Effect of Poverty in remote First Nations highlighted in film about Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug
Film shines light on Canada’s ‘Third World’
Sep 28 2010
Lili is featured in a film about the shocking conditions First Nations children endure in Ontario’s north. On Lili's 12th birthday in May 2006, her mother committed suicide. Lili found her.
Video: See the trailer
Five-year-old Tyler’s mouth slackens and his eyes close as he puts his hands around his neck and rotates slowly below an imaginary rope.
“When he killed himself, he went like this,” he tells filmmaker Andrée Cazabon as he describes the day in April, 2006, when he and his older brother, Kyler, 6, watched their father hang himself from the ceiling of their home in the northern Ontario First Nations community of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug.
For Cazabon, who spent 1½ years filming the family’s story — Tyler and his seven brothers and sisters lost their father, mother and stepfather to suicide — that scene is probably the most difficult.
And it is one scene Cazabon almost cut this week in advance of the film’s premiere Thursday at the Royal Ontario Museum.
“But Chief Donny (Morris) told me I had taken a lot out already,” she said in an interview. “He said: ‘If it makes people uncomfortable to watch this film, they should try living it.’ ”
Cazabon’s film, 3rd World Canada, is about the shocking conditions First Nations children endure in Ontario’s isolated north.
It is a plea to the south to learn and to act.
“I’ve never witnessed such levels of poverty . . . that tend to create the need for child welfare to be involved,” Tikinagan Family Services head Michael Hardy says.
Hardy, whose agency is responsible for 30 remote northern communities spanning two time zones and a geographic area the size of France, says the need is unimaginable.
“There’s something not right in Ontario when the amount of poverty that’s here, the amount of despair, the amount of loss, the amount of suicides are here and (there is) silence in Ontario,” he says.
Cazabon, 36, is a Gemini-nominated filmmaker who grew up in foster care and made her first film, Letters to a Street Child, in 1999 about her life as a homeless teen in Toronto.
Of all the harrowing experiences she has lived and brought to the screen, 3rd World Canada, her fifth film, was the most difficult to shoot, she says.
“It was the first time I have ever cried behind the camera,” she says from her home in Ottawa.
“It is a painful topic. But as we eagerly help Third World nations around the globe, I think we can match that same enthusiasm for helping the Third World nation in our backyard.”
The $165,000 film was largely bankrolled by the Law Foundation of Ontario with assistance from the Laidlaw Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, the Atkinson Charitable Foundation and the Rotary Club of Toronto.
Toronto businessman and Rotarian John Andras hopes the film sparks a dialogue that begins to look at solutions.
“You see the film — it’s devastating. It’s almost impossible to believe this is Canada. We should be better than this,” says Andras, a past president of the club.
“I think seeing is believing in this instance and I hope that a lot of people’s eyes are going to be opened on Thursday. And I hope from that will come the desire for change.”
The 46-minute film, which screens at 7 p.m. at the ROM, will be introduced by former Ontario lieutenant governor James Bartleman. It will be followed by a panel discussion at 8 p.m. with community members from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug.
Tickets are $50 and can be purchased at the door or at http://thirdworldcanada.ca/order. Proceeds will go into a trust for the children in the film.