Illustration by Sabahat Ahmad

As a half-Pakistani person, I often cozied up on the couch for Bollywood movie nights with my family growing up. These nights were more than a tradition—they were a rite of passage. I’m a fair-skinned South Asian, and this was a way for me to connect to my culture when I didn’t necessarily present as such on the outside. I idolized the actresses in these movies, awkwardly shaking my preteen hips and listening to soundtracks of films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aśoka on my CD player days later.

I first visited Toronto in 2015, when I was 24. I came to heal from a bad breakup in my hometown of New York City. A year later, I met my now-husband and fell for him immediately, permanently moving to Canada. He also has a South Asian background, and it made me feel less homesick to experience the comfort of Bollywood nights with my in-laws. We’d throw in our own sassy commentary, poking fun at the soapy love scenes and dramatic dance routines while being enamoured by them at the same time.

My move to Canada was not only out of love for my husband, but love for the city. Toronto has a massive South Asian population (nearly 385,000 as of 2021). It’s also the place with the highest number of South Asians in Canada. In Scarborough, where I live, our cultures are celebrated like nowhere else I’ve been in North America. Despite growing up in a place as diverse as New York, I’d never experienced such a normalized and integrated Indian and Pakistani culture, with aunties walking around in saris and Desi aromas like masala wafting through the streets. As a result, Bollywood carries some heft as a mainstream art form here, and a more diverse range of Bollywood and South Asian films are more present on Canadian Netflix than they are in the States. It’s heartwarming to see the classics of my childhood not just in their own dedicated section but in Netflix’s most-watched films, validating and serving the viewing preferences of the population.

But in the decades between the beloved films of my childhood and Bollywood movies today, not much has changed. The very same thing that brought me comfort is also holding us back as a culture. Only years later, as we watched these movies with my husband’s nieces, did I fully understand the unrealistic beauty standards they presented. European aesthetics are put on a pedestal, and actresses are cast accordingly, sending the message to young South Asian girls that fair means beautiful. As I watched my nieces regularly straighten their gorgeous curls, I reflected on the fact that the wide range of beautiful South Asian women is and was often underrepresented onscreen.

In Canada, these same issues of colourism and racism persist despite the country being globally recognized as a place where all cultures can thrive and coexist harmoniously. This shows us just how pervasive British colonialism remains in India and beyond. In searches for Canadian Bollywood actresses online, starlets like Sunny Leone, Nora Fatehi and Lisa Ray are the first three to pop up. This is in part because they’re the most popular, but it’s no coincidence that they also have fair skin and European features. It makes me feel as though darker-skinned South Asian women are set up for failure. I worry that young Canadian girls like my nieces will inherit these Eurocentric beauty standards, negatively impacting their self-esteem and making them want to fit into an unrealistic mould rather than appreciating what makes them so unique.

In January 2024, I read that Ed Westwick (everyone’s favorite toxic drama king from Gossip Girl) was marrying a Bollywood actress named Amy Jackson. She looked suspiciously Western to me, and with the name Amy Jackson, I knew I had to dive deeper. Was this the case of a name change or something more? She could have been racially ambiguous; as someone who is overtly conscious about being perceived as fully white when I’m not, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw the dark hair, olive skin, and light eyes not unlike my own and assumed she must also be of mixed-race heritage. But after a not-so-deep dive online, I discovered that she was, in fact, an English-speaking, British white woman who was somehow ludicrously popular in Bollywood films. I had the same moment of disconnect when watching one of my favorite shows a few years back, Made in Heaven, and discovering that one of the actresses, Kalki Koechlin, was also a Caucasian woman, despite being raised in India and speaking Hindi, which has helped her fit in when she takes on these roles.

In the past, South Asian actresses who passed as white were showcased and picked first. Today, it’s enough to be white and speak the language. I don’t even think I would mind if these actresses openly acknowledged their skin tone. But the fact that it remains hidden and requires some digging begs the question: is this Brownface Lite? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is it okay if these women were raised in Indian culture and consider India their home? It’s tricky to know where to draw the line.

I’m not trying to downplay the acting skills of talented, lighter-skinned South Asian women. It’s their right to take up space in their industry of choice. But I do find it troubling that these light-skinned and white women skyrocket to fame with such ease and are sought out by directors and producers in Bollywood while thousands of talented actresses with South Asian heritage are cast aside.

Bollywood has a history of giving priority to lighter-skinned actresses, and it perpetuates the harmful side effects of the caste system in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Skin-lightening creams are frequently advertised in India by major stars like Shah Rukh Khan, and it’s always seemed gross to me.

These messages are already too strong in South Asian culture. I attribute much of that to the brainwashing of the British Raj, which dates back to the 1850s, nailing in the mentality that if you have Eurocentric features and traits, you’re bound to succeed. These sentiments are still fully normalized and accepted.

Anyone who watched Indian Matchmaker has probably heard the bevy of problematic things the show’s star, Sima Aunty, has said, often lauding lighter-skinned people as a great catch just because they’re “fair.” She would prioritize women that fit that colourist Bollywood aesthetic for many of the show’s eligible bachelors. My own fair-skinned grandmother would use the slur “kala,” a derogatory term referring to dark-skinned people. In contrast, as someone who is often perceived as fully white, I’ve been called “gori” which refers to a light-skinned or white girl. I’ve always hated this dichotomy. I’ve heard people within my community freely comment on the skin tone of children. This widely accepted language creates a hierarchy and promotes problematic beauty standards—whether it’s meant as a compliment or a passive-aggressive criticism—and it affects children, subconsciously or not.

It feels grotesque for billion-dollar industries like Bollywood to profit off the commodification of white faces in distinctly brown roles. It screams, “brown women, this is what we want of you. This is how you can be seen as a woman.” As if darker-skinned women with distinctly South Asian features are not equally worthy of earning a “vixen” role or being picked out in a crowded audition room.

