(Photograph by Getty Images)

Past Lives, a new film from indie hitmaker A24, has been wowing critics with its intercontinental love story, told on an intimate scale. The movie, set mostly in Seoul and NYC, marks the filmmaking debut of Canadian director and playwright Celine Song. “I wanted to tell a story about how the ordinary can be extraordinary,” says Song, whose immigration journey mirrors that of Nora, the film’s protagonist. Both left South Korea for Canada when they were 12 years old, and both wrestled with their sense of identity in the years that followed. Since the premiere of Past Lives at Sundance, Song’s life has changed yet again: her film, which earned a standing ovation and stellar reviews, is now receiving the inevitable Oscar buzz. Here, she chats about how much of Past Lives is pulled from her own experiences and the culturally specific Easter eggs she planted.

Past Lives is largely chronological, except for the opening scene that takes place in a New York bar. Why did you begin there?

When we start the movie we see three characters at a bar in the East Village: Nora, who is the centre of the film, sitting next to Arthur, her white American husband, and Hae Sung, her childhood sweetheart from Korea. Then we hear the voices of other people in the bar who are wondering who these people are to each other. They’re playing a guessing game. Who is the couple? Who is the friend or sibling? It’s an invitation to the audience to come up with their own theories about these questions, which are the mystery of the film. And then we go back to 20 years earlier where Nora and Hae Sung are children in Korea.

Like Nora, you emigrated from South Korea to Canada to New York. You are also married to a white American man. To what extent is the movie autobiographical?

I did once find myself sitting in a bar between my husband and my childhood sweetheart. I was translating between them, and I could see other people in the bar looking at us, trying to figure us out. I thought, Okay, what if I tell a story that does nothing but try to answer that question? The story is adapted from events of my life, but also feelings I have experienced. It’s a personal story, but not a transcription of anything that happened to me.

Nora feels pulled between the life she is living in New York and the life she left in Seoul. Is that something you relate to?

Of course. I made a very big leap in my life, immigrating from South Korea to Toronto to New York. But I also wanted the story to be something universal. People who have left Houston to work in Manhattan will say things like, “Back in my Houston days…” Or if a lawyer becomes a chef, they might say, “Back in my lawyer days…” Even leaving a relationship is a kind of immigration, where you’re leaving a part of yourself to start anew. Nora’s story is the version that I know—physically and culturally and language-wise—but the idea is that we can all connect to this idea of past life.

You also have a past life as a successful playwright. What about Past Lives felt more like a movie?

What drove the decision was the story. The movie spans decades and continents, and it also involves aging. I wanted to do something that was a little more literal, which you can do in film more so than on the stage. And then there were the locations that were part of the characters and the storytelling. I wanted to make sure that the audience really felt these places—Seoul and New York—and understood how they are different.

What did you love about making a movie that is different from directing a play?

I loved it all! The part of me that loves being in control was really tickled by the process of making a movie, and then I just loved being on set and being part of the filmmaking machine. And I loved editing, which is a chance to rewrite the movie in these very small ways. After we shot everything, I was able to put this puzzle together from the images and the dialogue and the audio. I think I became a better writer by making a movie.

This is very much a story about cultural identity. Certain characteristics and customs are described as “so Korean.” How has the reception you’ve received from Korean audiences been different from other audience reactions?

The Korean-speaking audience connected with certain details in the film that are hidden just for them: there are times when I didn’t translate everything the characters were saying or texting. A friend of mine saw the movie and asked, “Are you okay that these really specific things are going to be missed by people who don’t understand Korean culture?” And I thought it was amazing that there are little secrets in the movie that are about cultural specificity. And it’s not just for Korean audiences. There is a scene where Nora is in rehearsal and the play is one that I wrote, so that was a little secret for my theatre friends.

Were there any Canadian easter eggs that I missed?

My costume designer is a Canadian who lives in New York and L.A., so we spent a lot of time talking about the kind of clothing we were wearing when we moved from Canada in the 1990s. Not just Canada, but the suburbs. You see Nora at grad school wearing a Niagara Falls T-shirt, and she wears a necklace with a little bird that we thought felt so Canadian, whatever that means. And of course there is the scene with Pearson International.

That felt so familiar, seeing the airport as it was in the ’80s.

It’s not actually Pearson. It’s in Queens.

I really thought I recognized it!

That means my art team did a great job.

The movie talks about the Korean concept “in-yun.” Can you explain what that is and why you included it?

In-yun is an Eastern philosophical concept: it exists in Korea, but also China, India, Japan. It’s about that ineffable connection that ties us to another person over a series of lives: family members, strangers, the person you end up marrying. I thought it was a good way to describe the relationship between Nora and Hae Sung. They spent time together when they were children, so you can’t call them exes. They’re not partners or lovers. They’re friends, but it’s more than that—it’s in-yun, this connection that endures through time and space.

At one point Nora is flirting with her future husband and she says that in-yun is “just something Koreans say to seduce someone.” Would your own husband recognize that scene from real life?

Ha! No, I haven’t used it like that, but it felt like something Nora would say in that moment.

Do you consider Past Lives to be a love-triangle movie?

I guess it is in structure, but it also subverts the idea. It’s less about the choice between two guys and more the choices she makes for herself and her life.

The movie premiered at Sundance, where it earned stellar reviews. Rolling Stone called it the first great movie of the year. How did the reception compare with your expectations going in?

My expectation was not to have any expectations. I felt like it could go either way. When the film was so well-received, I was so happy. I felt like it wasn’t just me who thinks this is a story worth telling. I wanted to make a movie about ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing, which is loving and caring for each other, and the fact that audiences connected to that is so great.

I’ve heard Oscar buzz. Does the prospect of walking the red carpet during awards season appeal to you?

I think what appeals to me more than anything is getting to make another movie.

The post How Celine Song’s <i>Past Lives</i> became the surprise indie hit of the year appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I realized I had multiple roles: a child, a caretaker, a friend, and, in some ways, a therapist. I didn’t realize how much responsibility I had placed on my shoulders.” (Photography by Jackie Dives)

I was born in Taipei in 1986. Although I was an only child, I never felt alone: at school, I was surrounded by friends and, on the weekends, I spent time with first cousins from my mom’s side who were my age. My parents didn’t plan on immigrating until they visited my uncle and his family who moved to Vancouver in 1994. They were drawn to the greenery in Vancouver—urban construction was booming in Taipei at the time, and my parents wanted me to be closer to nature. 

In 1995, when I was nine years old, we packed up our lives in Taiwan and moved into my uncle’s Vancouver home. My dad, who worked as an art teacher and filmmaker in Taiwan, opened a printing shop in Canada. My mom stayed at home with me and occasionally helped out at the shop. 

My dad learned the little English he knew from listening to Beatles songs and watching Hollywood movies. Neither my mom nor I knew any English. When I started Grade 3 near the end of the school year, I didn’t have any friends because I couldn’t talk to the other students. I was put in an ESL class, and occasionally spoke to the one or two students who could also speak Mandarin. I spent lunch and recess alone, reading Mandarin novels in the bathroom. I once got in trouble from my teacher, who said I couldn’t bring Chinese books to school because I had to learn English instead. I never told my parents about this. 

As I started learning English, I would help my parents translate a word or two. In 1996, a year and half into school, I was fluent enough to translate entire conversations. When I was 12 years old, I graduated out of ESL. I was proud to be able to read, write, and speak fluent English. At that point, it was easier to make friends. I understood jokes, made pop culture references, and carried conversations about things like TV and music. 

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In 1999, when I was 13, my dad’s printing business wasn’t doing well so he decided to go back to Taiwan to look for more job opportunities. With just my mom and me at home, I became her main translator. I dealt with bank statements and insurance papers, paid for hydro bills, helped her take phone calls and translated for her during doctor visits. I initially felt a lot of pride being able to contribute to the family. It gave me a great sense of responsibility. My mom enrolled in ESL classes, but she found it difficult to learn English and form new connections as an adult. She became isolated—I was one of the only friends she had. After a few months, my dad returned to Canada to take care of us and he found work at a non-profit. 

I was grateful that my dad chose a permanent job in Canada rather than a potentially better paying job in Taiwan, all so he could support me and my mom. Although my dad was sufficiently fluent in English, he still leaned on me to pitch in and help with the family. I didn’t know the term at the time, but I was a language broker, a bridge between my parents and a new culture, an invisible responsibility I carried all my life. I learned later that I’m not alone: it’s an experience shared among children of immigrants who’ve not only had to translate for their parents, but also navigate new cultures themselves. 

Although my dad’s English was better than my mom’s, there was still a cultural barrier. You can’t just Google Translate Mandarin to English—there are cultural nuances that make it difficult to switch directly back and forth between the two. I became more involved with his work, translating phone calls and business emails. Taking phone calls was the most daunting—it was scary to talk to a complete stranger who was also an authority figure. My heart would pound whenever I heard the phone ring; I would write down notes and prompts to prepare myself. Once, my mom was having difficulty speaking to a service provider, so she handed me the phone to translate. They were asking me questions I didn’t understand while at the same time I was translating and asking questions that my mom was feeding me. I was worried about mistranslating and I could tell the person on the other end was annoyed they were speaking to a child. It was incredibly frustrating, even though I tried my hardest to sound mature and professional during these conversations. 

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By the time I was 16, my parents relied on me to translate for them every day. It was partly out of convenience, but also because they were more confident in my linguistic abilities than their own. If they needed me to translate or proofread an email correspondence or bank document, I would have to drop whatever I was doing and prioritize it. Helping them renew their driver’s licences and passports, buy car insurance, and translate visa terms became regular responsibilities. As a teenager, sometimes I resented them for not being more self-sufficient like my friends’ families. I wanted to be a normal kid who didn’t have to worry about the well-being of their parents. But in Taiwan, older generations believe that children should place family needs above their own—and that was what I felt my parents expected of me.

In 2004, I began studying general science at the University of British Columbia. I was still living at home and juggling a part-time job, extracurriculars and volunteer work. I often got home late, and that’s when my parents would ask me to help them translate: some of their requests were timely, such as reviewing tax forms. As they got older, I attended more doctor visits with them and helped them navigate new technology, like Netflix and iPhones. Despite my frustrations, I understood the stigma around people who cannot speak English well. There was an instance when my mother and I went to an insurance company’s office, when the front-desk person got frustrated with my mom because she was struggling to put her thoughts into words. It wasn’t until I stepped in to translate for her that the staff relaxed.

I graduated university in 2010, and got married in 2015. I had my first child three years later, and becoming a new parent revived old childhood memories and unresolved feelings. I came to terms with the huge responsibility I had taken on at a young age. I realized I had multiple roles: a child, a caretaker, a friend, and, in some ways, a therapist. I didn’t realize how much responsibility I had placed on my shoulders. My mother began spending more time with me to help with childcare, and I began opening up to her about my frustrations. Over time, she began to understand how much I had taken on, and I heard from her how hard it was to assimilate into a new culture as an adult. I’ve developed more empathy towards my parents, and that’s helped us become closer. 

I now have two beautiful children, and want my childhood to influence how I raise them. If I hadn’t translated for my parents, they wouldn’t have involved me in their business and family decisions. Unlike the traditional parent-child model, where children follow what their parents do, I was directly involved in the family unit. I want to be intentional about how I raise my children and involve them in family affairs. Helping my parents gave me a sense of pride, and I want my kids to feel the same way. Learning from my experience, I hope to communicate with my children so they can feel like a valued member of the family, but also have the space to pursue their interests.

—As told to Prarthana Pathak 

The post As a kid, I was the main translator for my immigrant parents. It wasn’t easy.  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I’m damn good at my job and I want audiences to watch me do it in 100 different ways.” (Photography by Wade Hudson, makeup by Julia Vuong, hair by Priya Kumari Bilkhu.)

If you believe the early hype, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan rolled off her parents’ couch in Mississauga, Ontario, and into a star-making lead role in Netflix’s hit high school rom-dram Never Have I Ever. It was 2019, and a friend sent the tweet announcing Mindy Kaling’s casting call. Ramakrishnan, then 17 and tired from a long day at real-life Meadowvale Secondary School, went, so it goes: Eh, why not?

In truth, Ramakrishnan, now 21, has always had big plans. Okay, maybe “preferred manifestations.” She hadn’t banked on besting 15,000 other young girls to play the now-iconic teenage try-hard Devi Vishwakumar. Acting wasn’t her first dream; she wanted to be an animator. Later, she was cast as Priya Mangal, an (animated) South Asian tween, in Pixar’s Turning Red. Things have a funny way of working out—just rarely in the way she imagines.

The final season of Never Have I Ever, set in Devi’s senior year, streams this month. Another freshly adult actor who’s had less success with serendipity might dread an open schedule, but Ramakrishnan is mostly relaxed. What’s the next big thing for the erstwhile “next big thing”? A university degree? A stint as a Disney princess? She’ll figure it out—or the universe will.

Devi’s finally graduating. In a way, you’re graduating, too. Congrats! Where’s your head at as the series winds down? Reflective? Sad? On to the next?

A mix—sad, excited for the unknown. It ended when it needed to. I hate when shows drag out. That’s a pet peeve of mine.

The good thing about the high school conceit is that it can really only last four years—unless you “fail.” 

Right? In real life, I started high school in 2015. Then the show went from 2019 to 2023. I’ve been in high school for eight years. I failed every year, basically. Oh my god.

Was it surreal to attend fake high school right after attending one for real?

It was. In season one, I was so excited to see what a real set was like because I’d never worked on one. I looked at everything like, “This isn’t a real door! It’s all fake!” But, very quickly, it became my stomping ground, that little hallway that we re-dressed in a million different ways. You’d never know!

Speaking of transformations, you had one of the more dramatic pandemic glow-ups. Never Have I Ever debuted a month after we went into lockdown, and you came out of it an it girl. So, you know, how was that?

I don’t know about an it girl. I definitely came out wiser than I went in. For most of lockdown, I was filming. During months off, I played video games with my family and finally learned how to do transitions on TikTok. I had that phase of “Maybe I can start working out!” then slowly realizing, “No, I can’t start working out.”

So you were living with your parents?

I mean, I still live with my parents.

I’m well aware that Mississauga and Hollywood are two very different worlds…

What?! The Meadowvale Town Centre isn’t the Walk of Fame?

…but what do you do when you’re home?

I still do press, take meetings and audition. (After the pandemic, everything is self-tapes.) I also do fun, spontaneous things like visit Toronto Comicon and fan expos. I dragged my best friend to paint pottery the other day. I picked a plate—easy, because it’s flat—and painted “I feel lucky” with charms around it. I think it’s gonna look good, but it might look like garbage, to be honest.

Your parents immigrated here from Sri Lanka before you were born. What do they think of all the Hollywood fuss? How do you even begin to broach something like that?

They’re supportive and protective in all the right ways. They understand the Hannah Montana switch I do because they’re right beside me. They also keep me humble. I’m very much like, “I can walk into Square One, no problem!” And they’re like, “Just stay low-key. Don’t be an idiot.” It’s a really hard thing to wrap your head around, living a regular suburban life and having people say, “You’re famous!” I’m kind of a turd, actually.

