Film captures inequalities for those without yards
Toronto is a city.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem that way though, with all the small thinking and the sometimes-defiant refusal to behave like a big city.
A beautiful reminder of Toronto’s inherent cityness, its very urbanity, can be seen in the short film “We Went Out.” Commissioned by the Luminato Festival last year, the film is by artist, writer and designer Ian Kamau, and it beautifully evokes life here.
Toronto is hot, humid and lush in Kamau’s poetic, documentary-style film, a reminder that summer is coming, despite the recent April snow. Summer in the city is always special, perhaps anticipated even more this year, two years into the pandemic.
The lake is shimmering in the film’s opening shot, and then the wind turbine at Exhibition Place appears, and later the subway view of the Don Valley flashes between the steel supports of the Prince Edward Viaduct. So familiar, all of it. Celebrated, even. Landmarks.
Down in the valley, though, under the Viaduct arches is a much less celebrated in-between place that doesn’t appear on any postcards, where Kamau sets a few of the scenes. These, the film suggests, are the kind of places where he and his friends spent their time, where they made friends and where they created art and lived much of their lives.
“I never had a backyard,” says Kamau in his narration. “Or front yard. Or basement. I had stairways, hallways, parks and benches. A living room for us. A little room for me.” The city as living room is sometimes a trope tossed around by urbanists, but here it really is, where he “sat on steps, between doorways, surrounded by friends.” These are the places where city life plays out, especially for teenagers who are at an in-between age themselves.
“Who wants to stay home at 14?” is a phrase Kamau repeats throughout the 12-minute film. For me, somebody who grew up with a front and backyard, even a basement, in one of the deepest suburban edges of Windsor, the city Kamau shows is the one I desperately pined for as a kid. The city I asked my parents to move us to, one where I didn’t need to be driven everywhere, where I could walk out of home and find a million people and a million things to do.
I suppose I took that front and backyard for granted, and even romanticized life in a big city. As beautiful as Kamau’s film is, it doesn’t romanticize Toronto either and has an edge to it.
As Kamau explains in his description of his film, it was originally commissioned as part of a series to celebrate shuttered music venues during COVID-19. Though some memorable ones are shown in the film, he explained that many venues “did not treat hip hop or young Black and brown people well in the times when we performed in them regularly.” This made the in-between spaces even more important, but even they could be hostile.
When out in the city, he and his friends were “asked why they were there, where we should be, watched by strangers, questioned by neigh- bours, followed by police.” Surveilled in their own living room, as it were. Another character in the film remembers playing music on a rooftop on Sullivan Street, but police arrived and they were lined up on their knees.
For years Toronto has let down its citizens in this way, but especially so during the pandemic.
How difficult it has been to get public washrooms opened to serve people who needed to be outdoors but didn’t have front or backyards.
Or that city council, even progressives, couldn’t bring themselves to let people legally have a drink in a park, knowing full well it’s Black, brown and younger people who will be harassed or worse for doing so.
That building on Sullivan Street, number 11, figures prominently in the film, a home for one of the characters. Just off Beverly Street, a couple blocks north of Queen West, it was built in 1919 and before being converted to residential in 1983, it was alternately the Rubberset Company building and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police building.
Three-storeys tall and containing multiple apartments, it’s exactly the kind of gently dense building, here perfectly comfortable surrounded by single-family homes, that the city makes so difficult to build more of today, in turn making it increasingly hard for anybody, but in particular the families that Kamau depicts, to find suitable and affordable housing in this city.
It’s a hostile act, this kind of exclusion, but one neighbourhood after neighbourhood will demand, with the support of most councillors, as if we’re a small, mean town rather than a big, welcoming city.
“We Went Out” is a sweet and beautiful film that everyone should watch, clearly made by somebody who loves Toronto dearly but who can see the undercurrents of cruelty that make life here incredibly unequal.