If Bollywood showed women who represent the full spectrum of South Asian beauty, it would have a global impact, expanding beauty standards in South Asia and beyond. It would improve the self-confidence of women and girls while challenging the outdated norms of colourism and even make the worlds of beauty and fashion more inclusive, making way for a more empowered female population, which we need more than ever on a global scale.

While it might seem like not much has changed, we’re moving in a more positive direction. In Canada, I see hope in talented Canadian stars like Rekha Sharma, Kamal Sidhu, Uppekha Jain, and Parveen Kaur. It’s no surprise that Canada is leading the charge in showing the many forms that brown beauty can take beyond a skinny nose and pale skin, which will hopefully create a ripple effect in other countries.

Brown women will always remain at the heart of Bollywood, and if, as audiences, we can start to acknowledge how women internalize what they see onscreen, we can start to consciously change both the everyday lexicon we use to discuss beauty and the narratives we craft.

IVORY, PHOTO BY CRAVE BOUDOIR

Body positivity can be a harrowing but joyful process. Shana Myara made it a life goal. “I gave myself a project where I could fully explore fat liberation with other queers,” says Myara, director of the documentary, Well Rounded. “Particularly from the lens of racialized queers who might also have a critique of how bodies are expected to conform.” In her first full-length feature film, officially released during the pandemic in May 2020, Myara offers an unapologetic and honest look at our culture’s obsession with diet culture and the systemic issue of fatphobia.

Over the phone, Myara acknowledges she is calling from the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). She explains that she came to the idea of Well Rounded when she started to hate her own body—outside of her home. “I realized I was not taught to hate my body in my home,” she admits. Myara remembers growing up in her Moroccan household as they spoke about themselves as “large” and fondly referred to their thighs. “Quickly, I learned from a young age, the way I had to view my body outside the home was very different.” This contrast became the catalyst for Well Rounded, as Myara explores how our cultural backgrounds affect our relationships to our bodies.

Using a mix of personal interviews with queer Indigenous comic Candy Palmater, multidisciplinary artist Ivory, model and stylist Lydia Okello, and queer Taiwanese-Canadian activist and storyteller Joanne Tsung, juxtaposed with playful, colourful animations by Hungarian-Russian illustrator Alexandra Hohner, each emotional story weaves together over 60 minutes of compelling facts and narrative in a genre-bending flow. “It turned out to be one of my favorite parts of creating the documentary,” Myara gushes. “The surreal and the fantastic sometimes more accurately represent what we experience internally.”

Since the film debuted in October 2020 at the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Myara admits it has been a hard season and that since shifting online, some festivals have scaled back their programming. She believes there has been a lost opportunity for discussion related to body politics, and the chance to have a collective celebration of our bodies. But in the meantime, Well Rounded is being shown across Canada, with screening and festival applications underway for 2021.

Lena Dunham as Hannah in HBO’s Girls

I am quite open about the fact that I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. Talking about it comes easy to me. More difficult to handle are the reactions I get from others. “So are you like that nerd on The Big Bang Theory?” someone in a work meeting recently joked after I mentioned my OCD.

That nerd is Sheldon Cooper, a character on the popular CBS sitcom whose habits include not wanting his roommates to sit in his spot on the couch and knocking three times. Sheldon is often what people think OCD looks like.

I don’t watch the show, but I have yet to hear of an episode where it takes Sheldon more than an hour to leave the house because he needs to repeatedly check all the taps in his apartment to make sure there is not even the tiniest drip that could lead to a massive flood, destroying all his Nirvana memorabilia, killing his cat, and leaving him homeless. I doubt this would make for Emmy-winning television.

The Big Bang Theory is certainly not the only show to play OCD for laughs. Glee, Friends, and Monk have also reduced it to a punchline. Movies from As Good as It Gets to The Aviator depict OCD as a quirk, eccentricity, or Type-A personality indicator. Marketing campaigns joke about Obsessive Christmas Disorder, online quizzes ask “How OCD are you?” and Khloe Kardashian calls OCD, which she doesn’t have, a “blessing” because it enables her to create perfectly symmetrical stacks of Oreos.

Of those with clinical OCD, more than 90 percent have both obsessions and compulsions, but pop culture portrayals focus only on the latter. Portrayals are also often exaggerated, with OCD depicted as being performed in a specific way (often counting) or as a character’s defining personality trait. These negative portrayals not only diminish the severity of the problem, but also hurt those, like me, who don’t consider embarrassing blisters on their hands from repeated doorknob checking a blessing.

These portrayals also lead to silence and suffering for those who fear they will be dismissed or mocked for their OCD. (I was seriously once asked if I bottled my urine like Howard Hughes after someone watched The Aviator.)

Not all people with OCD are clean freaks, counters, or constant hand washers, but that is what pop culture has reduced us to. A few months ago, a friend visited my apartment and was disappointed it wasn’t cleaner. They assumed my OCD made me exactly like Friends’ Monica Geller. The apartment wasn’t clean, but my stove certainly was—I hadn’t used it in months because checking to make sure it was off became too exhausting and it was easier not to use it. Unlike me, Monica never survived on microwaveable Lean Cuisine entreés and Cheerios for several months to avoid the stove.

It took until 2013 for me to see a portrayal of OCD I could finally relate to. Many things about Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls frustrated me, but the show’s depiction of OCD perfectly captured my crippling feeling of frustration, darkness, and isolation. Talking to her therapist, Dunham’s character described how her compulsions and rituals would keep her up until the wee hours, leaving her exhausted and zombie-like in the morning, when she would wake up and do it all again. When my OCD is at its worst I often put off going to bed, staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. to watch something I am not even all that interested in (Top Chef: Colorado, anyone?) just so I can avoid my pre-bedtime lock and window checking.

In the morning, I stay in bed long after my alarm has gone off because the thought of getting up and doing my hours-long pre-leaving-the-house checking, followed hours later by my pre-leaving-the-office checking, has me feeling exhausted before I even have my feet in slippers.