I apologize for using the term it girl earlier. I know it’s a bit gross to admit you love fame, but are there any parts that make you go, “Man, this is amazing”?

Being an it girl adds a shit-ton of pressure, mainly the pressure to stay one. To me, being an it girl is people getting hyped about the things you’ve been the whole time—they’re just noticing them in that specific moment. Every time a season of Never Have I Ever comes out, we’re “what’s hot on Netflix.” Then it fades. But we’re all so much more than being hot on the internet.

Okay, but I’m sure the thirst traps you post are better with a glam squad and some art direction behind you, right?

Thirst traps are fun, I can’t even lie. For red-carpet events, I have a photographer—with lighting. I never thought I’d be this person. I was lounging in the fetal position 10 minutes later, but a shot my cousin took of me on vacation is actually one of my most-liked photos. I hope people know how much went into that perfect pose. My toes aren’t even in it! I’m not gonna let the internet see those for free.

On the topic of image versus reality: when you play such an iconic character right out of the gate, you run the risk of fusing with them in people’s minds. What do you want everyone to know about you in your own right? Go ahead—set the record straight.

At one point, I hated Devi for that very reason: people just think I am her. I’m Devi in the same way everyone is. I make mistakes and feel a lot of emotions. I know I’m my own person. I want to play many different personalities in many genres, especially so I can prove—as a young brown woman—that I’m not just saying lines. I’m damn good at my job and I want audiences to watch me do it in 100 different ways.

So versatility is the name of the game for you?

One hundred per cent. Season one was definitely heavier on people thinking I was just Devi because, in all fairness, there wasn’t much out there about me at the time. I was like a one-year-old in my career. A famous baby. I’m still just a four-year-old, so please be nice! Unfortunately, audiences are never going to know who I really am. In fact, I realized no one in my life will know me the way I know me—except for maybe my dog. He sees me in my room, whether I’m having a dance party or a mental breakdown.

Maybe I can tell you what I think I know about you. There seems to be a perception that you’re pretty blunt. Even in My Little Pony: Make Your Mark—which is just voicework—you play the tough, no-nonsense pony.

I do.

People can also learn a lot about you from your Twitter, namely that your mom wanted to burn your old shoes, that you get motion sickness in cars and that, in addition to your spontaneous pottery, you once got a spontaneous tattoo. Are you not a planner by nature?

Whenever I do plan, I realize it’s kind of a waste of time. I love going on adventures with my friends. In the middle of the night, I’ll say, “Hey guys, let’s drive two hours away from here and see what’s happening. Let’s do it for the vibes!” I will say: I am driven, too. I’m a big dreamer.

Being plucked out of 15,000 young women at an open casting call, as you were, might make someone believe in destiny. Do you? Or is this all just a random free-for-all?

I’m a spiritual person. I believe in things like manifesting—you know, speaking things into the universe. I’m that girl who wishes on 11:11 every morning. I say all of my goals as quickly as possible in that minute. I’m sure it does nothing at all, but it is mentally nice to be positive. Like, take Ke Huy Quan, this year’s Best Supporting Actor winner: he talks a lot about never letting go of your dreams. I agree with him.

Do you ever think you’re always manifesting things, but maybe not in the exact way you thought? Example: You wanted to be an animator when you were a kid. Then you were cast in Pixar’s Turning Red.

Yes. I can think of so many things like that. I watched The Office in high school and always said, “One day, I’m going to meet the cast members!” I haven’t met Steve Carell yet, but I’ve slowly started checking off some others: the Mindy Kaling, of course. Angela Kinsey played Ben’s mom in season one of Never Have I Ever. That was a freak-out moment for me.

Were there any notable non-Office manifestations?

In real high school, I came up with something called “Maitreyimas,” which is on December 28—my birthday. I would joke to my friends that one day it was going to be an international holiday. Now my fans tweet “Merry Maitreyimas” to each other from all around the world. Isn’t that cool?

Very. Can you speak something into existence for me? 

What do you want? Some career stuff? Some good ol’ happiness stuff?

Well, my childhood dream was to be the Canadian Oprah—which is a lot like what I’m doing today, actually.

Okay, so it’s going fine already. Anyway: Katie’s going to receive something super amazing and fulfilling. She has no idea what it is, but it’s going to happen.

I appreciate you using your powers for good.

My mom always says it’s important to put good energy out there.

I’m now going to kill the vibe a little and ask about your anxieties.

I love anxiety. Woo!

Never Have I Ever was watched in 40 million households in its first month. Do you ever wonder whether lightning will strike twice?

Oh, yeah. After season one came out, I was like: Wait, what if this is it for me? But then, I have other thoughts I hold on to. I don’t think a girl who is a flash in the pan makes the Time 100 Next list. I’m not even trying to toot my own horn, but: the cover. If that’s the case, people would want to see my face on screen, right? I also think about how much Mindy believes in me. I try to give myself flowers instead of waiting for others to give them to me.

There’s a certain line of conversation that tends to crop up around young, successful women of colour: She’s the one representative for everyone, so she has to be perfect! It’s nonsense, of course, but was that initial spotlight in any way empowering for you? Or was it just limiting?

In the beginning, I knew it was special to represent so many people. But it did turn into: Why am I being asked this question when white people don’t get asked this? Seventeen-year-old me was tweaking out about the fact that she had to stand for so many South Asian people. Too much pressure. And not all brown girls see themselves in Devi! Maybe they’re not fans of the show or my acting or my face—no hard feelings! Anyway, those representation questions don’t really bother me anymore. Someone has to answer them if we all want to move forward. That’s a privilege that I take very, very seriously.

When all is said and done, what’s your dream role? I heard it’s Rapunzel.

I’ve been on that agenda since, like, 2020. I have a sticky note on my vision board that just says: Rapunzel. I listen to the Tangled soundtrack once a week, so that, in the event that someone eventually asks me to sing the songs, I can be like, “Yeah, I got you.” I told my team and my agents to let everyone know.

Well, now we know it’s going to happen because you’ve said it.

I feel like this one’s gonna need me to say it a good couple hundred times. Honestly, there are so many books that I want to adapt for the screen. I even want to be on Hot Ones, that YouTube show where you eat spicy chicken. That’s a goal, and I’m gonna put it out there. That’s courage.

Years ago, you deferred acceptance to York University’s theatre program to shoot your show. Then you changed your degree program to human rights and equity studies. You just finished your first full year. Isn’t that funny—you’re back in school again.

I try to fit in as many courses as I can when work isn’t crazy. People ask me when I’m going to graduate and I don’t know. I have no plans to die soon. By the time I was 10, I knew exactly which high school courses I was going to take to get my college animation portfolio done. Now? Yeah, we don’t do that.

The post <i>Never Have I Ever</i> star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan doesn’t know what’s next. She likes it that way. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“In 2017, she went viral as the first Canadian woman ever to dunk during gameplay at an Amateur Athletic Union tournament.” (Photograph by Brinson and Banks; Hair and Makeup by Kimberly Acevedo)

When Laeticia Amihere was a kid, complete strangers would stop her on the street to ask if she played basketball. The reason was obvious: she hit a healthy five-foot-seven before she hit Grade 6. In reality, Amihere preferred soccer and track, and when her older brothers shot hoops, she was relegated to water girl. Yet by 11, she was donning a Mississauga Monarchs jersey in her local house league. “I think I started playing just so I wouldn’t have to have those conversations with strangers anymore,” she says.

Amihere’s skill was evident immediately. She was quite capable of charging the net, and her height made her a natural defender, meaning she could easily guard all five positions. Within four years, Amihere was playing provincial-level ball and, in 2017, she went viral as the first Canadian woman ever to dunk during gameplay at an Amateur Athletic Union tournament. When Canada’s national team came calling, she was only 15.

Nearing graduation, Amihere had racked up 54 offers from colleges and universities across North America. She ultimately chose to attend the University of South Carolina for the chance to play for Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley—a five-time WNBA all-star. At USC, Amihere had some big wins: she and four of her teammates were known as “The Freshies,” an uber-talented five-pack who, together, only lost nine games in four years. Staley has said Amihere is the most determined player she’s ever coached, a quality that helped Amihere persevere when the losses inevitably set in: two ACL tears almost benched her for good, and her oldest brother, Kofi, died suddenly last August.

Grieving her basketball-loving brother only further pushed Amihere to become one of the game’s most powerful players. This spring, she was selected eighth overall by the Atlanta Dream in the WNBA draft, kissing a photo of Kofi before she took the stage. Off court, Amihere, now 21, is working to ensure that the next generation of towering tweens won’t need the input of total strangers to realize their potential. (If you’re curious, Amihere’s current height is six-foot-three, three inches above the WNBA’s average.) Last year, she founded Back to the Motherland, a not-for-profit that brings basketball to underserved communities in West Africa, where Amihere’s parents are from. She also signed her first big sponsorship with Under Armour in May. There’s buzz surrounding the possible creation of Canada’s first WNBA team in Toronto. If the time comes for her to play on home soil again, she certainly won’t be on water duty.

***

P O P  Q U I Z  W I T H  L A E T I C I A

Favourite sports flick: The Game Plan. “I was totally obsessed with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson when I was growing up.”

First concert: Maverick City Music, an American worship band

Most overused word: “I think it would probably be censored”

Can’t-lose object: Her phone—and the 10,000 photos it stores

Career goal: “I’m pursuing a master’s in sports management. Coaching is a possibility.”

The post Mississauga’s Laeticia Amihere is the next WNBA star  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Photographer Darren Calabrese grew up in a New Brunswick farming village. His new book documents his return to the East Coast (Photography by Darren Calabrese)

Ever since Darren Calabrese was a child, his mother told him that one day he’d have to leave Douglas Harbour, the New Brunswick farming hamlet he was born in, and search for success elsewhere. She knew the area’s opportunities were limited—both for his future career and for other life experiences. She was right. He went to Halifax for university, where he met his future wife, Tammy, also from the Maritimes. Eventually the couple settled in Toronto, where Calabrese developed a career as a documentarian and photojournalist, and Tammy as a nurse. For 11 years, Calabrese freelanced for publications including the Globe and Mail, Monocle and CNN, travelling to places like Tanzania and Japan on assignment.

Then in June of 2014, he received terrible news. His mother had died in a freak accident: an oak tree branch snapped and fell on her while she was enjoying a glass of wine on the family property. By midnight, Calabrese was back home. He eventually realized he’d have to stay to help his father, who was suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after the accident. Calabrese and Tammy had always talked about moving back, and by the end of 2015, they’d made the move permanent. Settling in Halifax, he and his family made regular trips to the homestead in New Brunswick and soon welcomed their second daughter.

READ: A new Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit looks at the beauty and culture of the African diaspora

People talk about the fog of grief, but during that time, the familiarity of the East Coast came into sharper relief for Calabrese. He felt an intense connection to the land: his family has lived on those 400 acres since the 18th century, and now he could watch his daughters play on the same stretch of untouched waterfront he and his father and his grandmother did. “Photos of us all look exactly the same,” he says. “I don’t take that for granted—not for a second.”

By 2016, Calabrese was working on a book of essays and photos—pictures shot on assignment, personal images, old family snapshots. It was about his family and the region, and how he grapples with his place in both. Then, in September of 2020, his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Calabrese spent deer season rewriting the book, stripping away the padding he’d unconsciously put in to protect his father. “He’d be okay with everything in it, but I didn’t want to cause him any more pain,” says Calabrese. “He’d be thrilled that our family and our home are in a book. That there would be a lasting legacy.”

MORE: A cave-diving photographer on ‘swimming though the veins of the Earth‘

That book, out now, is called Leaving Good Things Behind, and the ideas of loss, tradition and, yes, legacy run through it like a river. Since moving to Nova Scotia, Calabrese has been documenting the relationships between East Coast communities and their landscapes, capturing polar bear hunts in northern Labrador and oyster farms in Cape Breton. “There is a tension,” he writes, “between the perseverance of tradition and the inevitability of change.” Here, Calabrese talks about a few images from his book that capture the ever-evolving relationship between the land in Atlantic Canada and the people who call it home.

“I photographed this image for a story about concussions in football and the safety of the game in New Brunswick. It’s nice from an aesthetic point of view, with the team lined up for the national anthem and all the orange helmets and uniforms. But what makes this a picture to me is the kid in the centre looking up at the sky. He brings a quiet, mournful quality to the image. I don’t know what was going on in his head. The team they were about to face was known for playing a particularly physical game, so maybe he just recognized what he was in for.”

“Anyone who’s grown up in rural Canada knows how important pageants are to the community. Generations of women—grandmothers, mothers, daughters—participate in them. This is the Oqnali’kiaq Princess Pageant in Eskasoni First Nation, a Mi’kmaq community on Cape Breton Island. The portrait of Alizabeth Jeddore opens the ‘Island’ chapter of the book. Here, she’s seen taking a break from practising the ‘Strong Woman Song,’ which she performed in honour of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by mummering. It’s a tradition that goes back centuries—you disguise yourself with whatever you have on hand, as Sarah Ferguson and her dog have done here, and visit your neighbours unannounced around Christmas. It’s pure East Coast absurdity. There’s no logical reason for traditions like this to exist, but they do. There’s a perseverance to them, because they’re meaningful to the communities that practise them. The best ones are special and unique. They don’t have to be spectacular.”

“This is the base of the tree that killed my mom. We cleared a lot of the surrounding trees immediately after the accident to be safe, but we kept the stump—it’s part of the landscape and our history, whether it’s there or not. So we decided to decorate it and give it a new context. My daughters, Harriet and June, painted rocks with my cousin Caryn. This is perseverance. This is what families do when you lose someone. You wear it, and you make it part of your life. You could try to avoid it, but in the end, it’s always there.”

“I didn’t have the patience for hunting as a kid. Then, one day, I was on the 401 outside Toronto when I realized that if I could sit in traffic, I could sit in the woods. In 2015, six seasons in, I shot my first deer. My father and I brought it to Willie Mckellar’s butcher shop in Minto, New Brunswick, which is a village near where I grew up. I didn’t have my camera on me, but when I saw these moose antlers drying on a roof—an absolutely normal thing to see during moose and deer season in rural Canada—I raced home to get it. This day was the first time my dad and I were really loose and comfortable with each other at home. We were drinking beer and laughing, and things were great.”

“A blue whale washed up on a beach south of Halifax in 2021, and after much discussion, we took our daughters to pay our respects. It was beautiful—people were placing flowers on its tail. There was such reverence for this 30-metre-long whale. It’s impossible to grasp the magnitude of its size until it’s right in front of you. I wish I didn’t see it this way, but there’s a lot to be excavated from these emotional experiences. We talked about it with our kids the whole way home—why it died, what’s going to happen next. And my eldest spent the next week reading about blue whales.”

“Joe Googoo is a Cape Breton oyster agriculturalist from Waycobah First Nation with nearly five decades of experience. Since a deadly disease called MSX killed the Bras d’Or Lake oyster industry in 2002, he’s been working with researchers to combine traditional knowledge and modern science to bring commercial oyster farming back to Cape Breton. He puts his literal blood and sweat into his harvest—that’s how much it means to him.”

