By Neil Armstrong
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| Photo credit: Phillip Pike Filmmaker, Phillip Pike, whose new documentary 'Our Dance of Revolution' had its world premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival |
Fresh off the world premiere of his film, “Our Dance of
Revolution,” at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival -- North America's largest documentary festival – Jamaican-Canadian
director, Phillip Pike, will hold two independent screenings in June in
Toronto.
It will have its international premiere at the 10th
anniversary of the queer film festival in Mumbai, India. In the next year or so
the film will roll out at other festivals around the world
Produced by
his company, Roaring River Films, “Our
Dance of Revolution is a long overdue look at Toronto's Black
LGBTQ community, featuring a rousing oral history of struggle and triumph from
four decades of local legends and freedom fighters,” notes a press release.
The
documentary was ranked #3 for the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian
Documentary as determined by audience vote at Hot Docs. Among all feature films
at the festival (Canadian & International), “Our Dance of Revolution” was
voted #6. In total, there were 234 documentaries from around the world.
Pike says the exposure will bring secondary kinds of
engagements with the film, educational sales and broadcasts. He is also beginning
to think in a more focused way about distribution.
For him, making the film is a gift back to the community and
he says the response from the community has been wonderful.
“People have been writing and commenting on Facebook about their
appreciation for the film, appreciation for making visible that story,” says
Pike, noting that it is “a mirror back to ourselves.”
“Our Dance of Revolution” is a preservation of the history
of Black LGBTQ activism in Toronto, which had many Jamaicans and other Caribbean nationals in the vanguard,
and also addresses the seeming erasure of this history.
To ensure that the documentary is seen by the younger
generation and is accessible to the community, Pike has been working with the
three agencies in Toronto that deal with black LGBTQ youth – Black Queer Youth,
the Melanin Linx Mentorship program, and the Central Toronto Youth Services (CTYS) program.
He provided them with complimentary tickets for the
screenings at Hot Docs and has made the same offer for the June 9 screenings at
the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema.
Engagement is important to Pike who is looking ahead to the
fall when there will be some opportunities for the Black queer community and
wider Black community to have access to the film.
There is already interest expressed to get the documentary
as a resource into educational institutions like the Toronto District School
Board and universities.
Going into the project he envisioned it as an intergenerational
dialogue but he doesn’t think that he delivered on that. Pike notes that unlike
narrative films, documentaries can end up being a different thing after the
research, development and the writing of the treatment.
The documentary starts in the early 80s and goes up to 2017
and includes many of the generations that have been active in community
building over that time. To try to have more intergenerational dialogue in it would
have resulted in a 4-hour film so he had to make an editorial decision to
structure it differently.
Pike said everyone he approached to participate in the film
recognized that it was an important storytelling project and they trusted him
to tell him intimate stories of their lives.
Pike, who came into the community in 1993, said there were
folks who were at it at least 10 or 12 years prior to that so the whole history
of Dewson House and the Dewson House Collective – which are showcased in the
film -- was new to him.
He had known writer and co-founder of Sister Vision Press, Makeda
Silvera, in the community but never had a deep connection to her and so getting
to meet her, “and talk with her, and spending a lot of time sitting in her
house for days on end scanning photographs” was new to him.
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| Photo credit: Our Dance of Revolution Makeda Silvera walking through the city in the documentary |
Pike said in a more general sense what he really gained was
a deeper appreciation of what these folks did in an “act of generosity, an act
of love of community to really step out of that sort of private sphere, that
private comfort zone.”
He noted that community building is a lot of work and there
are many countervailing forces of marginalization and police brutality,
however, “these folks kind of took up
the baton and ran with it, they created the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention
(Black CAP)” while sitting around a kitchen table.
“I have deep respect and appreciation for the scope of what
they have done and just the depth, I think, of their love and generosity for
community in doing it.”
The total budget for the film itself without some of the
ancillary costs, like the trailer and storage for digital media which is very
expensive, was $85,000 CAD.
To help defray that cost, Pike started a GoFundMe campaign and
is appreciative of all the donations.
“Some folks have donated to me directly
such that the current total is closer to $4,000. For me, the GoFundMe campaign
was a bit of an experiment and so I had no particular expectations about how
much funds could be raised by that method. Therefore any amount raised is
gratefully accepted to help defray the production costs of the film,” he says.
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| Photo credit: Our Dance of Revolution Debbie Douglas and Douglas Stewart walking outside Dewson House in the documentary |
The screenings
on June 9 at the 650-seat, century-old Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema will feature the world premiere of five extra scenes dealing with Sister
Vision Press, AYA, GLAD, Pelau MasQUEERade and the House of Monroe -- important
groups in the history of Toronto’s Black queer community.
Each
screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director and some of the
subjects of the documentary.
Pike says these
are opportunities for a wider audience to see the film that had screenings in
the middle of the day at the Hot Docs festival which were geared towards the
industry. The June screenings will also generate some revenue for the company.
He noted
that the film is 102 minutes long and so it really would not have been feasible
to have the extra scenes in the festival.
As a
graduate of McGill University’s Faculty of Law, Pike’s journey of personal and
professional discovery has taken him from a career creating change as a
community activist and human rights lawyer to a career creating change through
storytelling as a documentary filmmaker.
He is a
graduate of the Documentary Filmmaking Institute (School of Creative Arts &
Animation, Seneca College, Toronto). He also received intensive training in
video production at Trinity Square Video in Toronto and the Bay Area Video
Coalition in San Francisco.