In between all my checking, I remain hopeful there will be more positive pop culture depictions of OCD and mental illness. John Green’s recent novel Turtles All the Way Down, which is an account of Green’s own struggles with OCD, gives me hope, as do the better and broader representations of mental health issues in characters like Gretchen Cutler in You’re the Worst and Ian Gallagher on Shameless.

Take that, Khloe Kardashian.

For Erica Shiner, 2015 marked the year she first launched herself into the world of feminist activism.

That May, she started a petition to stop American rapper Action Bronson from performing at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square for annual music festival North by Northeast, saying his lyrics “[glorify] gang-raping and murdering women.” After gaining more than 40,000 signatures, Bronson was pulled from the festival. “That kind of launched me into feminist activism, even though I’d always been, from a young age, doing silly art projects with Barbies in chains and had a pretty feminist mom,” says Shiner. “I was always engaged, but not as directly as I became after doing the petition.”

Later that year, she also joined Roncesvalles-based Revue Cinema’s board of directors. “It’s a community-run not-for-profit, so there’s always a lot of opportunity for doing fundraising stuff there,” she says. A year later, Bechdel Tested was born. The bimonthly series hosted at the Revue aims to screen women-centred, Bechdel-approved films about different industries, each preceded by a Q&A with industry experts. “I wanted to use cinema to bring people together,” she says. “It was really important to me to do something that supported women in their careers, because … we’re the first few generations of women who were even allowed to work in so many industries.” Through Bechdel Tested, Shiner wants to create a space where women can learn from each other—not only about how to enter different industries, but also how to overcome gender-based issues in those industries.

The Bechdel test was first created in 1985 by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In order for a film to pass the test, it has to have at least two women in it who talk to each other about a topic that doesn’t involve a man. It offers a more nuanced method of evaluating female representation—that women are not only portrayed on film, but that they are portrayed well.

The series’ latest segment, Women in Religion, screened the 1983 film Yentl, starring Barbra Streisand and featured panelists like Cheri DiNovo, MPP and queer critic-turned-minister, and Farheen Khan, an activist and author. Attendees were served pink “Holy Water” cocktails from Swan Dive, a bar owned by Shiner’s sister.

Erica Shiner.

“We have sold out a few times, and our events tend to be pretty popular. I think that that speaks to the hunger for feminist programming that’s really thriving right now in our city,” says Shiner. “It’s sending a message to everyone that women can be central characters, that directors can tell their stories from a woman’s gaze.”

This month’s event, Women in Politics, will screen Election starring Reese Witherspoon. The panel will include Toronto city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and Michal Hay, Jagmeet Singh’s campaign manager. Shiner is mindful of having inclusive and diverse representation at the screenings—something she admits is more difficult with the films themselves. “It’s already hard enough to find films in a particular industry where women are central,” she says.

Bechdel Tested’s next screening is set for February 18. Shiner says future plans for the series are not yet public, aside from wanting to expand into areas outside of film.

“I really believe that the path to gender equality is in women’s solidarity … It’s just an important conversation, and that’s what’s valuable about it.”

CORRECTION (02/15/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the series hosts their Q&As after screenings of their films. This regrets the error.

A still from Dark River. Photo courtesy of TIFF.

Bear with me while I state the obvious: No paucity is more appalling in cinema history than that of women in the role of director—the role most closely linked with creative power and authorial vision. For an industry typically associated with liberal ideals, the movies have remained tethered to a fiercely gynophobic paradigm for its century-plus of existence. The situation is bad for myriad reasons regarding equality, gender perception, and professional integrity. It’s also just bad for movies: They suffer when dominated by the perspective of a single race, culture, class, or gender—and gender, of course, spans race, culture, and class. Movies need women.

This spring, the Toronto International Film Festival inaugurated a five-year commitment to “increasing participation, skills, and opportunities for women behind and in front of the camera.” In keeping with this mandate, one-third of the selected films at the 42nd TIFF, which ran from September 7-17 this year, were directed by women, while exactly half of the dozen films in TIFF’s Platform competition were female-directed. I would be happy to applaud this gesture of affirmative action for its own sake. But the real news is that the vast majority of the most compelling, innovative, moving films I saw at TIFF this year were directed by women.

At 89, Left Bank-French new wave icon Agnès Varda was surely the oldest director to have a film at TIFF this year, though Faces Places was easily the festival’s most youthful, playful selection. Co-directed with a 34-year-old photo-based artist known simply as JR, Faces Places follows Varda and JR as they roam the French countryside in a van that doubles as a fotomat and record their encounters with a farmer, a postman, factory workers, the children of miners, and many others. These individuals become the subjects of enormous photographic prints that are pasted to the facades of various buildings and other surfaces in their respective communities. No other film at TIFF ’17 prompted in me so much laughter and so many tears—often at the same time. Faces Places is about passing through but not passing over, about stopping, seeing, and being truly seen.

Seeing, and, perhaps even more so, listening, are key activities in Zama, the long-awaited fourth feature from Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel. The story of a bureaucrat for the Spanish crown marooned in a South American backwater in the 1790s, Zama is Martel’s first period piece, first literary adaptation—of Antonio Di Benedetto’s eponymous 1957 novel—and first film to feature a male protagonist. Paranoid, obsessed with social status and prone to violent outbursts, Don Diego de Zama is not an endearing character. But he is fascinating. He clearly fascinates Martel, who conveys his fraying psyche through a masterful manipulation of the subjective gaze and unnerving aural effects, such as voices whose sources remain mysterious and descending electronic tones that alert us to Zama’s seismic internal shifts.

