Annecy 2022: Q&A with Terril Calder (‘Meneath’)
Today on Skwigly we meet Terril Calder, whose latest entry in an extensive auteur filmography will screen this week at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics depicts the internal conflict of a Métis child as she reconciles the Seven Deadly Sins of Christianity with the Seven Sacred Teachings embraced by her ancestors. Embodying each respective set of values are Jesus Christ, who reinforces feelings of guilt, self-loathing and the degree to which many roads lead to Hell, and Nokomis, who combats the child’s scrupulosity with affirmative Anishinaabe Teachings to give her a sense of personal strength, pride and healing.
Born in Ontario and presently based in Toronto, Terril’s work frequently draws upon her Métis lineage and has spanned performance art, visual art and media art, with more recent film projects taking on mixed-media approaches to stop-motion animation. Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics marks her first collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada and has screened at TIFF, Berlinale and ImagineNATIVE with Special Mentions at OIAF and Tricky Women/Tricky Realities. Ahead of the film’s inclusion in this year’s Annecy programme Skwigly spoke with Terril to learn more about her unique filmmaking background and the personal journeys she undertook in bringing Meneath to life.
From what I gather, your route to animation is a fairly unconventional one. Could you talk a bit about your background in the arts and how that’s ultimately led to what you do now?
Sure. I have always been a creative person, I would say I was an artist since I was born, and did almost everything artistically. Indigenous communities tend to celebrate creativity, so everyone brought me stuff to build and create things. I had a little company when I was 11, I made kitchen crafts, and then when I was 16 I airbrushed t-shirts and sold them and made enough money that I could go to art school. So I got a BFA from the University of Manitoba and I was a visual artist for a number of years. But I think that I had to really come into animation on a really long path, because I did not have the patience, I think, when I was younger. I did the opposite of stop motion animation, I used to do performance art. I really believed in impermanence and really just using a medium that was fast. I always loved animation, even at that time, I just never could see myself doing it. I was always a bit daunted that this art would take about three years to make, at least. So I think as I got older I grew more patience for the art form, but I feel like a lot of those experiences come into the work that I’m making now. I did textile art, you know, had a little company selling hats and bags, used to do portraiture, sold that too, but I really found a home in stop-motion, because it’s really an amalgamation of everything that I’ve learned along the way. So in 2000 I decided that I was going to be a compositor so I got some funding to go to a trade school. And I also learned computer animation at that time, Maya, editing, compositing. The market sort of crashed in Toronto, so they weren’t really hiring 30 year old women, I was too old at the time, so I became a teacher. I couldn’t teach the kids computer animation so I thought I would teach them stop-motion and, at the same time, I learned myself. I would even say I’m still learning today, every day, it’s a medium that you’re always learning.
That’s interesting. So you were teaching and learning simultaneously?
Yes, exactly. Absolutely. I took my first stop-motion class two years ago, and it was awesome. I should do more. Because I am self taught and I’m kind of learning in a bubble, it’s so amazing to reach out to other stop-mo animators that have figured out amazing solutions for things. I guess in a way it forced my hand and I learned some solutions as well.
There’s quite a lot of mixed-media in your films as well, different approaches to stop motion – did that come from teaching as well?
I think that I’m really addicted to learning and I really I love action painters, the idea that you could feel yourself in the work, which is really weird, because stop motion is not very intuitive that way, to try to achieve something like that. So it’s always my intention that, when I’m learning a process, or I’m excited about something, that that kind of lends itself into the work, that you can feel my excitement to put it together. So I change mediums, techniques, dolls, everything, you know. I think my films are special because of that, because you can feel my enthusiasm, you can feel me in the piece, making the thing.
As a Métis filmmaker, themes of indigenous cultural heritage are often quite present in your work. Is that in important driving force for your films?
It is. My first film was called Canned Meat, about a woman who is indigenous, but it’s kind of a story about mental health and being a woman. That film taught me a lot about the film circuit, it went out and it had a platform and got a lot of attention. Suddenly I realised the power of filmmaking – if I have a platform, what can I do with that? So that became part of the combination of everything I put into films, my politics and my point of view, as well as technique. After I made that first film, I got very much involved in the indigenous filmmaking community. I think that we all kind of feed each other, understanding how powerful it is for indigenous people to tell their own stories, especially around the world, to bring attention to issues that are important to us.
Something I’ve definitely picked up on, talking to the NFB, is that it’s very important for them to participate in that and try and tell more of those stories. How did you come to work with them for this project?
