A MINOR MIRACLE
Family’s unique story told
Carlo Guillermo Proto’s first feature documentary, 2011’s El Huaso, was about his suicidal father, who ended up killing himself months after the film was finished. His second, Resurrecting Hassan, profiles a family of blind Montreal métro musicians.
Guess which one proved more challenging? You might be surprised.
“I finished my first film, travelled to festivals, then my dad committed suicide,” Proto said last week, sitting in his thirdfloor Villeray apartment. “The first film was pretty enjoyable to make, because I became closer to my father. This (second) film was harder to make than a film about my father who wanted to commit suicide — that’s how intense it was.”
Proto is no stranger to intensity. He didn’t flinch while travelling back to Chile to get to the heart of his dad’s lifelong battle with depression in El Huaso; and he didn’t give up during the tumultuous five-year process of making Resurrecting Hassan.
The film begins with Denis Harting, partner Peggy Roux and their daughter Lauviah Harting still struggling to come to terms with the loss of Lauviah’s brother, Hassan, who drowned in a swimming accident; and follows some dramatic turns as the tragedy and interpersonal tensions take their toll.
Resurrecting Hassan won the award for best Canadian feature at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal last November, and has been touring the festival circuit since. It opens in theatres on Friday.
For Proto, the film’s release marks the culmination of a decade-long relationship with the family that began when the Toronto native was a first-year student in film production at Concordia’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. He was first struck not by their story, but by their singing.
“They sang at Guy-Concordia métro,” he said of Denis and Lauviah. (Peggy doesn’t sing, but often accompanied the other two while they busked.) “I saw them for the first time and was enamoured. Denis’s voice was like what Lauviah’s voice is (in the film), but better. He was hitting Minnie Riperton. I’m not joking. He won Amateur Night at the Apollo and got a standing ovation.
“I have 50 hours of footage, including him going to a jazz bar down the street where they shot Malcolm X and singing Summertime with the house band. People were losing their mind for this little white guy who was just ripping it.”
That footage was captured while making Proto’s 2007 student short Peggy, Denis, Lauviah, which included Super 8 footage shot by each member of the family.
The crazier part of the story, which Proto doesn’t go into in Resurrecting Hassan, is that at the time Denis was involved in a burgeoning romance with Skye Byrne, daughter of Rhonda Byrne, author of the runaway hit selfhelp book and film The Secret. (Denis and Peggy had an open relationship, according to Proto.)
“Denis won Amateur Night at the Apollo and (Byrne) was on the Oprah Winfrey Show with her mom the same day,” he said. “She flew in from Chicago to New York and they met at Port Authority for the first time. And this was in 2006, my second year of film school.”
Proto had what he thought were the makings of his first documentary feature, until it all fell apart for reasons too long to go into in this space, but which may or may not have involved a cease-and-desist order from the team behind The Secret.
Fast-forward a few years, and Proto gets a call from his old friend Denis.
“He said, ‘Hey, we should start making that documentary again. We’re into this new movement
led by Grigory Grabovoy and he believes we can regenerate organs, and we’re going to do the ultimate regeneration and resurrect Hassan.’ I was like, ‘What the f--- are you talking about? Slow down.’ ”
Then Proto got out his camera and got back to filming his old friends.
Resurrecting Hassan merges the disparate worlds of Denis, Peggy and Lauviah, from their profound grief to their New Age pursuit of miracles, their stunning musicality and incredible perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.
“To me, it’s a film about tenacity and the human spirit,” Proto said. “My goal was to try to have the audience feel an untraditional kind of empathy. At the start of the film, people may be judging them, or grossed out by them, or maybe loving them — but having some sort of reaction. Then hopefully by the end of the film, you almost forget they’re blind and just see them as people.”
Expect the unexpected as Denis and family’s journey leads down roads that even the above setup may not prepare you for. But while their lives get shaken up, everyone emerges relatively unscathed on the other side.
Denis, who now lives in France, and Proto remain close, and the former will be acting in the latter’s upcoming first fiction short, about two estranged, adopted brothers who go off in search of their father.
“It’s not a vast departure from what I’ve already done,” Proto said. “People have confused both my documentaries with fiction. This will be fiction that feels like a documentary.”