Female directors needn’t tell female stories to exude a female perspective: Just as Martel creates a darkly alluring drama out of Zama’s simultaneously male-privileged and geographically disenfranchised desperation, Germany’s Valeska Grisebach produced a transfixing quasi-genre film populated almost entirely by men inhabiting very traditional gender roles. Grisebach’s Western concerns an all-male group of German labourers working on a water facility project in rural Bulgaria, several of whom behave condescendingly or even reprehensibly toward their hosts, the exception being the initially taciturn ex-Legionnaire Meinhard, who every day after work parts with his fellow Germans to spend time with the locals, despite their leeriness and lack of common language. As with Claire Denis’ 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail, Western is an intensely insightful examination of male culture in part because it was made by a woman, one with a profound interest in men that is at once critical and empathetic, distanced and intimate.

Lest you get the impression that TIFF’s mandate automatically equals greater films, allow me to report some significant disappointments. In Saudi director Haifaa Al Mansour’s English-language debut, the strained, expensive-looking, bullet-point biopic Mary Shelley, there’s nary a trace of the vitality that characterized her earlier film Wadjda. Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women is a middle-brow, ever-blushing, exceedingly conventional portrait of the unconventional family helmed by Olive Byrne, Elizabeth Marston and William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, who was the subject of Jill Lepore’s 2014 book The Secret History of Wonder Woman—which if you’re interested in this material is a far better investment of your time. The Hollywood tradition of actors-turned-directors, meanwhile, yielded the usual mixed results. Greta Gerwig made an irresistibly charming, smart and funny directorial debut with the semi-autobiographical Lady Bird, while her fellow Sacramento native, Oscar-winner Brie Larsen, made a fitfully amusing, mostly awkward, Charlie Kaufman-esque fairy tale comedy starring herself as an aspiring artist with a penchant for glitter, rainbows, and unicorns called Unicorn Store.

Let me close this survey with a film that, it seems to me, didn’t get enough attention upon its TIFF world premiere. British director Clio Barnard made an arresting feature debut in 2010 with The Arbor, a formally provocative documentary about the late playwright Andrea Dunbar. Barnard’s second film, 2013’s The Selfish Giant, also drew accolades and favourable comparisons to the films of Ken Loach. Barnard’s third film, Dark River, might seem on the surface to be her most orthodox, but this taut trauma-drama about a young woman’s return to her family’s farm following the death of her father slips between past and present, between realism and myth, between body and soil, with an eerie, seductive dexterity. A dark horse in the Platform competition, Dark River didn’t take home the prize, but it did receive an honourable mention from the jury consisting of Wim Wenders, Chen Kaige and Małgorzata Szumowska. Though it seemed to have gained little traction at the Festival, I suspect time will be kind to Dark River, because it’s with this film that Barnard has truly come into her own, balancing the dictates of narrative, aesthetics and politics in a way that feels unique to her sensibility. Barnard’s is a voice that’s here to stay, and Dark River will one day be regarded as the point where her contribution to the current cinema begins to truly flow.

I’ve written many surveys of TIFF and other film festivals over the years and have never had an opportunity to write so widely about important films helmed by women. This was not—again, bear with me while I state the obvious—because of any lack of talented female directors. It is my hope that this five-year initiative becomes both ongoing and influential, until such a time when half the human race is no longer marginalized to subordinate roles in what is arguably still the world’s most popular and far-reaching art form.

The same day the Jian Ghomeshi trial began at Toronto’s Old City Hall, another sexual assault trial was taking place just one floor above.

Kelly Showker’s upcoming documentary film, Slut or Nut: The Diary of a Rape Trial, follows York University PhD student Mandi Gray as she settles her human rights case with the university, following the process of reporting a sexual assault against a fellow student.

“When I first met Mandi she was initially like, ‘I need to document some of this because I’m afraid no one is going to believe me that this stuff is happening,’” Showker says.

The film is an educational how-to meets compassion project, and many of the crew are sexual assault survivors themselves. Showker wants to make sure women understand what going the public institution route means for them.

Showker recalls the most shocking part of the process: Gray’s trial. While on the stand for four days, Gray was intensely interrogated about the incident in a narrative Showker says was highly pornographic—as if she seduced her rapist. She was asked questions from why she didn’t call 911 to how drunk she could’ve possibly been after eight beers.

“I attended all of the trials and I couldn’t believe the types of statements they made to discredit her,” Showker says. “I think a lot of people are surprised when they find that out that no one is really representing [Gray’s] interests, safety, or security in the court process because she is just a witness. She was subjugated to the most intense and brutal cross-examination.”

Gray’s case marks the first instance a judge awarded a person in Canada financial compensation from a perpetrator. The case, however, is far from over, and Gray faces the possibility of being sued if she does not wish to continue. “Once you start knocking over those dominos you can’t stop,” Showker says. We want to encourage our legal systems to do the work they are meant to, she says, but “it’s just too much.”

The film is set to be completed at the end of spring.

Photo courtesy of Howard J. Davis.

She strolls softly through a deserted modern-day Montreal. Her outfit—and the way she seems to float through the streets—indicate her lack of connection to this modern scene. This is Marie-Josèphe Angélique, a slave “owned” by François Poulin of Montreal in the early 1730s.

Canadian filmmaker Howard J. Davis uses his film C’est Moi as an ethereal glimpse of a person swallowed by history’s tendency to whitewash and provide attention only for those it deems worthy. Though short at its eight-minute run time, C’est Moi provides enough information on Angélique’s story to encourage questioning our preconceived notions of Canada’s history—including its often inherent yet frequently overlooked racial discrimination.

It is rare to see films on a Canadian event that highlight important historical figures of colour. We are used to hearing stories of racial disparity and dissension from our neighbours to the south, but as Davis helpfully reminds us, Canada’s history is far from the clean version that is often portrayed.

Davis takes a symbolic approach to the telling of Angélique’s story. The majority of the film is dedicated to watching her, played by actor Jenny Brizard, glide through Montreal. The film then incorporates a text-based description of her story, where the key points are highlighted by evocative imagery and music. Here is where we learn of the fire Angélique was accused of starting, and the price she had to pay. Davis wanted this project to be a starting point for Canadians to look at the country differently. “We see Canada as a haven away from slavery,” he says. “As Canadians, we go, ‘Oh, no, it didn’t happen up here.’ But it did.” It is not often that stories of residential schools and internment camps get the attention they deserve.