“Nunatsiavut, the Inuit territory that stretches along the coast of northern Labrador, has an annual polar bear hunt. It’s tradition. It’s how they’ve lived for thousands of years. From a practical standpoint, it’s also meat, which gets divvied up to community freezers all along the coast. After the group got this bear, there was such a buzz: excitement, pride, gratitude. When the snowmobiles brought the bear back to town, it was like a funeral procession—there was a total understanding that this animal gave itself up for them.”

The post Polar bear hunts, pageants and other images from a new photo book about Atlantic Canada appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“Parents tell me that after watching my videos, they feel reassured about sending their kids to study in Canada.” (Illustration by Victor Kerlow)

In 2015, I lived in New Delhi, running a product development company with two friends. But soon we realized we had different goals, and we parted ways. I didn’t know what to do next, so I talked to my uncle, who had moved to Brampton, Ontario, to chase better job opportunities. “Give Canada a try,” he said.

After a couple of years, I finally saved up enough money to pay for my first year of tuition at Confederation College in Thunder Bay, where I would study engineering technology. Although my parents weren’t thrilled about me moving 3,000 kilometres away, when I left for Canada in August of 2018, there weren’t any tears at the airport when I walked through the gate.

I had arranged to rent a room in Thunder Bay through Facebook Marketplace, but after the landlord met me, he said there were no rooms available. I was shocked and scared, and I eventually convinced him to let me sleep on the living room floor for four days until I could secure new accommodations. From then on, I had trouble finding housing. Many landlords said they weren’t comfortable with immigrants living at their home. I persisted and eventually found a house to rent with two other international students from India; our total rent was $1,300.

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To pay for the rest of my degree, I juggled three jobs at a grocery store, a gas station and a convenience store. In 2019, I reunited with my girlfriend, Jasmine, who came to Canada to study at a university in St. Catharines. Around the same time, I started applying for jobs so I could start working as soon as I finished my degree. After a year and almost 100 rejections, I finally landed a product development position in London, Ontario.

I used to watch videos about immigration on social media, and one day, I emailed a YouTuber to ask him a question. After we talked, he invited me to go on his channel and explain how I came to Canada as a student and landed a job in my field. The video got over 40,000 views, and I received a deluge of requests on LinkedIn and Facebook from people living in India who wanted to know more about my college studies and the job application process.

I used to host workshops with students back in India, so I knew how to communicate with people and what questions they might have. Jasmine encouraged me to start my own YouTube channel, @GursahibSinghCanada, which I launched in July of 2021. I took a free, online video-editing course, and my initial goal was to post 50 times on my channel by the end of the year. My first video only got 72 views in a week, but I kept creating content, sharing information I wish I’d had before, like how to find a part-time job and secure housing.

MORE: I saw the devastation of climate change in Pakistan. Something needed to be done here too.

In October of 2021, I posted a video about the three intake periods in Canada for international students—January, May and September. Few other YouTubers had offered advice on this topic, and the video went viral with over 600,000 views. In the coming months, subscribers also asked about other matters, including pathways to permanent residency and Canadian food prices. Sometimes international students recognized me at the mall; they told me that my videos saved them from falling for scams or abusing their credit. One follower even said I felt like their big brother, advising them on a big life change.

Over the past four years, my life has changed too. Jasmine and I got married in July—my uncle performed the cultural rituals. My parents secured visitor visas and will visit Ontario later this year; I hope they will move here permanently. Jasmine and I are also saving up for a house, and we plan to have kids soon. In the meantime, my channel keeps growing. I now have over 260,000 subscribers, mostly based in India. Parents tell me that after watching my videos, they feel reassured about sending their kids to study in Canada. It’s fulfilling work. With my channel, I can use my experiences to help other immigrants plan for their new lives.

The post I struggled as an international student. My YouTube channel helps others avoid the same fate appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Stephanie Foden)

I’m a commercial photographer based in Disraeli, a small town in Quebec. In 2020, I drove my Ford F150 pick-up from Quebec to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to shoot some resorts for a client—a 5,000-kilometre, seven-day drive. My wife and three kids flew down to meet me there for vacation. When COVID struck and international air travel shut down, we piled everyone into the truck and made the return drive all the way from Mexico back to rural Quebec. It wasn’t the most relaxing road trip. Worried about border closures, we rushed home, only stopping to sleep at night. But once we were back, I started kicking around a new idea: could I recreate that three-country, transcontinental road trip in an electric vehicle? 

I’ve wanted to get an electric vehicle ever since Tesla introduced its first model back in 2008. But I held off: few electric models had enough space for a family of five and two car seats in the back. I made the jump in April of 2022, purchasing a roomy, five-seater Hyundai Ioniq 5 Long Range for $52,000. It has a 77-kilowatt battery and can travel up to 488 kilometres on a single charge. 

In those first few months, I drove my EV almost 20,000 kilometres in Quebec in those first few months. I knew it could make a longer trek—it drove as smoothly as my pick-up truck and I could sleep comfortably across its backseat in a sleeping bag. With an adapter, I could use electricity from the vehicle to charge my computer and edit videos during long road trips. 

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And so I decided to drive alone from Quebec to Puerto Vallarta in the fall, camping out at national parks in Utah and Arizona along the way to film VR footage for my business. My wife and kids would fly to and from Puerto Vallarta, while I would take a straight shot back to Quebec. 

Driving an EV on such a long trip required a lot of planning. It takes nine hours to charge the car from 10 to 85 per cent on a Level 2 charger, which you can find at public charging stations, shopping centres, hotels, airports and restaurants. But with a Level 3 charger—available at some highway rest stops, public parking lots, city centres and commercial areas—I could charge it the same amount in just 25 minutes. I just needed to plan my trip to hit Level 3 charging stations, which I found using a route-planning app called ABRP that showed me all of the charging stations along my route. I realized I could drive up to 1,100 kilometres a day, gassing up around mid-day when I stopped to stretch my legs or get food. There would be one near-dead-zone on the 400-kilometre stretch between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, but I was able to find a Level 2 charging station about 40 kilometres off the main route. It would be an inefficient detour, but I had no other choice. 

I kicked off my trip in early October of 2022, with an eight-hour drive from Disraeli to the outskirts of Hamilton, Ontario. At night, I camped along the 401. On these kinds of long road trips, I do a type of camping called “boondocking,” which involves parking the car in an open space and either setting up a tent or sleeping inside the car. I brought a V2L—or “vehicle to load”—adapter that let me use the car battery’s electricity to power my computer and electric stove. If it got too cold at night, I put the car in utility mode and raised the temperature up to 20 degrees—a nice perk of driving a non-ICE. It only uses about 10 per cent of the car battery without turning on the engine. 

Over the course of the trip, I set a goal to drive roughly 900 kilometres a day. I usually left around 7:30 a.m. and drove until about 4:30 p.m. I stopped roughly every 320 kilometres to walk around, grab some food or use the restroom, and I had to charge the EV up to two to three times a day. An average charge cost me between $15 to $20 at Circuit Electrique ports in Quebec and Petro Canada stations in Ontario. In the U.S., charging cost between US$25 to $35 to get to full battery, usually at Electrify America and Charge Point charging stations. I often stopped at Walmart, most of which have super-fast 350 kilowatt chargers that can juice the vehicle up from 15 to 85 per cent in just 20 minutes. They were never hard to find. 

READ: As a woman, I had no opportunities in Japan. My world opened up when I got to Canada.

I spent the five days driving through Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska before arriving at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. I visited other national parks—Bryce Canyon, Zion, the Grand Canyon—over the next few weeks, stopping to sleep in full-service campgrounds with electric charging ports. I filmed VR content during the day and edited at a picnic table at my campsite in the evening, drawing power from an extension cord connected to my vehicle. I was able to plug my equipment in at night to get a bit of energy for the next day. On October 31, after 27 days on the trip, I set out for Puerto Vallarta.

I drove from the Grand Canyon to Nogales, a city near the Mexico-U.S. border. After crossing into Mexico, I drove south to Hermosillo, then Los Mochis, then Mazatlán. Driving an EV in Mexico is harder—charging stations are far and few in between, so I could only travel up to 450 kilometres a day. I found an app called Plugshare, which showed me charging ports at car dealerships and hotels like the Fiesta Inn and City Express where I stayed. It’s too dangerous to boondock in Mexico because of high crime rates, so I slept in hotels. 

On November 3, after 31 days on the road, I finally met my family in Puerto Vallarta. We rented a condo for a couple of months, where I plugged my car into a 110-volt wall outlet. It was more than enough for enjoying the city. The following January, my family flew home and I started the drive back north. I drove from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara, then Guadalajara to San Potosi, all in two days. That’s when I ran into a bit of trouble.

During the 460-kilometre leg from San Luis Potosi to Monterrey, I had mapped out two spots to charge along the route. Both were close to El Leon, a small town about an hour’s drive outside of San Luis Potosi. The first was a Tesla Level 2 charger, which didn’t work with my adapter. I drove a little further to a nearby car dealership. But it was a Sunday, and the dealership was closed. That’s the danger of driving an EV: finding yourself in a remote location, with no charging stations in sight. 

I still had 250 kilometres to get to Monterrey, with only 260 kilometres of range left on the battery and no L2 or L3 charging points in-between. In a worst-case scenario, I knew I could find a home and hook up to their 110 kW charger—a common outlet found in homes. It would take up to four days to fully charge my car using one of those, but just a few hours of charging could get me out of a jam. 

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I had no choice but to try and make it. If I drove too aggressively, or faced a steep incline on the way, I ran the risk of draining my battery in the middle of nowhere. So, I got creative: I knew I could save on fuel if I drove behind a big truck. It’s a trick used by bikers in the Tour de France: following another biker reduces headwind and limits the energy needed to move forward.  I drove my EV right behind a semi-trailer, trying to do the same thing. It worked: I made it to Monterrey with about seven per cent of my battery left. After another charge, I drove to Dallas, then Springfield, Illinois, before crossing the border into London, Ontario, staying in hotels along the way because it was too cold to boondock in January. My charging stops were more frequent this time around because of the cold: in warm weather, I was using 16 kilowatts per hour, but when I approached Detroit, in January, I was averaging around 22 kilowatts per hour. I finally made it home on January 19, completing my 15,700-kilometre trip. 

There’s a lot of misinformation around EVs. People think they take a lot of time to recharge, but you can get a full charge in 20 to 25 minutes with a Level 3 charger. And taking an EV on a road trip makes financial sense too. When I drove my pick-up to and from Mexico in 2020, I spent roughly $2,000 on gas. Charging up my EV cost $630 both ways. That’s big-time savings. Driving an EV also limits your ecological footprint, which feels good. 

Drivers might have a bit of anxiety about getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, but the cost and environmental benefits of driving an EV outweigh the risks. I’m already looking forward to my next trip.

—As told to Mathew Silver 

The post I took my EV out on a 15,000-kilometre transcontinental road trip.  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018 (All images courtesy of Sunday School)

At 24 years old, Josef Adamu was an aspiring model struggling to gain traction in his career. Then he had an idea: if he wanted to find a path forward in his industry, he should carve one out for himself. Adamu initially wanted to start a modelling agency, but found the concept too restrictive. Instead, while working out of his mother’s basement in Toronto, he conceived of Sunday School, a creative brand agency that would work with companies on visually striking projects. His agency’s services include corporate campaign art direction, social media marketing, photography and videography, with a strong focus on stories and subjects from the African diaspora.

At first, Adamu wanted to control every shoot and project himself. “I didn’t leave much creative breathing room for people working with me,” he says. As the agency’s only permanent member, he primarily worked with freelancers, whom he hired on a project-by-project basis. Over the years, as he built up an international network of photographers, cinematographers, stylists and makeup artists, he learned to embrace bona fide creative collaboration. 

“The people behind the scenes are part of my culture,” he says. “Because the work is coming from our community, it’s easy to be intentional with every detail.” Soon, major brands noticed something special about Sunday School: the agency has worked on campaigns for Nike, Converse, Topshop and Sony, and celebrities like Lupita Nyong’o have recognized its work.

Sunday School’s first major Toronto exhibition, Feels Like Home, debuts at the Art Gallery of Ontario in May. The exhibit, which will run for a year and showcases the collaborative efforts of at least 40 people, features work from three projects. 

The Hair Appointment looks at the practice and ritual of natural hair braiding, exploring salons as community spaces. Ten Toes Down depicts a Black ballerina who has finally found pointe shoes and tights that match her skin tone—a meditation on identity, representation and belonging. And Jump Ball, a five-part series, is about the intersection of basketball and the African diaspora. “These three pillars are ways for us to tell stories around what it means to feel at home, far beyond a place where you rest your head,” says Adamu. It’s also a literal homecoming for Adamu, born and raised in Toronto, who has been working in New York for the past few years. 

The exhibition reveals the fruits of Adamu’s transformation as a creative director: after relinquishing some of his control, he’s become more open to spontaneity and improvisation during photo shoots. In an image from Jump Ball, which shows two Ghanaian youths wearing traditional garments on a basketball court, the use of colour is striking. Between their clothing, the basketballs and the hoop, it’s a veritable spectrum of orange—a happy accident, it turns out, and the type of creative coincidence that Sunday School has come to embrace. “I dropped my ego,” Adamu says, “and there’s real power in that.”

“Ten Toes Down,” by Kreshonna Keane, 2021

For much of her dance career, this young ballerina from Philadelphia had to use tights and pointe shoes that were too light for her skin tone. She would “pancake” the garments, applying makeup to them to match her complexion. For this photo shoot, Sunday School partnered with Freed of London, a British company that was one of the first to offer shade-inclusive ballet wear. The project’s name has a double meaning, referencing both the position of the dancer’s feet and a message to focus on what you love to do.

“Jump Ball: Toronto,” by O’shane Howard, 2019

Jump Ball is a five-part series about the cultural intersection between basketball and African tradition. Photographed on a basketball court in St. James Town, Toronto, this image is from the series’ first iteration. It depicts two Ghanaian youths wearing traditional garments that they would normally wear to a family function or special occasion. Adamu met the pair through friends, and he is interested in the way members of the African diaspora shed or don traditional attire—and in turn, parts of their identity—to adjust to their environment.

“Jump Ball: Mighty Migration,” by Joshua Kissi, 2020

The Gabriel family, photographed in their Manchester, New Hampshire, living room, escaped the civil war in South Sudan for the United States in the ’90s. Several children in the family are basketball stars, including Wenyen (not pictured), who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers; Piath, the young woman holding a basketball, is the next prospect to go pro. The house is filled with basketball jerseys and trophies, and the living room is the site of a family tradition: gathering in front of the TV on NBA draft night and waiting for a family member’s name to be called.

