Youth-Oriented Musical Film Stand! Explores Contemporary Issues Through the Lens Of History

By Liam Lacey

Why do we have universal health care but Americans don’t? Why is the word “socialist” less scary on this side of the border? Some answers to those questions may be found in revisiting events in Winnipeg a century ago, when the city was shut down by a general strike, including about 30,000 union and non-union workers.

A new youth-oriented musical film, Stand!, directed by Robert Adetuyi (Stomp The Yard) tells a Romeo and Juliet story about a Ukrainian labourer, Stefan (Marshall Williams) and a Jewish suffragist, Rebecca (Laura Wiggins) against the backdrop of the stand-off between workers and business leaders. The movie was adapted from the stage musical, Strike! which was composed, produced, and co-written with Rick Chafe, by Winnipeg’s Daniel Shur.

As well as an entertainment, Stand! is a civics lesson, and a story of immigration and human rights that feels particularly timely to commemorate. The six-week strike – which saw two killed and strike leaders jailed – was foundational in creating a national labour movement. One of its leaders, J.F. Woodsworth was a founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation or CCF and later the New Democratic Party, which has significantly tilted the political axis of the top end of the North American continent.

When the film finishes its theatrical and streaming life, it will live on: A half-million copies will be available for free download to Grade 11 students across the country, thanks to $1.25-million worth of support from various labour organizations and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Behind the film is director Robert Adetuyi, whose own biography exposes another fascinating corner of Canadian immigrant history. Adetuyi, now based on Los Angeles, is best known as the screenwriter and director for a series of urban dance movies: Stomp The Yard, You Got Served: Beat the World, Honey: Rise Up and Dance Bring It On: Worldwide Cheersmack. He’s also a partner, along with three of his five siblings – Tom, Amos and Alfons – in the Toronto-based TV and film production company, Inner City Films.

Their father, Joseph Adetuyi, was born in Nigeria and left home at 17. After a stint with the British Merchant Marines, serving in the Second World War, he ended up in Montreal in his late twenties, when he saw an ad from Inco looking for mechanics experienced with large engines. He called and the company sent a taxi from Sudbury to Montreal. He was, apparently, the first black employee of Inco. Adeyuti, known as “African Joe” spent 29 years working for the company, including living through the late seventies strike. He was also something of a musical entrepreneur, bringing blues, jazz and big band concerts to Northern Ontario.

Robert credits a progressive arts program at the Sudbury Second School for giving him and his brothers their interest in filmmaking, though he says his father was “very discouraging” of his sons earnings their livings in the arts, which he viewed as a precarious living.

By the time Robert reached York University, he found the filmmaking courses too rudimentary. Instead, he studied sociology and mass communications, as well as studying dramaturgy and film theory “but I was doing that work entirely with the intentions of becoming a filmmaker but bringing a different angle to it. By that point, I’d already been working as an actor.”

During a stint as an actor, he says, he got repeated feedback that if he wanted to play good roles, he would probably have to write them himself. “There were also limited roles for a black artist in Canada and I decided that Los Angeles was the place to be.”

Post-university, he also worked at the Canadian Film Centre, where he met his future mentor, Norman Jewison. Subsequently, the met through a professional connection and became friends. When Adeyuti moved to Los Angeles in 1992, Jewison provided him with lodgings at his Malibu home and connections to the industry.

“I was overly spoiled. You moved to L.A. and then suddenly Malibu – and you’ve got a tennis court there on the property. And I'm a tennis player. It’s like you're in Shangri-La suddenly and just being around this really interesting celebrity filmmaker was a great introduction in terms of overall mentorship.”

Adetuyi has continued to work both sides of the US-Canada border so it wasn’t a surprise when he was approached to direct the screen version of the film, originally called Strike!, without realizing that it was a stage musical with a 15-year history.

“I actually thought it was a good script recently written, about what's going on right now. I was fascinated by this piece of history and the drama of the story. I hadn’t heard the songs yet.”

Adetuyi and his family had experienced the deprivations of a strike: the Inco strike from September 1978 to June 1979 was, at the point, one of the longest strike in Canadian history “and when that was going on, I remember people talking about what happened in Winnipeg.”

While the original playwrights are credited as the screenwriters, Adetuyi asked for some changes to increase the diversity “which they embraced right away.”

“You look at photographs of the period and everyone is white,” says Adetuyi. “But historically, we know that wasn’t the case so, I said, can we pull the camera back a little and see what else was going on?”

That meant that a returning war veteran was changed from Irish to Metis (played by Winnipegger Gabriel Daniels). And a maid, Emma, is now recast as African-American woman, escaping racial violence in Oklahoma. She’s played by Winnipeg musical actress Lisa Bell, a former Canadian Idol contestant – and her singing talent also led to a change title.

“I said to Danny, now that we're agreeing that we're going to have to be this black maid in the script, you have one song will really open it up. And when we found Lisa Bell, well, she's such a phenomenal singer, you’ve got to write a great song for her. And then he wrote “Stand,” which I love, because it feels so contemporary. It fits the movie nicely but it really expresses what’s going on today, not just here but in Europe and elsewhere. I really hope we can use this Canadian story to help enlighten people.

Stand! Directed by Robert Adetuyi. Now playing at Toronto’s Cineplex Yonge-Dundas.