Davis notes that, near where he resides in Niagara-onthe-Lake, houses still stand that once kept slaves. He adds that New France had many slaves, yet we don’t hear about it. The remnants from some of Canada’s most horrific moments are still very much around.

Davis is deeply invested in his subject matter—as a person of mixed race, he has been interested in race-related stories for many years, beginning in his time at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Marginalized stories are often front-of-mind for Davis, with a special interest in stories about female figures as well, stemming from his “desire to tell more stories of people who are subjects of oppression who aren’t at the forefront of our history.”

This push toward uncovering hidden stories can be seen increasingly in the mainstream media, especially in Hollywood films from the past year. Hidden Figures, the historical drama that tells the story of the Black women who were integral in launching John Glenn—the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth—into space, is similar to C’est Moi in this respect. Davis points to some of the other films this year that focus on telling race-centric stories, such as Moonlight, Fences, and Loving. These stories have long been desperate to be told, and Hidden Figures’s success at the box office is proof that there are people ready to see them.

C’est Moi attempts to take an objective look at a snapshot in history, presenting the discovered facts and leaving interpretation up to the audience. With this impartiality, Davis makes clear his goal of uncovering stories and allowing them to speak for themselves, rather than to use his platform to preach.

As for his hopes for this film, Davis only wants for his subject matter to be discovered. Currently, the short film is set to be screened at film festivals in Florida, California, and New Jersey. While he is overjoyed at the American response, Davis hopes some of the many Canadian film festivals will show it as well so that the message of the film can come through to those who are living directly after the generations that actually perpetrated it.

As Canadians, we need to forgo the tendency not to confront the conflict that has happened in our midst because it makes us uncomfortable, and instead face it.

As Davis explains: “The whole point is starting a dialogue and recognizing our accountability to uncover the truth.”

Still from C’est juste la fin du monde, via YouTube.

One Sunday last November, my friend Megan and I met at a French-language movie theatre in Rosemont–La Petite Patrie in Montreal. I stood in line for matinee tickets, and then Megan and I bought popcorn. I ordered maïs soufflé, un regulier; the worker at the counter squinted at me, not understanding, and so I repeated myself, embarrassed, at a much quieter volume, which did not help. (Megan ordered un popcorn—apparently food packaging has been lying to me, and no one in Montreal says maïs soufflé at all.)

I met Megan over a year ago, and we’d been vowing to see French-language movies together ever since. We’re both functionally bilingual, her better than me, but the only way to improve—and, also, to become culturally proficient, which is a different but adjacent problem to linguistic proficiency—is to seek out immersion experiences.

We settled on Xavier Dolan’s C’est juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World), which centres on a 34-year-old man who goes home for the first time in 12 years because he’s dying. His family is working-class; he is now a well-known playwright. Like most Dolan films, much of the film’s meaning exists in subtext, and it’s hard to say what details are relevant when it comes to why Louis has avoided home (does it have something to do with him being queer? Something to do with his father, who we see in flashbacks, but who is now absent?), and to some extent, whether these kinds of questions are ever really answerable. I struggled to understand the previews, with their jump cuts and tossed-off sentences, and then worried I’d signed myself up for 90 minutes of a movie I wouldn’t comprehend without subtitles, when I could have just opted to see a subtitled version less than six kilometres away. But when the film opened—Louis on the plane, narrating a monologue about his impending death and his journey—he spoke slowly and clearly enough that I could stop treating the action like a dictée, and focus instead on its emotional weight.

***

English is my home language—the language I speak at home, and the language in which I feel at home. I understand the connotations and denotations of any given word in context; I don’t need to work for meaning, and can instead direct my attention to other things—body language, the things people leave unsaid.

French, on the other hand, is my second language. I started learning it in school when I was nine. Learning French felt like an issue of respect to me—why not embrace the opportunity to learn one of Canada’s official languages? Though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this as a kid, it also offered an avenue to think structurally about language, about etymology, about history and culture—a perspective on grammar and vocabulary that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, one that threw into relief how English compared to, and differed from, French.

These reasons are abstract. As an English speaker from southern Ontario, I could take the primacy of my first language for granted. Even now: if I head to Mexico, Brazil, Denmark or Japan, I can greet someone in my home language and have a reasonable hope they’ll understand me and be able to respond, at least if I’m in a tourist area. The cultural products I consume arrive in English, or subtitled. It comes in handy to speak French in Montreal, but even here, at least seven percent of the population gets by without French fluency.

When Anglophones take this for granted, we lose out on the type of cultural knowledge that comes only through language. It also means that we’re probably a bit arrogant—rather that humans are arrogant when placed in a situation where they can be. It means that we don’t have to struggle to translate a thought into a comprehensible sentence. That we feel comfortable laughing when a non-native-language speaker mispronounces something in English, without having to fear we’ll need to live through making the same mistakes and get laughed at ourselves.

Watching C’est juste la fin du monde felt a little like being in a dinghy instead of a proper boat, bobbing about in a sea of conversation. It was more complex to pick up on class and other details often communicated by language register. It was also easy to lose some nuance and fine detail (for instance, what exactly was Louis’s mom communicating about family dynamics when she told him he should invite his sister to visit, even if he’d never follow through?). It required more effort to understand what was going on and why.

Megan, who is also anglo, but who took immersion and has a francophone parent, felt like she understood about one in three sentences exactly as spoken, and about 85 to 90 percent overall. Like Megan, if I’d missed a word or moment, I could usually fill it in by understanding the gist of the rest of the sentence or its surrounding sentences. One detail we both missed outright involved the second flashback to a minor character, a childhood boyfriend of Louis. Louis’s older brother had communicated one quick, untethered line about him—neither of us caught it—and so we think perhaps he died, but his status remains a Schrödinger-like mystery to us.