“Jump Ball: Mighty Migration,” by Joshua Kissi, 2020

This young man is a close friend of the Gabriel family, who are the main focus of the series. This shot was taken on a New Hampshire basketball court during a casual weekend game. Adamu chose this subject in part for his large hands—posed on the ground with his hands over the ball, looking dead centre into the camera, he suggests the strength and empowerment imparted by the game. On his left wrist, he wears a bracelet depicting the South Sudanese flag.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018 

An intimate image of an auntie and her niece during their Sunday night hair-braiding routine. They are real relatives, and Adamu met the woman through a casting call for an early project. She connected Adamu to her aunt’s hair salon, which became the inspiration for The Hair Appointment series. The child mimics her aunt’s movements on the doll’s hair, depicting how this knowledge is passed from generation to generation. Adamu intentionally centred his subjects between two picture frames on either side of the mounted mirror, and kept the colours muted to pull focus towards them.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

In this image, choreographed by Sunday School, a little girl leans on her sister, both sporting perfectly coiffed braids and posed in front of their Brooklyn apartment building. The girls are sisters (though these aren’t their real school uniforms), and the image is all about their kinship. The older child keeps her fist loosely clenched and her expression stoic, as though she’s protecting her sleepy little sibling. One child wears high white socks, while the other is bare-legged—an intentional detail meant to highlight their contrasting personalities.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

This installment in Sunday School’s series features natural hair braiding, which takes place in salons and living rooms—spaces that have long been community hubs within the African diaspora. The image, taken in Alima’s Hair Braiding Salon in Brooklyn, recreates the moment before a client leaves the appointment, in which a stylist will often document their work with a final shot against the salon wall.

Feels Like Home is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario until May 2024. 

The post A new Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit looks at the beauty and culture of the African diaspora appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photos courtesy of Heather Dapaah)

Any Canadian cinephile worth their salt has seen the original Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror film about unhinged twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons. A new Amazon Prime adaptation gender-swaps the premise: Rachel Weisz stars as Beverly and Elliot Mantel, identical OBGYNs who dream of upending the patriarchal women’s reproductive health-care system (when they’re not switching identities to pick up lovers). The plot follows the opening of the Mantel-Parking Birthing Centre, run by the twins and financed by a morally bankrupt opioid heiress. Then everything goes off the rails when Beverly gets pregnant and Elliot gets jealous. Canadian actress Britne Oldford plays Genevieve Cotard, who begins a romantic relationship with Beverly and winds up in a sister-sister love triangle. “When I got the first two scripts, I just devoured them,” she says. We talked to Oldford about what it was like to remake a classic piece of CanCon and to act alongside Weisz, who was at the “tippity-top” of her dream co-star bucket list.

The new Dead Ringers has aspects of horror, but it’s also a love story and mystery. Is there a genre description that best fits?

I would describe it as a provocative psychosexual thriller. Everything is very intense, but when you get past all of the chaos, the show is about love and the birthing process, which is where we all come from. And then you have these brilliant characters: twin gynecologists and obstetricians who are trying to change how the health-care system functions for women. But they are also obsessed with each other, so their personal lives are quite wrought with chaos.

Are you a fan of the genre?

I can do gore, but I wouldn’t say it’s my go-to. I’m a fantasy nut. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings movies. I love sci-fi. I love grounded drama, and I watch a lot of foreign films. I actually made a conscious decision to re-sensitize myself to all of the violence that is on screen in entertainment and on the news. There has been so much of that over the past couple of years, and I’m someone who believes that everything you consume has an impact on mind, body and soul.

Your character, Genevieve, meets Beverly as a patient, then gets wooed by Elliot (who is pretending to be Beverly), then starts a relationship with Beverly and drives Elliot to actual insanity. Talk about a twisted love triangle—

Right. And you have this conflict because both Genevieve and Elliot love Beverly, and they both think that they have her best interests in mind. It’s funny because on one hand, my character is grounded in this loving, adult relationship with Beverly. I haven’t had a chance to play a lot of mature characters, so that was fun. But on the other hand, Genevieve has put herself in the middle of so much chaos, she can’t be entirely psychologically healthy. That’s something I’ve been reflecting on as I watch the show and think about how audiences are seeing my character. Maybe they think Genevieve is the bad guy?

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Had you ever met Rachel Weisz before you booked this role?

I’d never met her, but I was a fan of her work and have tracked her career. She was on the tippity-top of the short list of actors I’d like to work with. It’s hard to name a favourite performance. I really loved her in The Brothers Bloom with Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. I guess it’s one that a lot of people aren’t familiar with because I was talking with Rachel during a press trip to London, and she was like, “You’ve seen that?”

A real Rachel Weisz deep cut.

Yeah, exactly. The character she plays is just so quirky and wholesome and weird and beautiful. I guess all of her characters are beautiful, but this was such a great performance. I highly recommend it.

Did you audition with Weisz?

I sent in a self-made audition tape. I was in Toronto at the time, wrapping up a stint on the Netflix show The Umbrella Academy. This was early May of 2021, and they sent me the plot breakdown along with the first two scripts. I made a tape in the living room slash kitchen of my sublet. Time passed, and by July, I assumed that it wasn’t happening. I was back in New York, and then they asked if I would do a Zoom call with Rachel, Sean Durkin, who is the executive producer and director, and Alice Birch, the showrunner. We didn’t read the scenes; we just talked. It was a chance for them to get to know me and see if they would want to work with me—sort of an energy check. I remember they asked me, “What does love mean to you?” I got pretty emotional and used my hands, which I tend to do when I get passionate. My voice was doing the very Canadian, East Coast melodic thing, and Rachel said, “I could listen to you talk forever.” As soon as we got off the call, I ran to my spouse and shrieked.

Your character, Genevieve, is also an actor. Did that help you relate to her?

There are scenes where she has to sit through a junket. Or she comes in and Beverly’s family is watching her show, and she feels embarrassed. I know what that’s like. I would say that I put a lot of myself into the character. I’m a very romantic person and deeply protective of the people I love—I suppose, fiercely protective—but there are these moments of deep tenderness. You see the same contrasting traits in Genevieve: the tenderness in her relationship with Beverly and then on the flip side, when she is putting her foot down with Elliot. It’s nothing over the top—just a flicker that says, “I’m not going to put up with this.”

Part of Genevieve’s story includes her role in a slasher show. Is that an homage to David Cronenberg, a.k.a. “The Baron of Blood”?

Yes, and it’s actually an Easter egg for fans of the original movie. Genevieve plays a character named Claire in a show called Rabbit, which is the name of one of Cronenberg’s early films. Claire was also the name of my character in the original Dead Ringers movie, played by Geneviève Bujold. So there is a lot of hat-tipping going on.

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What was it like to film scenes with both twin characters from a technical perspective?

We have Katie Hawthorne, who was Rachel’s scene partner and body double. So any time both twins were in a scene, you had two physical bodies in the room playing both characters while multiple cameras were rolling.

That sounds complicated. Did you ever confuse one twin for the other?

The dynamics that Genevieve has with Beverly versus Elliot were so different. The hard part was remembering where the camera was and where you needed to be for the shot to work.

Rachel Weisz saw the original Dead Ringers in theatres in 1988. You were negative four years old, so I’m guessing your story is different.

I was one of those kids who wanted to watch the things I wasn’t allowed. I was always trying to figure out the code for the parental lock. The first time I saw Dead Ringers, I was too young to appreciate most of it. I rewatched it a couple of years ago, after I knew about the project but before I had booked the role, and I was pretty blown away by the body horror of it all.

Dead Ringers doesn’t shy away from violence, especially when showing the bloody realities of women’s reproductive health.

I think the difference is that what we see in the show is natural and part of the process of existence. Yes, it can be violent at times, but it doesn’t feel gratuitous. I think it’s really important for people to see these depictions of birth and what happens to bodies. It’s definitely not something the popular media tends to portray.

The post Dead Ringers’ Britne Oldford is stuck in a twisty twin love triangle appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I rarely saw strong-willed women like myself with thriving careers in Japan, but it seemed possible in Canada” (photography by Brent Gooden)

When I was a kid in Japan in the early ’90s, my kindergarten teacher asked my class what we wanted to be when we grew up. I told her I wanted to be a bride. I don’t remember what the other girls said, but I can guarantee that none of the five-year-old boys pronounced their dreams of becoming a groom.

I grew up with my parents and two brothers in a suburb about an hour outside of Tokyo. My mom was warm and loving and worked part-time jobs while we were young so she could take care of us. My father, an engineer, was strict with us and rarely home: he left for work around 6 a.m. and came home after 10 p.m. My mom would often ask me to help her with the cooking and cleaning, but my brothers weren’t expected to lift a finger. They did chores when I asked them to, but I never understood why I had to ask in the first place.

When I was in Grade 4, my parents wanted to enrol my older brother in a prestigious private school, which offered a better education than the public schools we attended. My brother didn’t want to switch schools, so I volunteered instead, which surprised my parents. I now wonder if they ever would’ve offered me the same opportunity if I didn’t ask for it. Private school gave me new opportunities: at 15, I stayed with a host family in Canada for two weeks, immersing myself in a new language and culture. I discovered a society where it was acceptable to be yourself and voice your opinions, and I became obsessed with learning English so I could return.

In Japan, there’s a strong emphasis on maintaining “social harmony”: you’re expected to be agreeable and never express a differing opinion. Women and girls especially are expected to be quiet and submissive. I never fit that mould. In school, I was a “class leader”—it was my job to enforce the rules if a teacher had to step out. I stood out and spoke up, which made me a target for bullies. I wondered if things would’ve been different if I was a boy. Another time, in Grade 5, I called out my teacher in front of the whole class for handing out scissors blade-first. I didn’t understand that as a Japanese girl, I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. I’ll always remember the shocked, horrified look on his face when I corrected him.

RELATED: When I moved to Canada from Syria, I could finally be myself

By my early 20s, I was eager to see what opportunities a new country could offer. In 2008, I was studying English communications at a Japanese university when I decided to participate in an eight-month exchange program in Canada. I had wanted to return since high school, and this was the perfect opportunity.

Back in Japan, classroom discussions were rare, even in university-level courses. Teachers lectured theories and facts at us that we were told to memorize, not discuss or question. We could either be right or wrong—there was no in between. In my classes here, I was shocked to learn that professors encouraged discussion and debate, even among female students. My opinions were valued and people treated me as an equal. In my business strategy class, I wrote a report on a magazine marketing technique popular in Japan but uncommon in Canada. My professor was impressed by the idea and encouraged the Canadian students to learn from international students in class.

I rarely saw strong-willed women like myself with thriving careers in Japan, where women occupy less than 15 per cent of senior management roles; our current government only has two female ministers. Living here, I saw female politicians and women in management positions wherever I turned. I saw working moms and older women with thriving careers. Women were free to voice their opinions in university classes and their ideas were heard and valued.

In 2009, I returned to Japan for a year to finish my final semester of university. I was on the train one day when I saw a man groping a woman’s breasts while she was asleep. This often happens on crowded trains, but women don’t speak up out of fear and the pressure to stay silent. I wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words in Japanese. Instead, I took a picture on my phone, leaving the shutter on loud so the man would know he was being watched. When the woman woke up, I showed the photos to her and told her what had happened. She was upset, but decided not to press charges. I realized then how hard it was to speak up for yourself as a woman in Japanese society. If I stayed, I knew I would be forever confined to these gender norms.

MORE: My family and I fled gang violence in Mexico and made a home in Canada

After I graduated, I wanted to build a career and a family, and I felt I couldn’t have both in Japan. People work until 10 or 11 p.m.—an impossible schedule for working mothers. My father regularly worked these demanding hours, and little has changed since his day. Many of my female childhood friends stopped working as soon as they had children. They didn’t have a choice: if you take sick days or leave work early to pick up your child, you’re passed up for promotions and considered unambitious. Childcare and household responsibilities are still seen as women’s tasks, so mothers can’t work jobs that require long hours—basically any full-time permanent job—and instead opt for part-time or contract work.

In 2010, I returned to Canada to complete a second bachelor’s degree in business administration at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. An international student adviser helped me find my footing: I’d ask for help when I didn’t understand what courses I needed to take or when I needed help finding a doctor. He helped me connect with other international students and I quickly found a community of friends. I decided to become an international student adviser myself so I could help other students in the same way he helped me. I received a postgraduate work permit in 2013, and officially became a Canadian permanent resident in 2016. I now manage a team of student advisers at Algoma University’s Brampton campus.

Yuka with her husband and two kids

In 2018, I married Vinay, an international student from India who I met in university. We had our daughter in 2019 and our son in 2021. Being a working mom is hard, but I have much more flexibility than I would have had in Japan. I often finish work at 4:30 p.m., and can always leave earlier or come in later if my kids are sick or I need to pick them up from daycare. My husband and I are home for dinner and to put the kids to bed. I can be a mother while still enjoying a meaningful career that I’m proud of.

In March, I was a panellist for an International Women’s Day event at work when an audience member asked how our cultures celebrated women. I didn’t have an answer. Japan is progressive in so many ways, but we’re behind when it comes to gender equality, diversity and embracing who you truly are. I take pride in my culture and heritage, but I never once felt celebrated as a  woman in Japan.

I hope that as my daughter becomes a woman, she feels empowered and celebrated. I’m raising her to know she can be whatever she sets her mind to—a beautiful bride, if that’s what she chooses, and so much more.

—As told to Mira Miller

The post As a woman, I had no opportunities in Japan. My world opened up when I got to Canada. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I’d love it if these bubbles started popping up across the country, in drag capitals like Toronto and in small towns alike. I’d love it even more if we didn’t need to use them.” (Illustration by Pete Ryan)

Kristyn Wong-Tam is a member of provincial parliament and the critic on 2SLGBTQ+ issues for the Ontario New Democratic Party.

I don’t do heels very well. I never have. I came out when I was a teenager, and my introduction to the world of drag largely happened in nightclubs and at parties in downtown Toronto. There I was, an awkward kid with limited life experience, watching queens like Michelle Ross entertain their admirers at Komrads dance club, strutting like Amazons across a shining floor to the tunes of Donna Summer. One of my most powerful drag memories is of watching RuPaul perform at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. I was in a 10-person lineup for the porta-potty when the early beats of “Supermodel (You Better Work)” came on; everyone deserted the queue to watch Ru own the stage in her wig, American flag–inspired bodysuit and sky-high boots. Back on earth—and in runners—I was giddy.

LGBTQ+ rights have come a long way since then. (RuPaul’s Drag Race just finished its 15th season.) But certain folks want us to go back to the Dark Ages. In recent years, trans and non-binary individuals—who make up a tiny fraction of the population—have found themselves the targets of a ramped-up global disinformation campaign by conservative religious fundamentalists to sway public opinion toward hatred. Not all drag artists are trans, but their joyful, gender-blurring acts have nonetheless become a wedge issue, and the performers themselves have been wrongly vilified as “groomers.”

Canadians sometimes like to think of ourselves as different from our American neighbours, but the anti-trans sentiment flying around state senates has germinated here all on its own. Between 2020 and 2021, Statistics Canada documented a 64 per cent increase in reported hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community—and those are just the ones we know about. Attacks on drag performers and events have also swept the country: a Calgary drag-on-ice event scheduled for February was shut down over safety concerns. Drag storytimes in Peterborough, Ontario, and Coquitlam, B.C., received torrents of online backlash, as did a recent “Winter’s A Drag” event hosted by a distillery in Elora, Ontario.

RELATED: Far-right religious groups protest my drag storytime events. Here’s why I won’t stop.

