The puck stops here
Filmmaker says Hello Destroyer ‘aggressively and expressively Canadian’
TORONTO Ahead of the upcoming release of Jay Baruchel’s Goon, hockey-comedy sequel, comes a very different kind of Canadian movie featuring the puck world: Kevan Funk’s Hello Destroyer.
In theatres in Toronto and Ottawa on March 17, the drama stars Jared Abrahamson as a young, Canadian, junior hockey player who falls into a dark space in his life when he critically injures a rival and becomes ostracized in the community.
The film, which earned four nominations from the Canadian Screen Awards, is a meditative and quiet reflection on institutional and systemic violence in our culture.
“The hockey part is like a red herring or a misnomer,” says Funk, the film’s writer and director. “The only reason it’s about hockey is that I needed a big cultural institution at the centre of this film.
“If I set it in the U.S., it would probably be the military. But I did want to make a film that was aggressively and expressively Canadian.”
Funk was born in Vancouver and grew up in Banff, Alta., where he didn’t play hockey but was on basketball and rugby teams.
“There’s a universal attitude or atmosphere that exists in any of those settings, especially in terms of this idea of this sense of discovering masculinity and I also think what is really a lot about the fragility of masculinity in those circumstances,” he says.
“Because I think so much of this is an act and a front ... which I think is based on a lot of fear of not being accepted. And there’s a tremendous amount of over-compensation as a result.”
Funk wanted to represent hockey in a realistic way and avoid any stereotypical Canadian hockey movie tropes and clichés.
But he also wanted to make it identifiably Canadian, as he feels strongly about reflecting Canada’s true culture and identity onscreen.
If I set it in the U.S., it would probably be the military.