In most respects, my viewing experience was similar to what I’d expect from any other half-decent, emotional indie movie (I cried at the end). But it was also an exercise in vague discomfort, the kind that people who speak English as a first language rarely experience, though we regularly expect the same of others. I plan to seek out this discomfort more often; I’m also well aware that the fact it’s an exercise for me is a deep privilege in and of itself.

A couple of years ago, a stranger approached me while I was volunteering at a film festival in Toronto. She motioned to a group of friends standing nearby. They placed a bet on my ethnicity, she explained, and wanted to know where I was from. I smiled and patiently regurgitated my now-rehearsed response: I was born in Scarborough, Ont., but my mother and grandparents are of mixed ethnicity from South Africa. She nodded and said my answer made sense—they knew I was “something like that.”

Her question was one I was all-too accustomed to answering. Growing up in a variety of Ontario suburbs, I constantly faced questions about my ethnicity. People asked me: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? What are you? I was left confused and conflicted. I didn’t have trouble identifying with my mom’s side of the family. They raised me to feel proud of my ethnicity and our family’s history of fighting apartheid. But I didn’t have a sense of belonging to my Latinx roots. I didn’t have a relationship at all with my dad, who was from Uruguay.

My parents divorced when I was a baby. By the time I reached elementary school, I wanted to know more about my dad: his life, what music he listened to, what his parents were like. I wanted to know more about Uruguay. There were few Latinx students in our grade; I had no Latinx teachers and no Latinx family members at home. At school, when we filled out family trees, we were asked about our parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. I left half of my tree blank. While my mom answered my questions as best as she could, I had questions about who I was. With my dad gone, I always felt something was missing.

I turned to movies and television for guidance. I was obsessed with pop culture—it allowed me to explore the world, imagined and real, beyond my life. Maybe there were Latinas on TV, I thought, or people like my dad who I could learn from. I learned fairly quickly, though, that movies and TV wouldn’t bring me any closer to my dad. But this deflating realization didn’t discourage me from questioning the way Latinx were portrayed on screen. Even as kid, I could tell the Latinx characters in movies and television were often negatively portrayed—if they were even portrayed at all.

***

In the 1970s, 7,000 refugees fled Chile and other Latin American countries to live in Canada. While it was common for refugees to flee countries under political unrest, many from Latin America also migrated to Canada for better economic stability. As of 2001, with almost a quarter of a million Canadians of Latin American origin living in the country, the Latin American community is growing “considerably faster” than Canada’s overall population, according to Statistics Canada. As of 2011, the Statistics Canada National Household Survey reported 381,280 visible minorities of Latin American origin, many of them with Mexican, Chilean, or Salvadoran roots. Yet, despite being one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in Canada and the U.S., Latinx are largely absent from mainstream English-language television and film.

Certainly, there’s a general dearth of inclusion in Hollywood, and a growing awareness that many audiences experience whitewashing, racism, and erasure first hand. There are “disturbing patterns” in representation of women and people of colour in television and film, concluded a 2016 report from the University of Southern California’s (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Assessing inclusion on camera and behind the scenes within 10 major media companies between 2014–2015, the study found that out of 109 films, 50 percent had no speaking Asian characters and 18 per cent had no speaking Black characters. Behind the camera, 87 percent of film directors and 90 percent of broadcast directors were white.

Other studies have reported similarly dismal representation and portrayal. “The Latino Media Gap,” Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race 2014 study, found 24 percent of Latino characters on U.S. television were linked to crime and made up a whopping zero percent of leading roles between 2012–2013. The numbers concerning Latinos working behind the scenes aren’t optimistic either: in film, from 2010– 2013, Latinos consisted of just two percent of directors, two percent of producers, and six percent of writers.

This may also help us understand why the majority of Latinx characters in mainstream television and film are stereotypes: Latinx are seldom included in the creative process deciding how they’re represented on screen. As pointed out by “The Latino Media Gap,” most of the memorable maids in television and film from the past 20 years are Latina (think: Maid in Manhattan, Family Guy, and Will & Grace.) These numbers only account for representation in U.S. media—when we look at representation in Canada, we don’t fare any better.

“[Latino Canadians are] not shown enough on screen as much as we exist in Canada. There’s a serious shortage,” says Maria del Mar, an elected council member of the Toronto branch of Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, who has worked as a professional actor for 25 years in Canada and the U.S. She says when American productions are filmed in Canada, a Canadian Latinx is still rarely cast in a lead role. What’s more, these productions typically reflect American life. “It’s almost like we’re invisible. We’re not worthy of telling our stories or our experiences,” she adds. “That can have a very negative effect on everybody because it basically gives you the impression we’re not worthy of being represented.”

In conversations about diversity, I’ve struggled to name a mainstream movie or television show reflecting the experience of a Canadian Latinx or starring Canadian Latinx talent. At the same time, I’ve had no trouble naming stereotypical, whitewashed, and racist portrayals of Latinx people in U.S. media, like West Side Story, Crash, Suicide Squad, and Hot Pursuit. A 2013 study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found, in relation to their percentage of the U.S. population, Hispanics (their wording) “clearly are the most underserved racial/ethnic group by the film industry.”

That’s not to say there are no contemporary mainstream Latinx pop stars, writers, filmmakers, and actors from Canada. They include season four Canadian Idol winner Eva Ávila; actress and Mexican Hooker #1 author Carmen Aguirre; and urban-pop singer Fito Blanko. The country also boasts several film and culture events dedicated to celebrating Canadian Latinx art, including aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival and Expo Latino, Western Canada’s largest outdoor Latin festival. We have a rich history of Canadian Latinx produced works like La Familia Latina, a 1986 documentary feature film about Latin American immigrants in Quebec, and I Remember Too, a 1973 documentary about children of Chilean refugees exiled in Canada. All of this is encouraging, but it’s not enough to quell the overall lack of representation—never mind that many aspiring and accomplished Canadian Latinx still face obstacles breaking into the mainstream.

