferns and full of domestic rituals that left a lasting imprint on me. Every summer, we'd visit. And after my parents died, I felt a magnetic pull to reconnect with my family's matrilineal Mennonite history, rooted in Ukraine but still very much alive in the rhythms of Agatha's everyday life. I wanted to reconnect with a place that hadn't changed much, where every object — quilt, embroidered pillow, kitchen utensil, garden tool — had been made or held by my family and is still in use on Agatha's farm. There, I sensed something just beneath the surface, an elusive presence I now think of as "the Manitoba Feeling" — fractured histories held in the land, which are felt more than seen. These intangible currents connect us to place, story and each other. As the film progressed, I came to understand how much loss had occurred on the property in my aunt's childhood. Agatha is resilient and unstoppable. She is always on the move — planting, gathering, harvesting, making something, hosting someone or scheming on the phone. She has strong ideas and opinions, and nothing can be wasted. When I was a teenager, Agatha gave my mom a blue-flowered bedspread to pass on to me, and I gave it the classic teenage side-eye. After persistent questioning, I found out she'd pulled it from a box behind a dumpster. To her, it was a perfectly good bedspread. And this makes sense when you consider she was born during the Great Depression, when recycling and reusing items were standard practice, if not crucial for survival. When my dad died, Agatha arrived on the bus in her usual way, armed with jars of home-made chicken noodle soup, reused Styrofoam trays loaded with her famous perogies and iced sugar cookies packed into old tissue boxes, held together with tape. Anytime someone wept, I'd offer them the box. And instead of a tissue, they'd pull out a cookie — pink, yellow or robin's egg blue. In Agatha's world, everything is held together with tape — her chimney (she assures me this is safe!), her leaking water pails, her tools, her linoleum and her windows. Tape, a central motif in the film, not only serves a practical purpose but also as a space to record information she doesn't want to forget: "Good tub from Anne Leadbetter, June 2003." Years before I started the film Agatha's Almanac, my sister and I asked our aunt to teach us some of her processes. She started with her pickle recipe (only the tiniest cucumbers make it into her pickle jars). I noticed the label on her secret ingredient: "Horseradish 1975," the year I was born. Next, she showed us how to make soap. She'd tagged the main ingredient "Good goose fat from mother 1982," referring to my grandmother, who had died when I was 12. It made me wonder if she had a container with "bad goose fat" and, if so, what it would be used for (because in Agatha's house, no goose fat would be thrown away). To tell this story, centred around the life of one woman, I sought out an all-female crew. Through filmmaker Heidi Phillips, I met cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, who brought Charlene Moore on board as sound recordist and Kristiane Church as production coordinator. Agatha immediately welcomed us with plates of varenyky and a list of house rules. We filmed her carving a thick-skinned watermelon for over two hours. No one questioned it — and if they had, I'm not sure I could have explained why it mattered. Later, I found out the watermelon had originated from my grandmother's seeds. They had been saved, stashed and regrown for 37 years. This scene was about more than Agatha's brightly coloured outfit and her sculptural way with a knife — it was a moment that connected the past to the present, a quiet continuity running through the earth of her garden. Another time, we arrived to a cold, dark house after driving through a sudden flurry of snow. Agatha's power was out. Luckily, we were relying mostly on natural light throughout the film. Every time a complicated situation presented itself, we found ways to keep going. We worked so well together, with ease and a collaborative spirit. What began as a short personal experiment grew into so much more. After the first shoot with the watermelon, I was hooked. After each shoot, I matched the 16-mm film with audio. Somewhere along the way, I realized this wasn't going to be a short anymore, but a multi-chapter project. The structure of an almanac emerged, exploring both the visible and the unseen aspects of Agatha's world. That winter, I shot 11 rolls of film: macro close-ups of hoarfrost, ice fog swirling off the river in –40 C cold and quilts floating on a line against the snow. The colder the winter, the more beautiful the footage. With high hopes, I sent the film to Negativeland, a lab in New York. The box was delivered on a Saturday, and somebody stole it before it could be collected on the Monday. I lost the winter. And it wasn't just a technical setback. It felt like a disruption of time, as if a part of Agatha's world was gone. Four chapters were screened in an exhibition at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska and rotated with the seasons. I kept going. Filming as many of Agatha's processes as possible became an obsession. When I realized I had gathered well over two hours of footage, I realized it was going to be a feature. I made it to the farm every spring, summer or fall, sometimes with the crew, sometimes alone. Last July, I filmed the final roll: Agatha wandering through the yard in her hip waders, the ones she wears when the basement floods. What I observed in those six years was Agatha's devotion — to her garden and her particular ways of life — her generosity and her care. She shows that ritual doesn't need to be grand to be sacred. Her way of moving through the world with purpose, frugality and intention is the foundation of this film.