A performer named Crystal Quartz, who is based in Guelph, Ontario, opened my eyes to how these protests unfold in real life. Not only was she being doxxed—her home address was published online—Crystal had to contact the police in every jurisdiction where she’d booked shows to make sure she’d be protected. Venue owners often had to call in extra security. Last winter, I travelled to Hamilton for one of Crystal’s performances and saw the reason for myself: a dozen angry protesters, clad in balaclavas and army fatigues, yelling and waving upside-down Canada flags a few metres away from young families heading into a restaurant for a fun, glittery lunch. I’ve seen a lot of protests in my life, but that experience was entirely jarring.

In early April, I introduced a private member’s bill, the Keeping 2SLGBTQI+ Communities Safe Act, in the Ontario legislature as a way to protect this community. One clause would set up an advisory committee to establish a long-term strategy to deal with anti-LGBTQ+ hate. Until this bill, there was nothing on the books that covered sporadic, one-off events—like drag brunches and storytimes—which typically move between venues. So the bill’s other, shorter-term clause would allow “community safety zones” to protect drag performances across the province. Ontarians might recognize this term from traffic signage that threatens to double their speeding fines in school zones. But in the past, this provision has also been used to establish safe perimeters around abortion facilities and vaccine clinics, which drew protests during the pandemic. We’d essentially be borrowing this old tool for a new purpose.

In the interest of preventing any more vitriol from reaching patrons, the act (if passed) would give Ontario’s attorney general the power to establish temporary community safety zones 100 metres in front of and around the venue doors. Anyone who commits anti-LGBTQ+ intimidation, harassment or hate speech within that bubble would be subject to a fine of up to $25,000. (The upper limit of that penalty would likely be applied in cases of criminal assault, not the simple honking of horns.)

The attorney general could work with emergency services and local law enforcement—who are used to monitoring potential public disturbances online—to set the address and timelines for the bubbles and announce them via media advisories that cost taxpayers nothing. There would be no burden on business owners to call in extra police services, which pulls resources from nearby cities. When the performance is over, the bubble zone would be lifted. At the very least, the mere existence of these zones could act as a deterrent.

MORE: A rainbow house beaming with Pride in the face of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes

I also want to make one thing clear: this legislation would not stop Canadians from exercising their right to free speech. In the days following the bill’s announcement, my staff told me it was covered by Fox News and Breitbart. (My team acted as a buffer between me and the backlash for a few days.) Online commenters did not seem particularly interested in an important nuance of the bill, which is that it protects citizens’ rights to congregate and to protest. Basically, bring your signs (within reason) and MAGA swag, but if this bill passes, you’re not crossing that invisible line.

Private member’s bills don’t typically pass because many are tabled by opposition or independent MPPs. If the attorney general pushes it through, however, the Keeping 2SLGBTQI+ Communities Safe Act could pass within weeks. If he doesn’t, it could take years. As scary as things are out there, government officials are looking for solutions on how to keep LGBTQ+ people safe. In fact, some cities already have their own community safety zones, just under a different name. I’d love it if these bubbles started popping up across the country, in drag capitals like Toronto and in small towns alike. I’d love it even more if we didn’t need to use them.

Drag means different things to different people. To bachelorette parties, it’s a fun evening-ender. To chain restaurants, it’s a novel way to fill seats outside of peak service times. A lot of drag performers will tell you that they’re just entertainers looking to make a living; others see themselves as cultural storykeepers for the queer community, peppering their routines with political commentary. Some parents aren’t into the idea of drag storytime. They’re welcome to stay home for that hour or two.

The point of these safety zones isn’t to force people to embrace drag. It’s to show that these events, and the people who run them, deserve safety—even if the pastime isn’t for everyone. Take my four-year-old son, for example. Right now, he can’t sit through a full meal, and mascots in Paw Patrol costumes scare him, so drag brunch isn’t his scene. But my wife and I are both queer, and soon we’ll bring him to one, as we’ve done with Pride events since he was born. We want him to know we live in a beautiful, diverse world. I hope one day he leaves a drag event thinking the same thing I did after seeing RuPaul in Washington all those years ago: There are so many of us. They can’t do anything to stop us.

The post The Big Idea: Defend Drag Shows appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Omar Mouallem (Photograph by Aaron Pedersen)

If you didn’t grow up in Alberta, you’ve probably never heard of Burger Baron. It’s a fast-food chain in only the loosest terms, with a menu that varies wildly from location to location. The branding? There is none in the traditional corporate sense, except for the words “Burger Baron” in each restaurant’s name. Some franchisees have pluralized it (Burger Barons), others eponymized it (Kelly’s Burger Baron) and others embellished it (Burger Baron Pizza & Steak). There have been nearly as many logos as locations—some, but not all, are reinterpretations of the original logo, a colourful little knight with crusader crosses in his shield. And the menus can run practically as long as a Chinese restaurant’s. Some of the Barons have actually sold Chinese food, or Greek, or Italian or Indigenous-inspired bannock burgers. The only guarantees are two burger recipes—the flagship Baron and the mushroom burger—their presence assured thanks to their sheer popularity with Albertans. Especially the mushroom, a curiously soupy sandwich that looks, and tastes, like Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom.

Actually, there’s one other guarantee: almost every single franchisee hails from a Lebanese family like mine.

I was made a baron as an infant, when my parents—Ahmed and Tamam Mouallem—moved from Slave Lake, Alberta, to the even smaller town of High Prairie, four hours northwest of Edmonton, to open their franchise. They were shrewd Lebanese, who had left their country, once the Middle East’s capital of commerce, before it was destabilized by ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence. My dad’s uncle, living in Slave Lake, sponsored him to come to Canada in 1971, when Lebanon was teetering on the edge of civil war. By the time my dad returned home to find a bride in his hometown near the Syrian border, “Beirut” had already become synonymous with urban ruin.

The mushroom burger at Burger Baron (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

As immigrants, they knew they were following in a proud tradition of Lebanese immigration to Alberta. Their predecessors—Lebanese peddlers, homesteaders, fur traders—had erected some of Canada’s first minarets and laid the groundwork for folks like my parents. And my parents, in turn, put a lot of work into leveraging and protecting that legacy, taking the model-minority trope straight to heart. They wanted their restaurant to be that restaurant-for-all-occasions that anchors every small town. And they wanted the townsfolk to know that even these brownfolk would sponsor the local hockey team and sign their boys up to play—and replace their son’s name on his jersey with the name of their business. At 12 years old, I was a skating billboard, “Burger Baron” emblazoned in lieu of my name on my extra-large yet too-tight jersey, for all of the five minutes I got on ice per game.

When my dad and I travelled from town to town for hockey games, he insisted we stop in at his counterparts’ businesses to meet franchise owners and reminisce/bitch about the homeland. It struck me as strange that all the Burger Baron owners were Lebs like us. Weirder still were the infinite incarnations of the chain. But despite its crapshoot reputation, my folks were tremendously proud of building a landmark in a community without many.

Omar Mouallem as a baby, wearing a blue sweater.

As I got older, I had mixed feelings about the restaurant, which seemed more like a prison at times. My relationship with it became even more complicated after I convinced my parents to pull me out of hockey—a request that backfired, because I was now expected to put extra time into the family business. I worked in the drive-thru and dish pit alongside my older brother Ali, who was being groomed more rigorously for succession on the grills. It calmed me to know that in Arab culture, the eldest son was the de facto steward of the family legacy. It was never in question who would inherit the throne; at most I’d been tapped as an understudy, in case tragedy should befall the future emir.

But I had more metropolitan ambitions. I wanted to be a filmmaker, which my parents lightly indulged by sending me to summer film camp in Red Deer and letting me work a cushy job at the local video store. I was only called into the restaurant when they were slammed, while Ali was expected to show up every day after school, and on most weekends. Once my brother could competently close the cash registers at night, my parents and I all sighed with relief. I started planning my escape, able finally to pursue my passions in peace.

Burger Baron in Edmonton, Alberta (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

In 2003, I moved from rural Alberta to downtown Vancouver to study film and writing, and later made my way back to my home province, to make a living at it in Edmonton. It was there that I began noticing people lighting up when they learned my family was part of a provincial institution. I was surprised to find a cult following for Burger Baron in the form of tattoos, a scene in the raucous comedy Fubar 2 and even a parody Twitter account: @Burger_Baron, known for trolling corporate fast-food chains. While the competition spends millions mastering reproduction, Burger Baron was the anti-chain, and people loved it. I was becoming prouder of being a baronet—not royalty, but evidence of the better life my parents had built for Ali and me.

I started investigating the chain’s origins 10 years ago as a magazine reporter, hoping to find the founder and thank him for what he gave to us. To my shock, he was not Lebanese. He was an American entrepreneur who moved his family to Calgary in 1957, with a plan to found the McDonald’s of the north. His name? McDonnell, Jack. But McDonnell had moved too aggressively on his expansion plans, and his company quickly burned up its forward momentum, leaving behind a trail of franchise owners orphaned by a bankrupted company. As far as anyone knows, the company’s intellectual property, like the name and logo, was never purchased by creditors or passed down to the next of kin. According to his son Terry McDonnell, Jack, who died in 1983, basically gave them all the recipes and wished them good luck.

Riad “Uncle Rudy” Kemaldean, a.k.a. “the Godfather of the Burger Baron,” at his palatial Edmonton home (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

They started to vanish quickly. By the mid-’60s, only a handful of Burger Barons remained, each independently owned and operated—sometimes even posted for sale in the classifieds. And who would ever want to buy a decentralized fast-food chain, with all the headaches of maintaining a brand and no corporate upside? The answer is Riad Kemaldean, a.k.a. “Uncle Rudy,” a.k.a. “the Godfather.” An astute businessman with a penchant for suits and cigars, Kemaldean bought his first Baron in Edmonton, in 1965. From its success, he sponsored friends and relatives from back home and set them up to manage new locations, which in turn became training grounds for his protégés’ own friends and relatives. The Burger Baron’s second wave spread through chain immigration, accelerating during Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990, and continues at a slower pace today. My dad apprenticed with his uncle, who bought one of the original Burger Barons from another Lebanese man, who had apprenticed with Rudy in the ’70s. Without royalties or start-up fees, the trade secrets proliferated through handshakes and favours, enduring every dining trend of the past five decades.

By the time I’d pieced together the puzzle, I’d grown fonder of Burger Baron and my family’s role in it. Like many second-generation kids, I struggled to see myself in Canadian culture, but being a Baronet makes me feel like I’m part of the fabric of Alberta—and, in a strange way, like I’m connected to the homeland.

***

In 2021, I began work on a documentary film: The Lebanese Burger Mafia. By the time I returned to High Prairie to film it, Ali had been running our parents’ Burger Baron for over a decade, doing things more or less the way our dad did—right down to sponsoring his son’s hockey team. Only he’d been doing it under a new, jazzier name: “The Boondocks Grill.” Another Burger Baron gone.

At its peak in the early ’90s, there were more than 50 completely independent locations, about twice as many as there are today. Burger Baron’s heyday is over, as owners struggle to compete amid the rise of big-box chains and foodie culture. The biggest challenge has been the next of kin, second-generation Lebanese-Canadians like me, who’ve become white-collar workers not in spite of Burger Baron’s success, but because of it.

The Lebanese Burger Mafia’s producer Dylan Rhys Howard, director Omar Mouallem and director of photography Moh Mahfouz (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

And many of those who have remained in the business, like my brother, are eager to distance themselves from its outmoded reputation. I was quick to tease Ali for betraying our family legacy—renaming the place, renovating it to look more like a steakhouse, adding upmarket bison burgers and, interestingly, my mom’s fattouche salad recipe. But my real motivation was to find out whether he felt like his succession was a choice. Did my freedoms as the baby of the family make him resent his inheritance?

“A little bit,” he admitted. “I didn’t understand why you had these options. But with me, I was already groomed for it.” But Ali said those feelings were never stronger than the pride and satisfaction that came from running a small-town diner very well. “I’ve been able to provide for the family in a community that I love, that I grew up in. It’s what I know. I guess it’s what I love.”

Omar Mouallem is the director of The Lebanese Burger Mafia, playing in Toronto at Hot Docs on May 3 and 4, and in Edmonton on May 14. Burgerbaronmovie.com

The post I grew up behind the grills at Burger Baron, Canada’s weirdest fast-food franchise appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photograph by Emma McIntyre, hair and makeup by Christina Spina)

Some might think Andrea Jin’s trademark sweet-then-dark jokes about, say, China’s one-child policy, veer into too-far territory, but 250,000 TikTok followers can’t be wrong. Mulan, her grandparents—all of it is fodder for the Vancouver comedian, who has channelled her dry, yeah-I-said-it sensibility into online acclaim and a ticket to Los Angeles (where she now lives).

Now 27, Jin was just 10 when her family immigrated from China to Vancouver. After school, she received English lessons from Family Guy and Russell Peters’s stand-up—stuff no kid should hear. “My parents didn’t speak English either, so they couldn’t tell,” she says. She got hooked on performing during a five-minute set at a campus comedy event at Western University, where she studied business. Everyone was eating and doing homework, but Jin wasn’t fazed. She quit school, took a job at a Vancouver steakhouse and gigged at small comedy clubs around the city—for free, at first. In 2019, Jin was a finalist in SiriusXM’s Top Comic competition. Then she appeared at Just for Laughs in Montreal. “Things just snowballed.”

Even as her career began to resemble those of her idols, Jin still didn’t see herself in their shoes. “Those male powerhouses were great,” Jin says, “but being an Asian girl, none of them had my perspective.” That is until Grandma’s Girl, a 2020 recording of Jin’s most crowd-pleasing bits, including “Wax Me” and “Asians Are in Movies Now.” Every single track was labelled “explicit” on Apple Music.

When gigs dried up during the pandemic, Jin’s manager, who signed her after a New Faces showcase at Just for Laughs, suggested she post clips of Grandma’s Girl online. Initially, Jin thought it was “cringe.” But her riffs on the pitfalls of social media and gently rejecting her female friends—she’s bisexual—have since earned Jin hundreds of thousands of fans, who flood her DMs with gratitude for making them feel seen. “I do this for selfish reasons—I didn’t know it would affect others positively,” she says, laughing, then uncharacteristically earnest. “It keeps me going.”

Last spring, Grandma’s Girl won a Juno for Comedy Album of the Year, and recently, Jin was hired to write for the Comedy Central series Digman! She’s gone Hollywood insofar as she’s already booked James Corden and has written a sitcom pilot (with plans to pitch), but she’s still shocked when she—“just some Canadian!”—gets recognized on the street. It brings to mind one of Jin’s favourite jokes, her long-time opener, where she asks the audience if it’s okay that she’s an immigrant. They seem to love it.

This article appears in print in the April 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Andrea Jin is a must-watch stand-up comedian (and reluctant TikTok star) appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Dominic Bugatto)

Under what circumstances could you be persuaded to eat human flesh? You may already know the answer. (The only acceptable one, by the way, is: extreme duress.) If you happened to be one of the many millions of viewers masochistic enough to mainline the first season of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s breakout survival sensation, then cannibalistic hypotheticals have, at the very least, crossed your mind. On March 24, the show’s second season continues the wild, subversive horror story of a varsity girls’ soccer team from New Jersey whose fantasies of championship glory meet a violent end when their plane to nationals crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness. (The show, which airs on Crave, was filmed in the gloomy forests of British Columbia.)