Rosa Carrera, a Vancouver-based actress and model, has difficulty branching out from stereotypical Latino roles. Although she did background work as a child for the 1987 show 21 Jump Street, in the past two years she auditioned for three maid roles—each written for someone with “Hispanic” or “ambiguous” ethnicity. Despite these obstacles, Carrera won’t give up. “You can’t move mountains, but you definitely go through them slowly,” Carrera says. “An industry is not going to change tomorrow, as long as it does change slowly.”

Some casting directors blame the underrepresentation on a supposed lack of Canadian Latinos in the arts, del Mar says, but that doesn’t reflect reality. It’s an age-old excuse those in positions of power use to dismiss calls for inclusion. But this mentality negates the fact that Latinx in Canada do exist— and they deserve to be seen. “There’s a wave of Latinos out there that need to be recognized,” del Mar says. “[Latino Canadians] are a force to be reckoned with. We are becoming a huge part of the population.”

***

When I was five, two of my favourite movies, Clueless and First Wives Club, featured Latinx maids or housekeepers. Later, it struck me that both were stories filtered through the perspective of wealthy white women. The problem with diversity in pop culture is not only how many Latinx characters were (and are) featured in my favourite movies and TV shows—but also how they’re portrayed.

Silvia Argentina Arauz, co-chair of Toronto’s Latin American Education Network, teaches media literacy to Toronto youth. In a workshop called “Putting the Me Back in Media,” Arauz draws a pair of aviators. Using herself as an example, she depicts the “me on TV” on one lens and the “me in reality” on the other. She asks students what they assume about her based on the image in the media. “Unfailingly, I’m told I do drugs, I carry drugs, I’m a single mom possibly on welfare, I have a drug dealer boyfriend, I haven’t gone to school or I’m a high school drop out, I’m promiscuous,” Arauz says. When she asks for their opinion about what they see in person, however, the students say she’s nice, educated, and nonaggressive. “What happens when so many people don’t meet me in reality and all they have is the me on TV?”

In high school, I encountered people who referred to me as “their” spicy or sexy Latina—a trope I’m certain they plucked from movies and television. Non-Latinx people, assuming my ethnicity, spoke to me in Spanish—and condescended me when I couldn’t speak back. As per Arauz’s metaphor, I was caught in a double bind between the real me and the images non-Latinx people saw in pop culture. Studies show repeating stereotypes of Latinx have a negative effect on how they are perceived. In 2012, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and Latino Decisions studied how stereotypes in media affect non-Latinx’ attitudes toward Latinx and immigrants. The respondents reported Latinx were portrayed as maids, criminals, and gardeners “very often” and nurses, teachers, and lawyers “sometimes” and “not too often.” While there’s nothing, of course, inherently wrong with being a maid or gardener, in pop culture, these characters are often minor, one-dimensional, and menial. The result? “People exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives about Latinos and/ or immigrants hold the most unfavourable and hostile views about both groups.”

What’s more, people who often don’t know anything about us write simplified versions of our diverse, complicated histories and identities, which also effects how non-Latinx people view us. In 2005, when The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series was a big deal, my friends decided I was the Carmen Lowell (America Ferrera) of our friend group. At first I was confused—if I was like any character, it was the snarky Tibby. Plus, despite us both being Latinx, Ferrera and I looked nothing alike. I quickly realized as the token Latinx in our group, I was automatically viewed as the Latinx in the Sisterhood. My friends probably didn’t realize Ferrera wasn’t the only U.S.-Latinx actress in the movie: Alexis Bledel, who plays Lena Kaligaris, is of Argentinian descent.

I couldn’t blame my friends for their blunder. Although Latinx are incorrectly referred to as a race, we are actually an ethnic group composed of diverse races, languages, and cultures. The mainstream media, however, typically ignores these complexities and our diversity in favour of lazily painting people of Latin American descent as one and the same. This catchall attitude toward Latinx suggests we not only look the same, but that we face the same stereotypes. Many Latinx experience some form of prejudice and erasure, but we each experience them differently. While U.S.-Latinx actresses like Cameron Diaz, Bledel, and Aubrey Plaza may not appear often in “Latina-specific” roles, they are also more often given the chance to play characters outside their ethnicity.

Most films and television shows featuring Latinx people also don’t reflect Latin America’s diversity—the various cultures, countries, and races that make up Latin American countries and the U.S.-Latinx population. The recycled stereotypes—the hyper-sexualized Latinx, maids, and drug dealers—are roles that are almost exclusively shelled out to Latinx of colour. These characters are rarely portrayed as complete people with lives and back-stories like their counterparts, only as the butt of the joke, the sidekick, or the villain.

Even Spanish-language television in the U.S. is guilty of favouring white Latinx over Latinx of colour, often portraying the latter in racist or stereotypical roles. In 2014, Proyecto Más Color, an awareness campaign founded by sisters Sophia and Victoria Arzu, urged Univision and Telemundo to include more positive portrayals of afro-Latinx in their programming. Most Americans don’t know afro-Latinx exist, Victoria argued in a video for their petition, and when Black people are portrayed on Spanish-language soap operas, they’re often maids, gunmen, prisoners, security guards, or drug dealers. “We have the same right to shine on television as anyone else,” Victoria said.

In Canada, despite the dearth of Canadian-Latinx representation on television and film, I still found a handful of characters, albeit American, that positively affected my childhood. I watched the Disney Channel to catch reruns of the movie Gotta Kick It Up! starring Ferrera and Camille Guaty. And as a teenager, I devotedly watched My So-Called Life every Monday night because I loved Rickie Vasquez. Played by Wilson Cruz, Rickie was one of the first openly gay teenagers in a recurring role on U.S. television. Rickie was a troubled teen who experienced stigma, homophobia, and homelessness. But unlike stereotypical Latinx characters that are criminalized or ridiculed, Rickie was humanized and given significant airtime.

