By Jordan Baylon

PUBLISHED AUGUST 2010 - Canadian Diaries Program Guide

by Jordan Baylon

At the moment I am failing to find a way to use words to bring a rational order to the films we have chosen for this program. Having sifted through roughly 18 hours of footage to select (along with my fellow jury members) 15 films, I am a befuddled quilt maker with beautiful swaths set out before me, representing an entire range of colours, textures, and tones. The agony of choosing the materials is now eclipsed by a paralysing resistance to commit the violence of stitching the tapestry of ideas - making up my personal understanding of this program. My fingers are numb with worry as I thread the needle, but I will try my hand.

The films presented here were chosen with two considerations in mind: the first being that they must represent Canada, and the second that they must exemplify the documentary format. With regard to the former, Canadianness is something I feel intuitively, but am at a loss to articulate in a satisfying manner. As for the latter, I am by no means an authority on documentary films: I have a rudimentary understanding of its technical aspects, and even less of a sense of its rich history.  In the case of either criterion, I had to be satisfied with being just a person who is open to a world of ideas - which those of you watching these films will agree is enough. So how am I different after bearing witness to these works?

In this program there are some films that have a strong grounding in the corporeal, and others that seem more cerebral to me. The distinction is ultimately arbitrary, but useful for the moment. The films in the first category speak to the body, and deal with geography and nature, with the sensual and the sensory. The electric blue explosions of pink in Kara Blake’s July’s Wet Dreams contrast poignantly with the white, austere, and solemn energy of a skating rink in Phil Hoffman’s On the Pond,  On the one hand there are the raw and emotive images of frolicking on a hot summers day, neither qualified nor diluted by words; on the other hand, ice and snow are consecrated by a family history told with many voices. These two films are elemental.

Still in the corporeal category are films about physical presences. The word “body” has a literal significance for Frederic Moffet and his look at “the art of gaining.”  In his aptly named Hard Fat, our gaze is made voyeuristic. In a hypnotic trance we watch SFGutMuscle and CMBigDog, and are forced to challenge our own notions of the empowering, the shameful, the beautiful, and the grotesque. Then there is the stoic and vital presence of a father in Lindsay and Nicholas Bradford-Ewart’s A Boreal Forest Expedition, a self-possessed and confident nature spirit warding the forests of Saskatchewan,  bonding with his daughter and baby granddaughter in shared spaces delineated by the light of the campfire or a lesson in skinning a fisher pelt.  In Janine Fung’s Leftovers, the ominous and surreal image of a mother brandishing a carving knife is made both humorous and elegiac by a narrative urgent in its quest for an elusive truth. Finally, the human body becomes the site for raging storms of passion, torrents of disappointment, and the warm light of stubborn hope for the women in Dominique Keller’s My Forehead. Facing these powerful figures, whether we are repulsed or fascinated, we see ourselves reflected in the reactions they catalyze within us.

The second category of films lives in the world of ideas. Perhaps the most complex and inexhaustible of ideas to address is that of the self. There is a warrior in Alanis Obomsawin’s My Name is Kahentiiosta who must place her own identity on the line, and hope that in the end she can claim it back along with the justice she sought in the first place. And like the hero of that film, Brian Stockton draws his very sense of being from his sense of place, as in the sense of wonder and warmth that he conveys in Saskatchewan and Whitmore Park: The Epic Story of My Life Part 4. In Jani Bellefleur-Kaltush’s Do Not Tell a young woman laments the pain caused as a single past rumour’s attrition continues erodes her life. Then there is the loss of identity addressed in aAron Munson’s AurA, where elysian prairie images are haunted by what has been lost and is being sought. Often that search is inherited and things that were found once have to be found again, as in the journeys of re-discovery and invention shared by Davina Pardo and her father in Birdlings Two.

Some films push the boundaries of the world of ideas to where the abstract and the ethereal fly, and where knowing and unknowing are questions. Kara Blake’s look in the life of electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire in The Delian Mode depicts a person of penetrating vision and tremendous drive, mapping the dark spaces within her with sound. Gerald Saul’s musings on presence and freedom in Grain: Summer. I Can’t See the Forest through My Dreams blur the border of the waking world. And lastly, John Price’s The Sea Series #8: Landfall Liliput seems propelled by the emotional logic of dreams, and for that reason I can only access it through the wonderful images it presents: clouds gliding across the sky in both directions, a little boy running on beach, a baby in the sand, and the expansive…

Having described the films in this way, I feel as though I have awakened at my bench with my work miraculously completed. I wonder at the form the tapestry has taken as my eyes trace the beautiful details inherent to each piece that forms the whole. This is what Canada means to me, and it took these films to make me realize I feel this way. I am thrilled to imagine what you will feel when you watch them, and how you will change. That is also what Canada means to me.