In a storyline that expertly mimics the timeless headspace of anyone touched by trauma, Yellowjackets pitches back and forth between the present-day lives of the survivors and the tragic events of 1996, a year once coincidentally dubbed “the year of the teenage girl” by the New York Times. Crucially, the show attempts, in nauseating detail, to make sense of the middle. How, in 19 months, could a group of superficially basic high school students devolve from Chuck Taylor–sporting athletes into dead-eyed, pelt-draped huntresses who cook and ritualistically consume their friend—or, maybe, friends? What makes Yellowjackets so compelling is how it circles a truth that’s simultaneously soothing and hard to digest: the fall into the recesses of our back brains is nowhere near as steep as we’d like to think. Any one of us could conjure our animalistic sides if pushed.

Husband-and-wife show creators Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle were smart to integrate this shadow delicately. In flashes forward, they charm with doe-eyed Melanie Lynskey (as the crafty Shauna Shipman) and disarm with Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis, beloved princesses of darkness who deliver note-perfect performances as the brooding Natalie Scatorccio and wire-haired Misty Quigley, the team’s off-kilter equipment manager. Amid the maggot-foraging and a bacchanalian party that almost leads to human sacrifice, there are periodic moments of naïveté, as if to say, “See? They’re just kids!” There’s a fumbled attempt at virginity loss. There’s a rousing group dance-along to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” which, of course, blares from a Walkman. And even after Misty stoically performs a DIY amputation on their injured assistant coach, she reassures her teammates with her recognizable credentials. “I took the Red Cross babysitter training class—twice!” she says proudly. Then she disinfects the wound with Sea Breeze astringent, a retro teen skin care staple. True predators first make a point of putting you at ease.

Our pop-cultural fascination with murdery wilderness porn satisfies a collective need for disaster rehearsal. It allows us to ruminate on the worst of our impulses, and on our phobias, like plane crashes, rogue wolf attacks and finding oneself in the woods without a tampon. It’s also content that comes complete with a fun—if complicated—thought experiment: how do people behave when civilization is far but death is potentially very near? But more importantly: how would I behave—you know, in theory?

It makes absolute sense that a series like Yellowjackets, which debuted in November of 2021, was met with rabid binge-watchers, adoring critics and an impressive 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In real life, we were all the deepest we’d been into survival mode in quite a long while—two years into a pandemic that disrupted and overhauled our lives. We encountered the usual creep of climate calamity and wealth-hoarding billionaires, but also the very real risk that simply being breathed on by our loved ones could leave us seriously ill. Whether it’s Lost or Lord of the Flies—Yellowjackets’ most frequently cited comparison—art that acknowledges our mortality and wretchedness has often proved to be more entertaining in times of trouble than cheerier forms of escape.

Part of the inspiration for Yellowjackets’ plot isn’t fictional at all, which makes the show’s it-could-happen-to-anyone ethos all the more unsettling. The series draws from the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was hired to transport a team of young-adult rugby players from Montevideo, Uruguay, to a game in Santiago, Chile, in October of 1972. The plane’s right wing clipped a mountain in the Andes, resulting in a disastrous accident that left only 16 of its 45 passengers alive and stranded atop a mountain. Before the surviving players were rescued—and heralded as national heroes—they took turns punching each other’s feet to maintain circulation through the freezing mountain nights. One survivor even rationed a single peanut. After a week of frigid conditions and with their food supply completely depleted, some survivors ate their deceased teammates.

In the days immediately following the crash, the players’ innate coping strategies began to emerge: one temperamental survivor screamed at and stepped on his debilitated compatriots. Another, disabled by two broken legs, pitched in by studying maps to figure out the team’s location. True to form, the captain, Marcelo, delegated busywork—like finding unbloodied, drinkable snow—to keep everyone from focusing on their grim situation.

None of the Yellowjackets’ various wilderness personalities are huge surprises. Their dangerous new conditions only amplify less-than-savoury characteristics that already existed. What those girls get up to deep in the northern backcountry is a natural progression from their promise-filled existences in New Jersey—not an aberration. For those who think the teen-girl factor precludes Yellowjackets from ever achieving Lord of the Flies–levels of feral, I’d say: have you ever met or been a teenage girl? Yes, there are dorktastic singalongs and a certain aura of sweetness, but also weird rituals, ceremonial garb (friendship bracelets), tribalism and blood. What elevates the series from pure brutality to brilliance is its focus on creatures, easily mistaken as harmless, who conceal a sharp, ruthless edge. Kind of like their insect mascot. Kind of like actual human beings.

It’s pretty easy to imagine these suburban gals as your high school friends. Back in ’90s Jersey, our anti-heroines weren’t waging battles against the elements but each other, for social supremacy. The series’ first main-character kill-off involves being ostracized to death. The relationship between resident besties Shauna and Jackie, the team’s pretty, selfish captain, looks close at first but is riddled with jealousy and backstabbing. When things get properly violent, as in the case of single-minded Taissa Turner, it involves purposely splitting the shin of a weaker teammate to preserve her chance at championship gold—even if Taissa would never admit it. (She later runs for state senate.) Other players arrive in the forest knowing their way around a gun, or medicated for delusions. The show’s writers seem to suggest that even if we’re bummed out and bogged down by our id-based qualities, they might just come in handy later on. That’s the genius—of these so-called flaws and of the show itself.

Modern-day psychologists examine the nuances of survival behaviours, now viewing them less as unsightly brain grooves to be smoothed over and more as deeply intelligent mechanisms in the right circumstances. They may not be particularly virtuous, but they keep us alive. Yet when we see the day-to-day existences of the adult Yellowjackets—many of whom make it out of the Canadian brush without a discernible moral compass—we can understand how these same impulses can keep us from really living outside of life-or-death scenarios. The adult Yellowjackets cope in ways that are more relatable than cannibalism: Natalie struggles to stay clean after multiple trips to rehab, while Shauna finds outlets in adultery and some darkly funny jokes. (When she eventually kills her paramour, partially out of self-protection, she compares remembering how to dismember a body to “riding a really gross, fucked-up bike.”) As a teen, Taissa’s ruthlessness makes her most likely to succeed: she dreams of being first-string on Howard University’s soccer team, dating beautiful women and landing a legal internship in New York. “You did do all those things,” Shauna says, once they’re both adults. But Taissa, who has dissociative episodes and a young son in therapy, replies: “But if I’m being honest, not a single one of those things felt real.”

Heading into season two, old wounds don’t appear to be healing; somehow, things are getting much scarier. In fact, one teammate seems to be leading a cult. The show’s earliest cult, though, forms around the Yellowjackets themselves. At one point in the present-day timeline, the characters chafe their way through their 25-year high school reunion as they’re greeted with a winners’ welcome and a corny slideshow of memories set to Enya’s “Only Time.” It’s not always satisfying to celebrate survival tactics as evidence of the triumphant human spirit. Sometimes, what you need is to bond over shared scars and secrets with friends who have witnessed the full extent of your human shittiness. It’s nice to hear, “Wow, that was the worst.” Or, “We are kind of the worst.” Reflection over perfection. Television often does that very well.

Most of us will not find ourselves stranded on a mountain or in a forest. (Some of us may find ourselves in the domesticated wild a couple of hours north of a major city, but likely in the context of a cottage weekend.) Our most formidable personal disasters will probably be some form of heartbreak, financial ruin or remotely educating small children during a plague. To cope, we will do what we can, if not everything we want. We will not eat people; we will pay for Crave and find another form of catharsis. And we will try, as Natalie says during her last group-therapy session at rehab, to find a way to keep the tiger in the cage.

The post Yellowjackets is about cannibalism. It’s also about how we face trauma. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Madison Tevlin stars in the new film ‘Champions’ (Photo courtesy Tevlin)

You may remember Madison Tevlin as the 13-year-old from Toronto who went viral with her heartfelt rendition of John Legend’s “All of Me” back in 2015. Since then, Tevlin has landed a series of entertainment gigs (including her own talk show on CBC) and become a public advocate for people with Down syndrome. And this month, she stars in her first feature film, Champions, a feel-good sports comedy about a team of athletes with intellectual disabilities, and their coach, played by Woody Harrelson. “It’s been crazy and overwhelming,” Tevlin says. Here, the aspiring actress shares her dream co-star and the teacher who changed the trajectory of her career. 

Champions is officially in theatres. What have the last couple of weeks been like? 

They’ve been crazy and overwhelming. Since the movie came out, it’s just been boom, boom, boom: parties, press, red carpet, cameras flashing. The premiere was at a theatre in Lincoln Square in New York City. It was a really good time, and a lot of us hadn’t seen each other since filming the movie in 2021. The after-party was under a tent at a lounge in Columbus Circle. I drank Shirley Temples all night, and the dance floor was non-stop. We danced to “Tubthumping,” which is one of the big songs in the movie, and I requested “Shout” from the movie Animal House, which is one of my all-time favourites. 

Who were you wearing?

My mom was my stylist for the night. I love colour, but she loves all black. We decided on a black blazer but then added glittery sequin detail on the sleeves. Then my mom had the idea to do a big spray-paint-style basketball on the back because Champions is a basketball movie.

RELATED: ‘Women Talking’ star Shayla Brown wants a more inclusive Hollywood

What does your mom think of all of your success?

She is a proud mama—I really love her. She was very supportive when the chance to be in a movie came around. 

How did that happen? Did you audition?

They actually reached out to me through Instagram and asked me to send a tape. At the time, I didn’t think I wanted to do it. I just wanted to be a normal kid and hang out with my friends at school. My mom thought it was a good opportunity, and then one of my teachers was very supportive and confident that I could do it. I’m glad I listened. After doing this movie, I know what I want to do as a career. 

Are you a read-the-reviews kind of person? I ask because critics are raving about your performance as Cosentino.

I don’t really read reviews, but a lot of people have been telling me about them. I played the only girl player on the team, who’s brought in as a secret weapon, and the role felt like it was made for me. She’s a badass chick who puts everybody in their place. She’s also the only female member of the team, so it was fun to be surrounded by all the boys. My favourite scene was where I gave Johnny, another player, a pep talk in the locker room. I get to swear in that scene, which I loved.  

READ: “I was living this double life: law student by day and Survivor contestant by night”

Your co-star is Woody Harrelson. Were you intimidated to work opposite such a big star? 

He was the best to work with. I know Woody’s a big deal with Cheers and everything, but I just treat him like an actor and a normal person. He was really great about giving me pointers on how to become a better actor, and I loved that many of my character’s best lines were delivered at him. My favourite line from the movie was when I said, “You’re no McConaughey,” when asking about his character’s dating life. We still laugh about it when we see each other.

This is not your first brush with celebrity. What can you tell me about becoming a global viral sensation at 13? 

It wasn’t something I was expecting. I’d been working with a vocal coach because I love to sing, and I wanted to get better. I made that video for my family and friends, but also for myself. I wanted to show that just because I have Down syndrome, that doesn’t mean I can’t belt out an amazing song. I posted it around World Down Syndrome Day, and I guess people started sharing it on YouTube. From there, I was asked to be on some Canadian shows like Breakfast Television, and then I was on Good Morning America and a billboard in Times Square. That year, I was also chosen as an ambassador to the Special Olympics, which were in L.A. And then more recently, I got a chance to host my own TV show on CBC—an interview series called Who Do You Think I Am? I interviewed interesting people who are used to being unfairly judged like Annemieke Struyke, who is a female firefighter with alopecia, and Juice Boxx, who is a drag queen. These are people who are used to pushing past stereotypes, which I can relate to. 

MORE: How this choreographer created the creepy monster movement in The Last of Us

Is there a particular stereotype you find most frustrating? 

Sometimes people talk down to me like I’m a little kid because they think I’m not going to understand them. That drives me crazy! They look at me and think they have me all figured out. But just like everyone else, I have lots of different sides. I always say my disability is the least interesting thing about me—I have a lot going on. I love meeting new people and asking questions to get to know them for who they are. I love having big conversations and going to parties. I’m usually the last one to leave. 

#Champions star Madison Tevlin shares her favorite moment from working on the new Focus Features film pic.twitter.com/F2Jcw8BEWh

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 28, 2023

You are also a bit of a TikTok celebrity with over 160,000 followers. What do you like about the platform?  

I’ve always loved TikTok for all the fashion content and dance videos. When I decided to join, I thought it could be a good place to share my message, by sharing my life and answering any questions people might have. For example, I posted a TikTok video about dating because people always ask me if people with Down syndrome can date. Of course they can! I already have my wedding planned. I love that I get messages all the time from people who say I inspire them to embrace their differences. It feels really good to know that there are people who look up to me, and then I also hear from the moms of people with intellectual disabilities, which means a lot. ​

What’s next for you career-wise?

I’ve shot a couple of projects since Champions. The Adventures of Tikki the Wonder Dog, which is an animated movie about diversity and acceptance, and Screams From the Tower, a comedy set in the ’90s that we shot in Chicago. Now I’m back in L.A. and living it up. I moved here after I graduated from high school at Loretto College. Home will always be Toronto, but I think L.A. is the best place for me to work and represent the Down syndrome community. 

After Woody Harrelson, who’s next on your celebrity wish list? 

There are so many. At the top of the list are Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. I met Drew when I went on The Drew Barrymore Show with some of my Champions castmates. It was so cool. She was really nice, and I was totally starstruck. 

The post Canadian YouTuber Madison Tevlin is starring opposite Woody Harrelson. Here’s how it happened appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“This job didn’t involve dancing—I had to develop a language of movement for these fungus-infected characters who are a huge part of the show.” (Photos courtesy Becker)

If you’ve been tuning into The Last of Us over the past two months, you can thank Paul Becker for your nightmares. In HBO’s hit series, a mass fungal infection turns humans into a breed of lethal braindead mushroom monsters, triggering a full-scale societal collapse. Becker, a 43-year-old choreographer from Vancouver, was hired to ensure the movements of the infected population were as authentic as they were creepy. His process started with several months of homework: researching the connection between movement and neurological disease and mining the archives of National Geographic. He came up with an erratic, twitchy style of motion that evolves over different stages of infection but should, under no circumstances, be described as zombie-like. We talked to Becker about how he created the now-iconic Clicker choreography.

According to your IMDB page, you’ve spent the last two decades doing choreography on some pretty big movies. How did you get into this line of work? 

I started my career as a dancer. I was breakdancing at 13 and later I got into other styles. Even then, I knew I wanted to not just dance, but create. In 2002 I got a job as a backup dancer in the movie Chicago. Rob Marshall, the director, started as a choreographer, and I was inspired by his ability to tell stories through movement. I was a sponge on that set. My big break was a few years later, when I was dancing in a commercial with Kate Beckinsale. It was for a Japanese soap called Lux, and we were shooting in Vancouver. Kate was very upset because the choreographer didn’t show up, and I said I could help. That credit helped get my foot in the door, and in 2004, I booked my first movie, doing choreography for Ice Cube’s Are We There Yet? I’ve been working steadily ever since.

READ: How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland

How did you end up working on The Last of Us?   

