Accidental Filmmaker
Some love for We Were Here, and other wonderful films I've seen
When I was holed up in a funny old converted classroom at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island in August 2024, I had no idea the stories I was writing were going to become a series of animated shorts that would screen at film festivals - much less win some awards. I just said to the kind and talented Jessica Hiemstra, “I feel like these stories need to be videos somehow.” Jessica figured out the somehow and it was perfect.
The series won a lovely Legacy Light Award from Web Series Canada in September, where Lucy Silversides was also nominated for Best Editing and Eve Goldberg for Best Original Score. What a dream team! Then Sophie’s film won Best Documentary at the Voices Rising International Film Festival in New York. And now it’s won an Award of Distinction from Canada Shorts - the Canadian and International Short Film Festival. What these awards mean to me is that the lives of our children mattered. And that’s what I wanted to say.
When I was in New York for Voices Rising, I had a chance to see some wonderful work. I’m not a film buff, really. I rarely get to see shorts, but now a whole new world of art has opened up to me! I wanted to share a couple of real gems here.
The first is called The Last Words and won Best Student Film at Voices Rising. It was made by a couple of high school students, who were just delightful to meet and are just getting started. It opens with real news clips about book bans all over the U.S. then fast forwards 15 years to a high school where kids are urged to rat each other out for possessing or reading books. One intrepid reader is part of the underground and we see her defying authority to share the written word.
The second is part of a much bigger community oral history project based in Brooklyn called Stoop Stories, which reminds me of the kind of work I was very happily doing back in the early 1990s when stuff was funded. I saw the short called Maani and Mr. Sweat, in which a teenager talks to an older neighbour about life as Black men, the choices that have to be made as adults, their wonderful community of Bed-Stuy, and the simple pleasure of stoop ball. Check it out.