I’d had offers through the years to work with them, or different institutions, and I was always very reluctant because I didn’t want my narrative edited. I didn’t want to lose control of the stories that I wanted to tell. So a lot of my funding always came from grants or different resources where I didn’t have to have any accountability to an organisation. It’s very tricky, especially as an indigenous person in Canada, to tell stories that people don’t understand. It even comes up with this film, the conversation of “who is your audience?” Sometimes it’s a sense of humor that isn’t necessarily understood by non-Indigenous audience, so it’s imperative for me that my advisors always have to be multicultural, and get where I’m coming from too, because then they’re instrumental in helping me make the film better, and not editing it to just one gaze.
Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics (Dir. Terril Calder, ©2021 National Film Board of Canada)
I was interested in that element of it, because it does seem the film explores the sort of front-and-center struggle of identifying oneself, but there are also these references to expressing yourself artistically and how that can be compromised as well. In describing the genesis of Meneath, you mentioned ‘code switching’ – what significance does that term have to you and this film?
Well, I think that’s kind of related to what we were just talking about. I did feel a huge pressure to fit in, to change or to abandon, especially because I’m mixed. So a lot of people would try to say “Well, if you just did this, then you would fit in”. So I think that is ultimately why I became super independent, because I wanted to cultivate something that was uniquely my own, uniquely indigenous, artistically. I felt like that’s where my strength would come from.
Having the main character be a child, is that referencing a specific childhood journey of yours? Or is it more representative of your life as a whole?
It’s a little bit of both. I mean, she’s a vehicle to talk about ethics for me and talk about code switching, that stuff. So it’s stuff I know but it does definitely take liberties to tell an engaging story, because I realised it was gonna be way too didactic just to talk about ethics. So I wanted to follow a piece of an honest story that that would engage the viewer, that you would care about her wellbeing. The fact that she’s a baby or a young girl, she’s talking about some pretty controversial stuff. And I think that it was easier for me to imagine sympathy for her point of view, being a kid, that it’s a confusing time, and you’re sorting things out. So she doesn’t come at these issues with judgment, more curiosity. And I thought that was really important.
You’ve also referred to Willie J. Ermine, M.Ed. as a crucial voice in developing this film. I’d be interested in if you could tell me a bit about his work and how it played into developing Meneath?
It was actually through research, when I knew that I wanted to talk about ethics and my own experience. He talks a lot about indigenous ethical spaces within institutions and the idea that it can be really exhausting for people to constantly meet other people’s expectations, especially when people tell you quite frequently that what you’re doing is wrong. So I wanted to make a film that would say that what you’re doing is just a different way of doing it. But Professor Ermine, instead of just saying “Well, this is a problem”, his solution is to make these spaces within institutions that are safe spaces for indigenous people to be able to get an education, but also just be able to unwind and not have to constantly explain.
Something that struck me as a universal quality of the film is the role of Jesus and Christianity. I think that that element of it is something a lot of people would probably engage with, because there’s so much in our various paths, backgrounds and lifestyles that are often at odds with Western takes on religion, all of that stuff people carry with them and are conflicted about. I was interested in the structure of the film around the seven deadly sins and kind of rebutting them, I guess, with these more positive teachings. Was that something that was always in your mind as far as the shape the film would take?
Really, at the beginning, I knew what I wanted to achieve. I didn’t know how I was going to go about it, but I did want to make a film where there would be room for everybody’s perspective. And a lot of the people, when I was first putting the script together, especially Christians – which I wasn’t raised as, but always had a great curiosity for – were very critical of Jesus. They wanted to demonise him constantly. And I said “No, he’s very well-intended”, to me it was really important that I leave a lot of room, that I don’t bring people to their conclusions, that they can decide for themselves where they fit into this story. So it’s not just specifically my story, but it’s everyone’s experience with the colonial system, with Christianity, you know, because there are other structures, there are other ways of being. I’m just trying to ask that question, or trying to get people to ask themselves that question. One woman, who was a pre screener, saw the film and she was crying. She said to me “I never knew that”. To me, that’s the biggest compliment, that she could find yourself in the film and question her own her own upbringing. That there isn’t a right way or wrong way, this is just one way.
There’s a lot of really compelling visual concepts that play out. When it comes to ideas generation and the balance of dialogue and visuals, are you more script-led or more visually oriented?
