FILMMAKER
by Pamela Cohn
in Festivals & Events
on Apr 24, 2018
Canadian filmmaker Samara Grace Chadwick’s debut feature 1999 – Wish You Were Here played in the Compétition Nationale, a strand of films dedicated to feature and medium-length films produced or co-produced in Switzerland. A co-production between Canada and Switzerland, Chadwick’s project was part of the pitching forum at Visions a couple of years ago. The film is a profoundly personal but strikingly universal diaristic look back at a particular place and time — the years Chadwick attended the Mathieu-Martin High School in her hometown of Moncton. The school was dubbed “Suicide High” due to a handful of students who killed themselves over a span of only a few years, meaning there were thousands of students who had a high school experience that included a classmate’s suicide.
Sixteen years later, Chadwick faces that time again with a group of friends who were also affected by these untimely and somewhat mysterious deaths of a sibling, or best friend, or just an oft-glimpsed classmate that no one knew so well. Fiercely articulate, but still wounded by these acts, Chadwick and her closest friends from high school (including one teacher) charge through loaded emotional territory to help one another continue to heal. Looking through the prism of memory, with cracks in that prism that let in light that only warps and bends things even more than it illuminates, Chadwick intrepidly shifts backwards and forwards in time, she and her protagonists speaking in their native Chiac, a very odd admixture of English and French that signifies their Arcadian heritage, while also reinvigorating the local slang that no one outside that community speaks in that particular way. A concession towards peacemaking between the English and French colonists, the language flows sometimes literally word by word between the two languages.
The film does the same between past and present, re-creating those bonds from that time of life filled with secret passions, secret pains, and the secret lives of others. I appreciated the film’s angst and awkwardness interposed with the lovely silliness and warmth in the ways the now 30-somethings reminisce about a time that ended up being far from innocent, a piece of their fragile adolescence rudely stripped away.
The tracking shots of the high school by Pablo Alvarez-Mesa reminded me of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, the rows and rows of brightly colored banged-up lockers reflecting and refracting against grainy VHS material that has all but disintegrated giving the film a tangible, brooding texture that is completely missing when oriented against today’s view of the town of Moncton, all box-house and box-store suburban blandness. But with a lovely smile on her face, one of the women that lost her very best friend to suicide back in high school tells Chadwick at the end of her interview, “It’s been soothing.” The communal act of remembering even something tragic can be so comforting. There are many surprising, tender, charming moments in this film amongst all the pain, and I, too, found it moving and soothing and oh, yes, deeply nostalgic. It made me feel alive when I myself feel half-dead most of the time.
All of our important stories live beyond us in someone else if we’re very lucky but a death, no matter how peaceful or tragic, leaves us certain that we can only live forever in the hearts and minds of others. Chadwick, here, takes the role of the listener, the gentle interlocutor, always in the frame, but either in three-quarter profile, with her back to the camera, or on the borders. This intentional stance, at least how I see it, makes clear that she is far behind her comrades who stayed in Moncton and are now having families of their own. She left town to pursue her dreams of becoming a filmmaker. You realize that as much as everyone she films with is healed anew through the making of 1999, this might be the first time Chadwick herself has faced down some long-echoing demons of her own.
TORONTO NOW
Hot Docs review: 1999
Samara Grace Chadwick's doc about a rash of suicides in her old school is a powerful meditation on trauma and resilience
BY NORMAN WILNER APRIL 25, 2018 6:02 PM
In 1999, the student body of École Mathieu-Martin – a small French-language school just outside Moncton, New Brunswick – was rocked by an inexplicable rash of suicides. Samara Grace Chadwick was a student there; 16 years later, she went back home to make a movie about the period.
Chadwick’s 1999 doesn’t try to explain the deaths as much as understand what it was like for the kids who lived through the tragic period. It’s an evocative, very personal documentary that finds Chadwick talking to her friends and trying to feel her way through a collective memory that none of them can fully grasp.
Interweaving footage of the school as it is today and archival clips of kids goofing around for a video camera, Chadwick and editor Terra Jean Long have built a meditation on trauma and resilience.
It’s unlike anything I’ve seen this year.
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