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| Photo credit: Jah Grey The key creatives and subjects of the 'Our Dance of Revolution' documentary |
Completed
in 2003, his first documentary, “Songs of Freedom,” tells compelling stories of
courage and hope of gays and lesbians living in Jamaica. It was an official
selection at several film festivals and was acquired for broadcast across North
America on a specialty TV channel. “Our Dance of Revolution” is his third film
and second feature.
“Songs of
Freedom” also had its world premiere at what is now known as the Hot Docs
Cinema (then known as the Bloor St. Cinema).
Pike’s
company, Roaring River Films, is
dedicated to the production and distribution of documentaries that inform and
inspire with a focus on capturing the experience and perspectives of queer
people of African descent across the African Diaspora.
The titles of his films – “Songs of Freedom” and what was
originally “Tell the Children the Truth” before it was renamed “Our Dance of
Revolution” – are inspired by the lyrics of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and
“Babylon System.”
“I’m a huge Marley fan, I’ve always been. I started doing
this thing where I thought, oh, why not have every film that I make have the
title come from a Marley song.”
The emancipative philosophy of “none but ourselves can free
our minds” so “taking on responsibility for our own emancipation, our own
liberation” and then the original title “Tell the Children the Truth” sparked a
willingness to tell these stories revealing the truth, said Pike.
“In thinking back to Makeda, for example, and how she talked
about how in those early years gays and lesbians were invisible to the Black
community so it’s as if we didn’t exist, as if that truth was not being told;
it was a non-starter,” he said.
After going through the production process and hearing
social activist, Angela Robertson, talk Pike said the imagery of the dance and
all of the footage of Blockorama of people dancing underscored Robertson’s idea
that “it’s not only a celebratory dance but it’s a political dance about making
our lives visible.”
“I just thought that was a very poetic title and it brought
a lot of things together in the film.”
Pike said it has been a wonderful journey since he embarked
on making documentaries.
“For me being a documentary filmmaker is a huge privilege. I
remember when I made “Songs of Freedom” I bought a camera, some sound equipment
and an airline ticket and I flew to Jamaica. I said I was a documentary
filmmaker and because of that people opened up their homes and their hearts and
let me in and sat down with me and spoke on camera for hours about their
lives.”
He noted that documentary filmmaking is difficult and there
are not a lot of financial rewards.
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| Photo credit: Our Dance of Revolution Members of the Black Women's Collective with Phillip Pike in the documentary |
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| Photo credit: Ludwing Duarte courtesy of Hot Docs Phillip Pike and some of the key subjects featured in the documentary |
His second film, “The Seasons of Our Life,” a 15-minute short, was done while he
was at Documentary Filmmaking Institute and has been submitted to a festival.
It is a short poetic documentary that is “a
meditation on our human journey from birth to death. Four subjects ranging in
age from 11 to 100 answer the question, ‘what is it like being ____?’ where the
blank is their age.”
Jamaican poet, novelist, short story
and non-fiction writer, Olive Senior, who lives in Toronto is featured in it.
Pike is hoping at some point in the future to revisit the
short film and make a longer version of it.
“For a long time I’ve been fascinated by this idea of how we
are as human beings at different stages of our lives and I don’t think it’s
something that in our western culture we think a lot about. We’re very
compartmentalized so we send the kids off to daycare, we put the old folks in
nursing homes, and we kind of glorify everybody in-between so I wanted to
explore that idea.”
He says documentaries spark thought, reflection and
conversation so he wanted to spark conversation and reflection about what would
life be like for him when he is 80 or 90.
There were two inspirations for this short documentary. One
was the journey he had with his mother in the last six years of her life.
They were particularly close over those last six years and he
was able to observe her “literally deteriorate physically from day to day, week
to week, month to month” so it got him thinking about his own mortality.
He was also inspired by a presentation he saw by some youth
at a faith organization “where they had people come up, starting from about ten
years old up to about 80 or 90 and just say what it’s like being that age.”
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| Photo credit: Our Dance of Revolution Black Lives Matter Toronto, honoured group of Pride Toronto Parade in 2016, in protest at the head of the parade |
Having made “Our
Dance of Revolution” which involved 35 years of history, 35 interviews
and 18 subjects in the film -- a huge ground to cover -- Pike would now like to produce a new
film but on a smaller scale, possibly in Jamaica and something related to age,
aging and change.
“It hasn’t concretized into anything specific but I almost
feel like I would want to go to Jamaica and do a small sort of intimate portrait
of some folks in rural Jamaica, particularly maybe women who are living a
certain kind of life, and just have them share with us their wisdom.”
During the making of “Our Dance of Revolution,” the
filmmaker had a vision in his head of multiple generations of people together
in the same room sharing a meal and talking and sharing their histories and
filming all of that.
He pulled together some community activists to plan it and
it grew into something much bigger than he had initially envisaged.
Pike said “Bigger
Than We,” which was held in June 2017, started at about 2:30 p.m. and they were
still drumming at 10:30 p.m.
“It was a huge thing but it was wonderful. The feedback we
got from that event was just wonderful, people called it a balm for the troubled
times,” says Pike, noting that just getting all those people together in that
room alone was a feat.
He ended up not using as much of that footage as he thought
he would have, however, a lot of the voiceovers that are in the film are from
the event.
Pike is hoping to edit all of that footage into a form that
can be used as “documentation of our history” in the future.
He says the next “Bigger Than We” will be held over on the
Toronto Islands during the summer of 2020.
The two screenings will take place on Sunday,
June 9, 2019 at 2:00 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, 506
Bloor Street West, Toronto.
[A shorter version of this story has been published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, May 30-June 5, 2019 issue.]
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