I got a call from Rose Lam, the executive producer. I’d worked with her on A Series of Unfortunate Events with Neil Patrick Harris. She said, “I have a job proposal for you, but it’s pretty unorthodox.” This job didn’t involve dancing—I had to develop a language of movement for these fungus-infected characters who are a huge part of the show. After that conversation, I had a call with Neil Druckmann, who developed the original video game, and Craig Mazin, who created the TV series. They were really committed to getting the details right. I remember they said that with the infected, every movement has to have a reason, which is absolutely my language as a choreographer. I was really excited.

Was monster movement in your wheelhouse before this latest gig, or did you have to watch a bunch of old zombie movies? 

This wasn’t my first time working on creature movement. I did Cabin in the Woods, a horror movie where the main characters are attacked by various monsters and zombies. I also did a couple of Wes Craven projects and some of the werewolf movement in the Twilight movies. In a lot of horror, there is a fine line between fear and laughter. For The Last of Us, we really wanted to avoid anything that came across as cartoony or schticky. We actually weren’t allowed to say the word “zombie” on set. That was a rule created by Neil and Craig. Zombies are dead, whereas the infected are still living, but braindead.

How does that play into the way they move?  

It depends on their level of infection, which is something we took straight from the video game. There is a big difference between a Runner, who has just recently been infected and is more human-like, and a Clicker, who’s at a late stage of infection, where their whole body and face is covered in mushroom spores. Overall, the movement is twitchy and unpredictable. They can be eerily calm in one moment and then darting at super speed. There’s a marionette-like quality. You see that with the arm movement too, where it’s almost like the arms are being yanked by a cord.

Behind the scenes of the Infected rampage

The Making of The Last of Us, a 30 minute special, now streaming on HBO Max#TheLastofUs #TheLastofUsHBO #TheLastofUsEp9 #TLOU #HBO pic.twitter.com/bLgCojpwmm

— Atom (@theatomreview) March 13, 2023

What were some of your key inspirations? 

Neil and Craig explained how all the movements stemmed from a neurological glitch caused by the cordyceps mushroom infection. My task was to figure out how bodies would react, so I hired a team, and we spent about five months doing research. Early on, we found a National Geographic video of ants infected by parasitic fungus spores, which was a key inspiration. Another touchstone was Butoh, which is a Japanese style of dance that’s based on the idea of pushing past socially acceptable movement, so there’s a lot of creepy-looking contortion. And then I researched neurological diseases like Parkinson’s to get a sense of the tremors and spasms that characterize the earliest stages of infection.

We also had to figure out the movement around how the infection spreads, which occurs through these tendrils that come out of the mouth. That movement is almost like a kiss. We had a lot of fun doing these experiments where we would have someone biting into a watermelon to get the mouth positioning exactly right. It seems a little artsy-fartsy, but it was necessary to fully understand every detail—because after I designed the movement, I had to teach it.

A member of the Infected (Photo courtesy HBO)

 There were boot camps to teach extras how to move like the infected. Did you run those? 

I ran many of them, although it wasn’t like one big boot camp—we did different training sessions depending on the episode. Sometimes I was working with a particular actor and their stunt double, other times it was groups to prepare for the scenes with mobs of infected characters. When we were in Calgary, we had a space on one of the soundstages that was like a big gym with mats on the floors, so we could be barefoot and play around. I would get everyone to stand in a circle and close their eyes, and then I would guide them into character, starting with their breathing and then the smaller, twitchy movements. One thing that surprised me was that the trained dancers weren’t any better at it than the actors. They often were worse, I think, because they tend to be so aware of their bodies, and there can be this inability to let go, which was essential to what we were doing.

Did you give yourself a cameo?

No, but my daughter, who is a professional ballet dancer and stunt double, was in a few scenes. There was this one set-up where there was a dogpile with 45 infected characters all in full makeup and prosthetics, and she was one of them. We did a rehearsal for that scene where everyone was lying down and twitching. I’d yell the word “sunlight,” and they would go slack, and then I’d yell “cloud cover,” and it was like human popcorn. It was fun, but in the end, they went with a wider-angle shot, so they did the scene in CGI instead. 

Is there a scene or episode you are particularly proud of? 

The very first time we see the Clickers is in Episode 2, when they attack Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s characters in the museum. That was such an important reveal in terms of the franchise and the fan base, so I felt a lot of pressure to get it right. Clickers are fully transformed, so they can’t see. Instead, they use echolocation. We put a lot of work into the first time audiences saw their scream. The Clicker’s arms launch backwards, and their chests push forward. Dinosaurs were a big inspiration, and particularly one scene in Jurassic Park where the little dinosaur lets out this giant scream. One thing I really liked about this show was the subtlety. There are a few big moments, but a lot of the terror comes from the restraint.

The post How this choreographer created the creepy monster movement in The Last of Us appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Alexander Henderson was part artist, part documentarian. In the late 19th century, he was one of the most prominent photographers in Canada, shooting lively urban scenes and idyllic rural landscapes in a sweeping style reminiscent of the great Romantic painters.

Henderson’s photographs are pure Canadiana: a cluster of ice skaters on Montreal’s harbour, Indigenous people camping on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, railmen working on the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia. His images are as haunting as they are beautiful. The subjects often stare coldly into the camera from far in the distance, seeming more like spectres than human beings.

Henderson chronicled a crucial period in Canadian history. British colonialism was boosting Quebec’s population, driving industry and shaping cultural life, all the while encroaching on Indigenous territory. Immigrants flocked to Montreal, where milling, brewing, textiles and shipbuilding had replaced the fur trade. Railway expansion turned the city into a major trade and travel hub, and cultural institutions like McGill and the Museum of Fine Arts were opening up. Between 1844 and 1911, Montreal’s population swelled from nearly 45,000 to more than 500,000, making it Canada’s biggest metropolis. (Toronto usurped it soon after.) Henderson was prolific during this period.

He was a descendant of Scottish gentry who enjoyed a comfortable upbringing in Edinburgh. His grandfather, Alexander Sr., had been the first chairman of the National Bank of Scotland and the lord provost of Edinburgh. Growing up, Henderson spent a lot of time at Press Castle, a large mansion on the family’s 650-acre property southeast of Edinburgh. He immersed himself in nature, exploring the neighbouring woods, hills and mountains.

Henderson studied accounting for a few years, but an experience in 1851 led him toward a career in the arts. At the age of 19, Henderson took a two-week trip to London for the Great Exhibition, where he encountered the works of famous British artists. The paintings had a huge influence on Henderson, and his future work borrowed heavily from the Romantic style, adopting an emphasis on nature, the inclusion of expressive characters to create mood and the use of light effects to enhance textures and soften edges.

In 1855, Henderson and his new bride, Agnes, immigrated to Canada. Like the throngs of other Brits who migrated across the Atlantic as part of colonial expansion, they imagined a new, exciting life in Quebec, which had a booming port economy, a rich cultural scene, a robust population of British expats and plenty of untrammelled outdoor space for fishing and hunting. They rode a steamboat called the Baltic from Liverpool to New York and train-hopped up to Montreal, where they eventually settled in a wealthy community west of downtown (now known as Golden Square Mile).

The couple started a family (nine children in total, five of whom survived into adulthood) and wasted little time establishing themselves among the local elites, leveraging their wealth and social status. Henderson was treasurer of the Montreal Fish and Game Protection Club, contributed to the Art Association of Montreal and enlisted in the Victoria Rifles. He also became acquainted with the prominent photographer William Notman, McGill College principal John William Dawson and renowned geologist Alfred Selwyn, among other bigwigs.

Henderson worked briefly as a merchant, but owing to his inheritance, he had no need for a traditional career. Instead, beginning around 1857, he pursued his newfound passion for photography, then an emerging technology, which struck a perfect balance between his love of art and the outdoors. By 1866, Henderson published his first book of photographs and opened a studio in Phillips Square, advertising himself as a portrait and landscape photographer.

Henderson saw—and photographed—Canada with the eye of an outsider, drawn to scenes that would have been novel for someone from Scotland. He showed a particular interest in our frigid, snow-packed winters. His landscapes featured urban sights, like steamboats in the harbour; traditional Canadian activities, such as ice skating and tobogganing; and older buildings, which evoked the historic architecture of his native Britain.

Over the years, Henderson travelled across Quebec, camera in tow. In the 1870s, beer tycoon John Thomas Molson took regular trips with his family on his yacht, the Nooya, snaking through the lower St. Lawrence and the Maritimes. Henderson joined him on a couple of voyages, photographing the yacht, cod-fishing stations, seashore landscapes and Molson’s family. He used a field camera, capturing images on glass plates that were later developed in a dark room.

In 1892, when the Canadian Pacific Railway created its own photography department, they brought Henderson on to oversee it, with a starting salary of $167 a month. The work took him out west, where he documented progress on the railway, broadening the scope of his portfolio.

Henderson died in 1913. By then, he’d fallen into obscurity. His obituary made no mention of his work as a photographer. All of his glass negatives, the accumulation of his life’s work, were left in the basement of the family home. And years later, in 1965, his grandson threw them in the garbage, destroying much of Henderson’s legacy.

The story could have ended there. But that year, Stanley G. Triggs, former curator of the photography collection at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, discovered several hundred Henderson prints while looking through the museum archives. The photos were mesmerizing, but Triggs couldn’t find any information about Henderson’s life. Eventually, Triggs collected some 2,000 prints from Henderson’s family, which he believes is only a sliver of his total photographic output.

From now until mid-April, more than 250 period prints and reproductions of photographs are on display at the McCord Stewart, as part of the exhibit Alexander Henderson—Art and Nature. Throughout his career, Henderson exhibited his work in Montreal, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York and Philadelphia. But this exhibit, more than a century after his death, is the first major museum retrospective in his adopted home country.

Skating Rink, Montreal Harbour, C. 1870

In the foreground of this landscape, ice skaters glide across the frozen harbour in the winter. In the background, the building on the left is the custom house, where merchants would have their imported goods inspected and approved. And on the right is Notre-Dame Basilica, known at the time as the French Cathedral.

Highwater, Montreal Harbour, c. 1870

This shot depicts steamboats in the Montreal harbour when the St. Lawrence was at its highest levels, with the famous Victoria Bridge in the background. Gathering to watch the ships in the harbour was a popular Sunday activity.

Indigenous Fishing Camp, Restigouche River, C. 1870

This image depicts members of the Mi’kmaq Nation fishing on the Restigouche River, which flows between Quebec and New Brunswick. Back then, wealthy travellers went there to cast their rods. At this point in his career, Henderson had opened his first studio and established himself as a professional. He carried some of his equipment in a fisherman basket for convenience. He would have developed photos like this and sold them to tourists in shops or hotels.

Spring Inundation near Montreal, 1865

Shot during Henderson’s amateur days, this is one of his most iconic photographs, showing a man and two children in a boat just off the south shore of the island of Montreal.

Making a Bark Canoe, Murray Bay, before 1865

Early in his career, Henderson still considered himself an amateur. He spent a lot of time travelling around rural Quebec, documenting the landscape. This photo was taken in Murray Bay, located northeast of Montreal, along the banks of the St. Lawrence. It was a popular spot for tourists from across Quebec and the United States. Members of the Mi’kmaq Nation set up camp in the area and sold their handicrafts, baskets and objects.

Beaver River Valley, near Six Mile Creek, Canadian Pacific Railway, B.C., 1885

In 1885, Henderson travelled out west to British Columbia. His images of the railway were so popular that seven years later he became head of the photography department for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR would have used his images to showcase work on the railway and to sell as souvenirs to tourists.

Montarville Manor House, Saint Bruno Mountain, C. 1870

This photo was taken in Montarville, located east of Montreal. From 1627 to 1854, Quebec operated under France’s seigneurial system, in which the state granted people land in exchange for royalties. The officials who governed the area were known
as seigneurs. And the seigneur of Montarville lived in this house, which dates back to around 1774. The manor was demolished in 1903.

Flood, Saint Paul Street, Montreal, 1864

Montreal flooded several times throughout the 1860s—either due to rising tidewaters breaking over the banks of the St. Lawrence River or leftover winter snowfall melting in the spring. Some Montrealers even kept rafts at their properties in case the city turned into Waterworld. This image shows one of those infamous floods, with horse-drawn carriages trudging through the water and Montrealers staying dry atop wooden pallets.

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Explorer: 19th-Century Quebec In Photos appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Winnipeg is on the cusp between the old and the new. Some architecture still bears “ghost signs” for brands like Wilder’s Stomach Powder, and although these exteriors can give the impression of a tomb, their interiors reveal a city in a chrysalis stage. Historic buildings are turning into invaluable institutions: in 2022, Hudson’s Bay gave its six-storey landmark to the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, with plans to turn it into affordable housing, an art gallery and more. (It was symbolically traded for two beaver pelts and two elk hides.) There’s a modern culinary campus for Red River College Polytechnic, and young entrepreneurs are opening pop-up vintage stores. The city is at an exciting crossroads, and these spots are a window into its future.

Since it’s hard to grow crops in Manitoba’s climate year-round, Nola is trying new preservation techniques to make the most out of the province’s fruit and vegetables

Nola

Best veggies

101–300 Tache Avenue | nolawpg.com

A lot of restaurants claim to be steering away from animal proteins, but chef Emily Butcher actually shines a spotlight on vegetables. Take, for example, a dish of carrots glazed in local honey and butter, spiced with cumin, coriander and paprika, heaped over whipped Macedonian-style feta and garnished with candied pumpkin seeds. “Celebrating vegetables is difficult in Manitoba,” Butcher says. But Nola treats its produce adoringly and honours other  Manitoba staples like goldeye—a smoked fish you won’t be allowed to leave the province without tasting.

Rosé Coffee & Wine is a cozy spot for charcuterie, oysters and tartines

Rosé Coffee & Wine

Best atmosphere

474 Main Street, Unit B | rosecoffeeandwine.ca

Entering kieu nguyen’s 625-square-foot shop feels like being nestled inside a jewellery box: translucent pink curtains illuminate red velvet drapes, a pink and crimson rug, and chairs upholstered in black velvet. By day, the shop offers top-drawer espresso and flaky pastries. At night, after the champagne buckets come out, the tiny room transforms into a sexy wine bar with intimate booths and a succinct menu of oysters, charcuterie and tartines.

The Leaf

Best greenery

145 The Leaf Way | assiniboinepark.ca/leaf/lifegrows

the first day of spring can feel like a prank in Winnipeg, rarely showing any signs of new life. Except at the Leaf in Assiniboine Park, a new attraction where biomes are devoted year-round to lush indoor habitats, including a tropical rainforest, a butterfly garden and another space filled with the cool flora of the Mediterranean. If you’re there before March 19, visit the Babs Asper Display House, which will be in full bloom.

(Photography by Lindsay Reid)

Qaumajuq

Best art museum

300 Memorial Boulevard | wag.ca/about/qaumajuq

In the inuit art and culture space Qaumajuq (pronounced kow-ma-yourk), there are harpoon heads made of ivory and contemporary carvings of stone, whale bone and caribou antler. This art centre stands in stark contrast to the rest of the city, much of which is named after colonists who stole Indigenous land and resources. The museum opened in 2021 as part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (now known as WAG-Qaumajuq), and in April it will exhibit over 400 works by Inuit people that date as far back as 200 BCE.