If I can tell it visually, without the words, that’s always a better road. In the past I made a film, SNIP, that was just narrated and really thick with dialogue. I learned from that film that, if you can tell it visually, the words should just go.
As a medium to express the concepts and reflections that you put across in your work, do you find the animation is something that audiences have been receptive to?
I find for a lot of indigenous animators, especially with the stuff that we want to tell, that live-action is a little heavy handed for people. Nobody wants to talk about genocide, but if you do an animation it’s always more approachable. So animation talking about really heavy issues, I think, is kind of a backdoor in addressing them, it gets around people shutting off or saying “Well, this isn’t about me”. It’s also very poetic, it can be nonlinear. I do teach a lot of kids, too, because I think it’s a great tool to poetically get at what you’re going through. So yeah, absolutely.
Over the years, we have talked quite a lot about NFB productions, not so much other funding streams and grants available to auteur filmmakers and artists in Canada. From what you were saying, I get the impression that you’ve been involved with a few in creating your work and I was kind of interested in if they’re still available and out there, if there are specific things that they look for in the work that they fund?
Yeah, there’s the Canada Council, and then there’s provincial funding Ontario Arts Council, and then there’s municipal, which is the Toronto Arts Council. So there are pockets of funding, they don’t pay as well as the NFB but you can you can definitely make it make a work with that funding. Compared to a lot of people that you work with, they’re funding artists to grow, so they’re not funding ‘bums in seats’, you’re not making a project where they need revenue at the end. So it’s kind of funding to experiment, figure out your craft, put together a film, so there’s really no strings attached. You just have to make it. I think it’s amazing that in Canada we have that, because I know, globally, people don’t have access to that kind of funding. But we’re very fortunate because you can really figure out what direction you want to take. They also love when you switch mediums, or you’re experimenting – they fund artists to be better artists, which is amazing. In Canada we now have the ISO, which is the Indigenous Screen Office. There used to be pockets of funding through other resources, like Telefilm and I think CBC, I can’t remember all of the places that would put aside funding for indigenous films – all of those resources are now going to the Indigenous Screen Office, which is only about three years old. And it echoes what was happening in Australia, which gives a lot of indigenous filmmakers freedom to ask for funding through indigenous organisations, peer committees, assessment. It’s a great resource, I can’t wait to see, for the young filmmakers, what’s going to happen, where that funding is going to take them.
Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics (Dir. Terril Calder, ©2021 National Film Board of Canada)
When it came down to eventually pairing up with the NFB, did you find it was a clement experience as far as how the film was developed, were there any compromises you had to make in the end?
I’m pretty stubborn! I’m very lucky that I was making films for 10 years before working with them, because I knew what I would compromise and what I wouldn’t. And I do feel a lot of younger filmmakers might have not have been as bold as I was. But it was a good experience. I mean, Michael Fukushima is a man of color, and that was encouraging to see, that he was the executive producer. Jelena Popović, the producer, is amazing. I would say we learned how to dance together, for sure. And we’re in pre-development for another project, so we will work together again, absolutely.
Did it bring to the table any new approaches, I suppose, or perhaps a different kind of crew structure than you’d used previously?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it really allowed me just to be an artist, not the producer myself, and worry about things. And it was it was a great experience just to come and make the film. I hadn’t experienced that before. It’s such a dark film but it really was made with so much love. Yeah, they kind of took care of me, I’m part of their family now. And that that was nice. Absolutely.
How long was the production? Because it was quite a long film…
It was one year in development and then when I was shooting, it took about two years to put together. I was very excited to make the baby, I made the baby right at the beginning, even before I had a script!
Will you be going to Annecy with it?
I am. I haven’t been before because I didn’t really think I was an animator, but I guess I am now! It’s great, I’m going and I’m really, really excited. I was just at Les Sommets a couple of weeks ago, it’s so cool to be a part of this community.
Yeah, I’ve seen that it’s already gotten already quite a few commendations and mentions and played at some pretty high profile events. Has that generated any valuable feedback or audience interaction?
Quite a bit, actually. It’s amazing, and getting those nods or acknowledgments means I get to keep making films. And that’s actually where my passion is. I mean, I can do the festivals but I’m really in it to make these these films, to get what my intention is on screen. So that’s great. Sometimes I find a little overwhelming, honestly, but I like when, you know, somebody’s mom comes up and has some something to say that, you know, it affected them or touched them in a way. I think it’s a beautiful thing.
Annecy festivalgoers can catch Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics as part of the Perspectives 2 programme.