Portraits From a Fire: A Teen Rez Film Auteur Finds His Focus in a Sweet, Subtle, Imaginative Tale
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
It’s kind of meta that Trevor Mack, a B.C. Tshilhqot'in Nation filmmaker would make a film about a teen with Hollywood dreams making DIY films on a Tshilhqot'in Nation reserve.
It gives the character-driven, mystically-minded movie Portraits From a Fire a universality shared by anybody who’s lived in a small town or community and felt confined or out of place amid its secrets.
At the same time, its universality allows Mack’s film to speak to Indigenous experience without being too on the nose, or even always serious. (One elder character teasingly encourages the young protagonist to make a Western, “so I can shoot a white man.”)
Tyler (William Lulua) is a filmmaker without a vision, until he starts to look around.
A lot of that looseness comes courtesy of amiable newcomer William Magnus Lulua who plays the protagonist Tyler with a fluid ease. His mother is dead, and his gruff father (Nathaniel Arcand) constantly finds ways to distance him, either through out-of-town jobs or just plain avoidance.
Tyler doesn’t wear his troubles on his sleeve, but pours them into his version of living room sci-fi with a lot of exposition and literally cardboard characters. When we meet him, he is screening his latest opus to an outdoor audience of three – two of whom are elders – Sammy (a scene-stealingly funny Sammy Stump) and Etsu (Melanie Bobby) - who are effectively surrogate parents in his dad’s constant absence.
Adding to his frustration in getting his film career started is the growing realization that there are secrets in Tyler’s past, partly illuminated by pixilated flashbacks of events he doesn’t consciously remember. Of his fellow rez residents, he says, “I can’t help but think that they all know something I don’t.”
At his greatest point of confusion and self-doubt, Tyler encounters a mysterious young man named Aaron (Asivak Koostachin) who seems to know a lot about him, and about what he’s doing wrong with his camera.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Specifically, what he’s doing wrong is pointing his camera at cheesy visions of the future when an authentic past and present is all around him waiting to be captured on video for posterity. At Aaron’s urging, Tyler begins to Vlog the reserve. And with the help of some found memory chips, begins to create a picture of what he believes is his past – which begins to make other people uncomfortable.
Amid the subtly rendered supernatural events, subtext emerges about Tyler’s change of mind about where he points his camera. His Hollywood dreams are symbolic of assimilation. Were they ever to become real, it would remove him from his community and his people and the authenticity of his life experience.
Portraits From a Fire is a sweet movie, with flashes of digital artiness, some dark moments and nicely drawn characters with a shared wry sense of humour. The location shoot, the Tl'etinqox (Anaham) Reserve, adds to the atmosphere with its lived-in reality. There’s a working-class hominess to it that could stand for small towns anywhere in Canada. Except this one’s called a “rez.”
Portraits From a Fire.Directed and co-written by Trevor Mack. Starring William Lulua, Sammy Stump and Asivak Koostachin. Debuts on VOD on Tuesday, November 9.