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188 TWELVE Telling Our Own Stories Seeking Identity in Tkaronto The time for you people telling our stories is over. . . . I’m done being asleep. —Tkaronto Métis director Shane Belcourt’s feature-length narrative film Tkaronto tells the story of two young urban Indigenous Canadians who arrive in Toronto, and because they stay at the same house, they meet, spend time together, and share with each other their stories. Jolene (Melanie McLaren) has come to the Canadian city from Los Angeles to interview Max (Loren Cardinal), an Ojibwa elder, as a part of her project to interview, photograph, and paint portraits of several such elders. The Métis man Ray (Duane Murray) has come from Vancouver to market his idea for an Aboriginal television series. The film’s plot traces the growing connection between these two main characters as they do the work that has brought them to the city and as they simultaneously ponder the significance of their Aboriginal identities. Tkaronto is not a film that features the death of an important character, but it does include mention of the deaths of people significant to the characters , and Jolene’s project implies a perceived need to capture and preserve stories and images of some of the tribal elders, a project similar to Will’s photograph calendar in Medicine River. In addition to this implication and to the brief references to deaths, the film has themes in common with several other films under discussion in this study. It melds a documentary style into its fictional framework, as do Skins and The Exiles, for example, and like Naturally Native it both features an Indigenous woman in a leading role and traces the experiences of characters who seek a sense of Indigenous identity. As part of its depiction of this identity search, Tkaronto also identifies the hold Hollywood (mis)representations can have over a Native person’s sense of self. In the opening scene of Tkaronto Jolene is in the midst of interviewing Max about his Aboriginal identity. The scene is, or appears to be, straight interview, and in these opening moments the viewer has no way of knowing otherwise. The film thus immediately and pointedly recalls or alludes to the long-standing documentary mode of the interview. This form of interactive documentary, according to Bill Nichols, “stresses images of testimony Tkaronto 189 or verbal exchange and images of demonstration” (44). The form has the capacity to readily demonstrate the validity of what the interviewee relates. In Tkaronto the effect is achieved with a series of shot/reverse-shot close-ups between interviewer and interviewee, the young Ojibwa woman Jolene as she interviews the Ojibwa elder Max. She records his responses to her questions, and after the interview proper, she takes a few photographs. Her project within the fiction of the film, the viewer finds out only later, is to interview and paint portraits of several elders. She apparently uses the taped interviews as inspiration as she draws from the photographs she takes at the end of the interviews. The effect that director Shane Belcourt achieves with this use of a documentary format is to suggest, as documentaries do, a real world outside the documentary itself. The film can be seen as authoritative and instructional in the same way one perceives documentary to be authoritative and instructional. Even though it is not actually a documentary, Tkaronto does seem to impart important real world information by borrowing the style and tropes of the genre. It relays information about some of the identity issues that are very real for the characters at the center of the film and, implicitly at least, for the viewers as well. In addition to recalling the genre of the documentary, such an opening scene sets the stage for a major thematic component of the film. Both Jolene and Ray will turn to and rely on Max to help them understand who they are and what it means to be Canadian Aboriginal. The first scene surely indicates that Tkaronto is very much a film about identity, and Max’s comments sound a thematic note that will resonate throughout the entire film. Belcourt’s film thus takes on an issue that is important to Indigenous art forms in general and film in particular. In introducing her book, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video (2001), for example, Beverly Singer maintains that “one of the most important issues facing American Indians concerns the...

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