BY JOSH TIMEWELL

The following is part-three of a series of interviews with filmmakers who are featured in the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, which takes place from 9-16 July, 2017.

The Road to Webequie is a short film directed by Ryan Noth and his co-director/partner Tess Girard under their production company Fifth Town Films. It has been featured in a number of film festivals abroad, and won the $1000 audience award for best short film at South Western International Film Festival in Ontario last year.

The film depicts three youths of Webequie First Nation, near Ontario, Canada. Webequie is home to around 800 people, who are facing some development and change in the nearby mining development. Visiting the youths at different points in time, it gives an insight into the differing backgrounds and life choices with which they are faced.

Ryan Noth was born in Canada and remains based in Toronto. I was given the chance to ask Ryan a few questions. His responses are below.

What was your motivation to put together The Road to Webequie?

“A friend had visited Webequie to do some health outreach, and came back determined to spread the word about the difficult conditions facing youth there, particularly in the face of mining development. He had never made a film, and talked both Tess (my co-director/partner) and I into the project. We wanted to avoid the cliche of interviews with elders and teachers and just experience the community from the kids’ point of view as much as possible. We really like the film Etre et Avoir, which focused on kids at a rural school in France, and thought maybe we could try to tell the story of Webequie through the kids’ perspective.

Before going, we had some ideas on who we would meet, like Sharmaine, but while we were in Webequie some kids just started hanging around with us, like Kenisha, and it became obvious she was someone we could talk with. Brennan, on the other hand, kept standing us up, until we finally ran into him as he was going fishing, and he let us tag along. The older kids in the film, Sharmaine and Brennan, each have very different backgrounds, though they grew up in basically the same isolated place. With those three, we thought we had a good cross-section. And the one adult whose voice we kept in the film is Bob, who is a cultural instigator in the community, and who invited us there to make the film.”

What has been your favourite/most rewarding aspects of the making of The Road to Webequie?

“I think the way the film challenges expectations of both first nations stereotypes, but also films about first nations, is what I’m most proud of. Tess and I are both very careful about how we represent our subjects in our work, and this instance felt even hyper focused, because we wanted to be sure our portrayal was fair – not poverty porn, but also not falsely positive. As with all first nations communities in Canada, there are many complications to how people in Webequie want to live where they are, versus how people from the government and outside of Webequie would prefer them to live.

We were crushed by our emotional experiences there, both meeting the kids and hearing their stories, but also the feeling of inevitability for imminent industrial development of some kind. The development of the mine (and the road that would connect the town to Thunder Bay), can clearly bring both good and bad to the area, however it is managed. I’m happy with how we tried to present all of these complications visually and emotionally in the film, and the way I think it manages to challenge a viewer to engage on a human level, not just as a statistic in a paper or sixty second news report.”

What is on your radar for the next few years of your career?

“Both Tess and I continue to work on documentaries that focus on the landscape as a character alongside the people in a story. Tess just finished a feature called As The Crow Flies, with the National Film Board of Canada, and that should be out soon. I’m developing both documentaries and some semi-scripted fiction projects that I hope to go into production on soon too.”

The Road to Webequie is showing July 10, 6.30pm at Longplay, Melbourne.

For more information and tickets, visit www.mdff.org.au

*featured image credit: http://www.fifthtownfilms.com/the-road-to-webequie/

For more information about The Road to Webequie, visit http://www.fifthtownfilms.com/the-road-to-webequie/