Sundance success

Q: Could you feel that something was afoot in the theatre at the first industry screening?

A: What usually happens at Sundance screenings is that the junior buyers appear and check out the film, and if they like it, the next day their bosses show up and the offers are made. I was waiting in the lobby on Monday as people were filing in and I immediately noticed something: Everyone was there. The juniors and the brass were all in attendance. It was a strange audience. Half was very young and funky and wanting an urban dance film and then the rest was very…Hollywood. [laughs]

For me, everything I’ve ever directed before was a comedy and you gauge the success by laughs. But I couldn’t feel the room at all with this because it was a drama. When the screening was over I turned to my partner and said: “I have no idea how we did.” I went up to do the Q & A and realized: Oh, okay, we had a great screening. Within an hour the bids start coming in.

Director Ian Iqbal Rachid. (Mongrel Media)

Q: How does that work exactly?

A: We were in a bar having a drink with the cast and our sales agent called, saying: “Offers are being made, get over here.” All the sales agents are holed up in the hills outside Park City. You see this trail of buyers going from one condo to another for various films. We went to this condo and sat in a room and our sales agent was meeting with buyers in a different room. Offers would be made, and passed by us, and back again. This went right through the night. We decided on a deal with Paramount at about 5 in the morning and it was hammered out over the next few hours. By the morning we had a sale. I’m still exhausted.

Q: Do you think How She Move benefited from the current success of the urban dance movie Stomp the Yard?

A: As long as there’s been film, there’s always been dance films. The very early films showed ballerinas on stage. People respond to the body in motion, the grace of it, the musicality of it. The genre keeps changing but that’s the primal pleasure. But in our case, we’re a character movie as much as we’re a dance movie, and that’s what separates us from some of the other urban dance movies that have come out. Though I sure would like to share their box office, our ambitions are slightly different.

Q: What are those ambitions, then?

A: The story is set in Toronto’s Jane and Finch corridor in a Jamaican-Canadian family. It’s about a young second generation woman whose parents are very ambitious and aspirational. She’s trying to get to private school and use stepping as a way to do that, all in the hope of redeeming her parents’ journey to this country. We wanted to tell that story.

Q: You have said that you’re interested in the effects of migration on immigrant families, also a theme in Touch of Pink. But this script is by a young writer named Annmarie Morais, so how much influence did you have?

A: I came on board when the script was in development and the theme of the scars of migration was quite embedded at that point. To me, that was the spine of the movie, and I worked with Annmarie to make it more present. It was the thing that drew me to the project and I did try to wring more out of it as development went on.

Q: Have you encountered that same pressure that your heroine feels to redeem your family’s journey to Canada?

A: We migrated to Canada from Tanzania in the early 70s. Oh yeah, all immigrant kids feel it, especially those of us who migrated under difficult circumstances and came without very many resources, which was my family. They left a very happy full life behind, so there’s a need to make sense of that, which comes, in a way, on the backs of our success.

Q: How She Move has a really specific sense of place: it’s about a notorious, culturally complex Toronto neighborhood, and features some of the city’s biggest hip-hop stars like Kardinal Offishall. But the fact that this slice of Canadiana sold to an American company suggests that Canadian stories aren’t necessarily just for Canadians, which seems encouraging somehow.

A: The really exciting thing about this is we have the opportunity to reach a broad international audience and that’s tough for Canadian films. I like audiences. I want my films to reach people and often with Canadian films that’s not a possibility. Everything we’ve heard indicates that Paramount wants to reach as wide and as varied an audience as possible. The company that owns them also owns MTV and BET [Black Entertainment Television], so I think it will come out to the world via a multifaceted approach. I don’t think they see it as a teen movie. We’ve shown it to audiences of much older people and they’ve loved it as well. There’s a universalism here that transcends Canada.

Q: Had you had much exposure to step-dancing culture before this film?

A: I knew nothing. But I really enjoyed the research and went to quite a few competitions. What I love about step dancing is it’s been around for about 100 years, it’s a very significant part of African-American culture in the states. It evolved with the first black universities and was inspired by South African gumboot dancing. Cultural practitioners from Africa were brought over to inspire the kids at the first black universities, to give them a sense of pride. Kids started taking it on and developing their own form and it became almost a competitive sport at university sororities and fraternities. It’s a dance form that’s related to hope, so I quite like the message of it.

Q: Can you do it?

A: [laughs] I would never do it in public. Closed doors only.