Latinx advocates all over the U.S. and Canada are mobilizing for change. In 1998, Latinx successfully advocated for the retirement of a Seinfeld episode that depicted the burning of a Puerto Rican flag; in 1999, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts organized a “brownout” to boycott four major networks in response to the “virtual absence of Latino images on television;” in 2009, news host Lou Dobbs retired from CNN after surmounting pressure from Latinx advocates who challenged Dobbs’ anti-immigration rhetoric “in relation to undocumented Latino immigrants.” And, several contemporary U.S. television shows like Jane the Virgin and Devious Maids are subverting tired tropes to comment on the way media portrays Latinx.

Even with these considerable strides, some studies report Latinx representation is actually getting worse. In 2016, as a follow up to “The Latino Media Gap,” co-authors Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Chelsea Abbas helmed “The Latino Disconnect: Latinos in the Age of Media Mergers.” Looking at recent mergers between telecom and cable providers, the researchers found, after the 2011 Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, stereotypical Latinx roles on television rose from 34 percent in the 2008–2009 season to 52 percent in the 2014– 2015 season; in film, stereotypical Latinx roles reached an alltime high of 66 percent in 2013.

As for Canada? There’s no up-to-date or sufficient data offering insight into how Canadian Latinx are represented in Canadian English-language television and film. The lack of information available—paired with the near invisibility of our diverse communities reflected on the screen—suggests a want for something more. We need to continue promoting diversity, del Mar says, and teaching Latinx children they can grow up to be directors and writers. It’s hard, she adds, to convince people Canadian characters can also be Latinx—they think they may not appeal to a broad audience. “The truth is, the broad audience needs to be reflected,” she says. “The way to do that is to encourage more Latinos and to cast more Latinos in the industry.”

I’ve learned in order to discover new Latinx artists, I need to look past Hollywood and the mainstream, which still struggles to keep up with decades-old conversations about diversity. Still, I have hope. After all, Uruguayan-born filmmaker Fede Álvarez directed the summer horror hit Don’t Breathe. In the weeks the film debuted, I was ecstatic to see the words “Uruguayan director” in dozens of mainstream news headlines, some even praising Álvarez for reinventing horror. Maybe someday everyone will realize Latinx everywhere deserve to be seen.

Near the beginning of Stone Story, a documentary that straddles Stone’s 70th and 71st years, he addresses the camera: “Close your eyes and pretend that the world does not contain poverty, racism, inequality, injustice,” he says. “If by living the way I do, is taking a step in that direction, then I’m going to go for it.”

If Stone’s story originally epitomized a kind of racial and class privilege—“Look at me, not conforming to middle-class expectations”—by 2016, its meaning has shifted, and his initial choice to eschew normalcy has given way to inescapable familial and economic consequences. Acutely aware of this, filmmaker Jean-André Fourestié centres the film not on Stone, but on the broader family dynamic—what the stone rolled over in its quest to gain no moss. While his ex-wife and daughters own homes in the U.S., where they visit, eat meals, and celebrate together, Stone rents, living paycheque to paycheque, working part-time as an overnight security guard at a soulless condo in the burbs. Stone’s communal lifestyle in Mile End may now have as much to do with economic necessity as a desire to live out hippie precepts.

While she reminisces about meeting—and dancing with— Janis Joplin at Woodstock, Stone’s eldest daughter Debbie seems the most torn when it comes to her father’s choices. She recounts a story on the bus where the group had run out of food and money. They pulled over at a Jack in the Box, and sent Debbie and Jacquie inside to beg for food. When the girls returned with bags of cheeseburgers and fries, the adults gobbled them up—barely remembering to feed the kids who’d secured the meal in the first place. “They treated us like little people living grown-up lives,” Debbie tells us. “But we weren’t adults—we were children.” At one point, Debbie concedes that it may all have been worth it for the memories; at the same time, though, she calls her stepfather Alan Katz “dad” more often than she does Martin.

For his part, Stone asserts that he wanted to show his kids that a different value system was possible. (And, to his credit, according to a short pre-screening introduction Fourestié gave at Cinema Parc in Montreal, Stone wanted his family to feel free to share their unadorned perspectives on his great hippie experiment.) Intentions aside, though, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what comprises Stone’s alternative value system. Communal meals? Jam sessions? Smoking pot on a balcony, surrounded by plants? Stone is open with his friendships, with his home, with his overtures of a better tomorrow—but his friendships seem fleeting, his family relationships, strained. It’s easy to see what Stone has lost—deeper relationships, financial security—but it’s harder to see what he’s gained. Occasionally, his naivete borders on the painful-to-watch—he mentions that he never locks his door, for example, and then proceeds to dox his address in stages over the course of the film.

In the latter third of the film, we learn that Stone’s youngest daughter is struggling with an illness that has threatened her life. Stone, unsure if he can handle seeing her sick, hasn’t visited her in years. Meanwhile, Debbie’s years of hard work have finally paid off, and she’s purchased a rural hobby farm in Canada with a new partner—bringing her physically closer to her father, whom she visits. Martin, who has rented the same apartment for 40 years—along with an estimated one hundred roommates—has just received a notice of lease non-renewal from his landlord. After a quick catch-up, Martin presents Debbie with the notice. She holds it in her hands for a moment, folds it up and gives it back. While she says, later, that she finds her father’s situation “sad,” she isn’t willing to step in and fix his problems. Her father has abdicated his familial responsibilities her whole life, and she’s done picking up the slack.

Stone Story’s pacing is a bit erratic, its conclusion lacking, its parallel storylines meander side by side, interacting only clumsily. It’s not a great film—in fact it’s easy to see how Fourestié could have cut it differently, interposing narration instead of relying on parallels to make narrative points—but it is a profoundly sad film, with a profoundly sad takeaway: the economic realities of capitalism are inescapable, and they catch up to us whether we want them to or not.