The puck stops here
Filmmaker says Hello Destroyer ‘aggressively and expressively Canadian’
Ahead of the upcoming TORONTO 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 on the ice 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 expressive ly 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. He says a lot of the film’s script stems from things he said or experienced.
“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.
Funk recently engaged in a public debate about Canadian film with Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival.
Funk sent an email to Bailey (which TIFF has published with permission on its website) in response to an editorial piece that ran in the Globe and Mail.
In the op-ed, Bailey urged homegrown filmmakers to focus more on telling true stories, like those of Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women.
Funk responded that he agrees Canadian filmmakers “need to be much more bold in terms of the films that we are producing,” but added, “the institutional and corporate conditions that exist in this country very much shape the films that get made.”
His letter mentions Goon and several other Canadian films. “I can speak from experience, at length, about the radical disinterest that Canadian distributors and broadcasters generally have for the type of films that you are appealing to filmmakers to make,” he wrote to Bailey.
Funk says he wrote the email because he “had a very visceral reaction reading his op-ed.” With his film out, he’s using the platform to continue the conversation, noting “there’s still so much more to talk about.”
“I also think that just another middle-class white guy is not the voice that needs to necessarily be leading this charge either,” says Funk.