(Photography by Lindsay Reid)

(Photography by Lindsay Reid)

Book ahead if you want to eat at this intimate restaurant, which is only open Wednesday to Saturday

Petit Socco

Most intimate dining

256 Stafford Street | petitsoccowpg.ca

At their 10-seat restaurant, co-owners Courtney Molaro and Adam Donnelly keep a tight menu of five to six items, including bread and dessert. “It’s out of necessity,” says Donnelly, who’s also the chef. “It’s just me in the kitchen.” This strategy also speaks to his confidence. Why make something for everyone when you believe in the quality of your concise menu? He bakes sourdough with einkorn, spelt and rye flours, served without butter or olive oil. It’s meant to be eaten throughout the meal alongside charcuterie, seasonal cheeses and family-style dishes, which often feature seafood or meat, rounded off with freshly made desserts like apple brioche tart.

At Winnipeg’s hotels, you’ll find rest, relaxation and a glimpse of the city’s past

Inn At The Forks

Where to stay: Best splurge

75 Forks Market Road | innforks.com

Visitors who want to take in the best of the city should stay at this luxury boutique hotel, located in the Forks, a roughly 54-acre public space where the Assiniboine and Red rivers meet. The rooms are sleek and minimalist (they start at $199) and the hotel’s in-house spa offers a full range of services. Nearby are the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and a food hall with over two dozen vendors, where a bag of lemon-pepper-seasoned fried pickerel bites from Fergie’s Fish’n Chips—available in limited quantities in the afternoon—is the ultimate secret snack.

Fort Garry Hotel

Where to stay: Best budget

222 Broadway |  fortgarryhotel.com

Mirroring the city’s fortunes, this hotel has had its ups and downs, with ownership changing hands many times since opening in 1913. It’s where Prince (now King) Charles stayed in 1979—he was fed goldeye, like every other visitor—and it has been reinstated as the city’s premier accommodation (rooms start at $157). The restaurant features a French-leaning menu and a deep wine list, and at Ten Spa, mint tea and nibbles of Turkish delight are available alongside a Turkish hammam and fancy treatments (like an olive oil wash).

Happening this Month:

Alvvays, Burton Cummings Theatre| alvvays.com

March 8 

The former Walker Theatre was built in 1907 and reborn in the 1990s as a live venue with heritage status. In recent years, the golden balconies and 1,579 poppy-red seats have been refurbished for a new generation of performers, such as Alvvays, the power-pop quintet currently touring their 2022 album, Blue Rev. Before the show, it’s a short walk for mussels and tartare at the Amsterdam Tea Room or steamed dumplings and lotus sticky rice at Kum Koon Garden, a dim sum restaurant with cart service.

Illustration by Antony Hare

Local Favourite

“​​Down the street from my West Broadway apartment is the Tallest Poppy, a colourful restaurant that hosts drag brunches. It’s where I chat with friends over local beers, fried tofu sandwiches and hummus plates. On weekends, we eat Talia’s Breakfast (named for the owner and chef).”— Dee Barsy, Artist

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Hot Spot: The Winnipeg Chronicles appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Jamiel Bustos opened a TikTok account in July 2020. Now he has millions of followers and an impressive client list. (Photos courtesy Bustos)

I started cutting hair when I was 14 years old in 2017. I loved how fresh and confident I felt after receiving a nice haircut, and I wanted to give that to others. I started asking friends in school if I could cut their hair, but nobody trusted me with scissors, so I settled for cutting my own. Every few weeks, I would show up to school with a strange haircut that looked terrible and other kids made fun of me.

At the end of that year, a friend finally let me give him a cut. I did a decent job, so a few more classmates agreed to come to my parents’ apartment in Etobicoke and let me cut their hair, too. At 15, I was hired as an apprentice at a barber shop near my parents’ place. I swept the floors and learned tricks of the trade from older barbers, like how to replicate popular cuts. I would go there after my afternoon basketball practice and stay at the shop for six hours, making roughly $50 a shift. But I wasn’t doing it for the money: I was passionate about cutting hair and determined to learn what I could.

Two years later, when I was in grade 11, COVID-19 hit and put a stop to public haircuts for a while. The barbershop closed down, and I was left trying to figure out how to use this difficult situation to my advantage. A few months into the pandemic, I realized that everybody was on TikTok, so by July 2020, I made my own account and started posting weekly. I posted funny skits about my haircuts—cutting my boss’ hair while he was asleep or doing viral dances from the barber’s chair, all while cutting hair on the side and trying to master the craft. My channel grew steadily: by December, I had reached 300,000 followers. I started receiving tons of messages from people who wanted me to cut their hair.

READ: When nursing burned me out, TikTok became a lifeline

One of my first clients was a real estate lawyer. He has a mansion in Toronto, so I shot a video of me walking up his cobblestone driveway where his Teslas were parked, and meeting him in his living room for a haircut. We injected some humour into the video: he pretends to be asleep and we spray him in the face to wake him up, and at one point my friend pops out of nowhere to ask him what he does for a living. I titled the video “cutting my rich client”, and it went viral, hitting 10 million views on TikTok. From that video, my following on TikTok grew to one million by the end of 2020.

@jbalwaysfresh Why he flexing on me like that #fyp #foryou #haircut #dubai #dxb ♬ POPSTAR (Feat. Drake) – DJ Khaled

The concept was so well-liked that I made it into an ongoing TikTok series called “Cutting a Millionaire.” I reached out to entrepreneurs, celebrities, and millionaires and offered to cut their hair in exchange for making a TikTok video out of it. It was a snowball effect: with each celebrity I featured, it became easier to find the next one and after a while, they started reaching out to me. Over the last two and a half years, I’ve cut hair for viral Youtubers like the Dobre Brothers and Coby Persin, Indian actor Sonu Sood, and UAE internet personality Rashed Belhasa. I have almost 300 videos on my account, including clips of my travels and now 64 editions of “Cutting a Millionaire.” That series has really boosted my channel; I now have 6.7 million TikTok followers.

This new life is a pretty wild departure from my original post-high-school plans. My parents immigrated from the Philippines in 2007 and believe in a more traditional route: you go to school, then university, then you get a 9-5 job. I was supposed to go to dental school but here I am, barely out of high school and charging $1,000 for celebrity haircuts. I don’t plan on going to college.

My path may be different from what my parents envisioned for me, but they’re supportive because they know I’m putting everything I have into this craft. It’s a lot of work: cutting hair is its own job, and on top of that, I spend several hours a day running my Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat channels, where I have a combined following of nearly nine million people. I’ve also started modeling with American retail company Fashionova, which I enjoy doing because I love clothes. To help manage the workload, I’ve hired a manager, a videographer and a personal trainer all in the last six months.

MORE: I started skateboarding in a sari at 43. Then I went viral on TikTok.

I make more than six figures annually from my social media channels and haircuts, but I invest a lot back into my career. I have other expenses: I spend a lot on car payments, and cover my mom’s rent at $2,000 a month and help my dad pay off his mortgage at $3,000 a month. Plus, running this business can get expensive: my team and I have traveled to Dubai, Los Angeles, Vancouver and New York to meet celebrities, cut hair and collect content.

It’s barely been four years since my first barbershop gig, and in that time I’ve gotten comfortable betting on myself. I put all of my effort into building this career, and it’s paying off in ways I could never have imagined. I have a few business plans in the pipeline: I’ll be launching a hair product company next year, and I’m taking a trip to LA to shoot some more content in the next few months. One day, I would love to open my own barbershop.

I also have a bucket list of three celebrities I want to feature on my channel: Drake, Manny Pacquiao, and Elon Musk. I’ll have to make some serious noise to get their attention, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that no challenge is too big if you’re willing to put in the work.

—As Told To Alex Cyr

The post I’m a 19-year-old barber and famous on TikTok. Celebs pay me $1,000 for a haircut. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When Survivor premiered in the spring of 2000, Kane Fritzler didn’t know it was about to change his life. That’s probably because he was a two-year-old in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as yet blissfully unaware of scheming alliances, tiki torches or the age-defying magnetism of Jeff Probst. But 23 years later, Fritzler is about to embark on the desert island journey of a lifetime.

When Season 44 premieres this week, he’ll be playing to be the show’s third-ever Canadian champion, after Season 41’s Erika Casupanan and Season 42’s Maryanne Oketch. Fritzler, a recent law graduate now living in Saskatoon, recently returned from his time on the remote Fijian island and sat down with us to talk about what it was like to compete on the game show he grew up watching. 

READ: How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland

What’s your relationship to Survivor? 

Survivor was a family show for us—my grandmother would come over to watch. When I was a kid, I loved watching all the different characters and archetypes on the show. As I got older, I fell in love with the show again from a gaming and strategy perspective. That was the holy grail: to figure out how to play this thing like the perfect board game.

Tell me more about that last bit. What is unique about the gaming aspect of Survivor?

In the first season, they brought out the concept of alliances and it blew people’s minds—they thought contestants were just supposed to go with their gut and vote people out. As the seasons stacked up, a meta-narrative developed, and you saw people playing the way they watched other people play. Every once in a while, someone was able to break that. By the time Season 44 rolls around, you have all these different things going on: you have alliances, you have sub-alliances, different takes on the game. So the thing that keeps the game fresh is the people who get pumped into it. 

What made you think you’d be good at it?

I wasn’t sure I would be, but I wanted to try. I’m fresh out of law school, I love people, and I’m a problem solver. So I look at people like problem sets, and I think I’m very good at building relationships with people quickly. I’m good at identifying people’s interests and figuring out what they want and how I can adapt to make myself seem like I’m good for them—in the game! That sounds really manipulative. I don’t do that in real life. But in the game it’s about getting to know people and asking how can I use these relationships—which are genuine—to keep myself out of the boat but still playing a game where I’m doing cool stuff and having fun.

What was the application process like? You’re a guy from Saskatoon and you want to be on the show—what happens next?

Yeah, that doesn’t sound like the start of a successful story. They didn’t even know where Saskatchewan was! I was going, “No, I swear, I’m Canadian, please let me on the show!” I sent in an audition tape on their website like everyone else. I did that every single year that I could. Survivor was opened to Canadians I think three or four years ago. I’d update my tape every year. Then you just wait and hope that you get that phone call.

Tell me about the phone call.

It was a world-changer. I spent a lot of time knowing that Canadians couldn’t play. And then all of a sudden you get the phone call that you are heading to Fiji, that this is happening. All of a sudden your mindset changes. You’re actually going to the beach, you’re actually going to meet Jeff Probst. It’s a complete shift.

So you get on the plane, you land in Fiji, and there’s Jeff Probst. What was that moment like?

It was one of the most surreal moments of my life, honestly. I’ve watched the show for a long time. You know the camera shots, you know what’s going to happen. And then you’re standing there, and Jeff Probst is a real human being, and he’s giving you the spiel to kick off the show. It was surreal. I was thinking, If I shouted at him right now, he was going to answer! And I’m there beside all these other people who share this dream. It was a crazy experience. 

Is it exactly like it looks in TV?

It feels very authentic. It is 100 per cent real. When the sun sets, it’s dark in the jungle, you know? It felt exactly the way I wanted it to feel. 

And then you met all the other cast members. What was that like in those first few moments?

First impressions are huge. As soon as you’re dropped on the beach, there are 17 other people with huge grins and scary eyes looking at you, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. They might be your best friends or they might be your worst enemies, but we’re all there because we love Survivor. When I applied to this it was my dream, and now I’m sitting here with people who have the exact same thing in mind: we all want to get to the end.

Does that change the way you play the game? The fact that all the cast members are superfans?

It changed how I approached the game, for sure. In Survivor, you have to make some assumptions. Everybody knows the game. It makes it a lot faster and a lot more intense.

How did you prepare for the show?

The first thing I did was finish law school, because that was mentally taxing and something I had to do anyway. But I looked at everything I did as Survivor training. In all my negotiation classes in law school, I thought, I might use this on the island. And I did a ton of puzzles—everything I could get my hands on—and watched a ton of Survivor. I kept my regular workout routine, because I didn’t want to start trying to become a power lifter and then go and break my back—that would’ve been a huge downer—but I amped everything up to nine or 10 as the date neared.  I learned how to make fire, too. I watched a lot of YouTube. I got my flint and my fire supplies and I was making fire like crazy. I was assuming, no matter what, that I was going to have to make fire on the island, so I wanted to make sure I had it down pat.

Meet Kane, a law student whose main goal is to become the Sole #Survivor and is ready to dig deep! pic.twitter.com/uP8bt3o5QX

— SURVIVOR (@survivorcbs) February 21, 2023

What was the worst part of being on the island?

The one thing that everyone asks about is the survival element, because it is real and it is intense. That’s the most daunting. To show up on an island and not have any food, to be sleeping on the ground or whatever shelter you can muster. Those are hard things. But honestly, you’re just having so much fun. Nothing really shook me to my core. 

Canadians have put on a really good show these past few seasons. Are you prepared to carry that legacy?

It’s a really tough mantle to carry. When I was watching Season 41, I was like, I hope Erica wins! But also, I hope she doesn’t win, so that I can be the first Canadian to win. And then she won! And I was like, Marianne’s so awesome but I hope she doesn’t win! What’s going on here?! I think Canadians have waited so long to be on the show that when we go out there, we’re ready to perform and to play hard. I have big shoes to fill. I’m hoping I can live up to the expectation.

Were you allowed to tell anyone about Survivor?

No. For a little while I was living this double life: a law student by day and a Survivor contestant by night. And it’s weird because it’s a very important part of you that you’re getting more and more invested in and you can’t tell anyone. But I’m excited now.

What’s the response been like so far?

It was a long shot to get a person from Saskatchewan on the show. It’s weird news to deliver to people—everyone has a slightly different reaction. They either freak out or they don’t believe it, but the end response is that people are super excited. I have professors reaching out, and people from the law community. Everyone in my life has been super supportive.

What was your biggest takeaway?

When you get dropped on an island, the only things you have are the clothes on your back and who you are, your personality. That’s all you get. All I had out there was Kane Fritzler. You learn you have to rely on that. The other thing is that you meet all these different wonderful people. So it was just a good people experience.

Will you stay in touch? Any lifelong alliances?

We’ll wait and see how it plays out. I’ve got to watch the season before I reach out. But I could see it.

Are you ready for your time in the spotlight, to light up Saskatchewan?

I am so ready for it to premiere. I anticipate Saskatchewan rallying around me. I am very, very excited to kick this thing off.

The post “I was living this double life: law student by day and Survivor contestant by night” appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It hasn’t even been on the air for two months, and HBO’s The Last of Us is already being hailed as the best series of 2023, thanks to its mix of artistry, emotional resonance and nightmare-inducing action sequences. The story, based on the popular video game of the same name, follows Joel (Pedro Pascal), a grieving-father-turned-mercenary who must accompany Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a gun-slinging 14-year-old, across a mutant- and zombie-infested America in the aftermath of a near–extinction level pandemic. 

The series was shot entirely in Alberta—a major coup for the province’s production industry, which calls this the biggest production in Canadian history. Jason Nolan, the show’s Calgary-based location manager, scouted and managed locations—everywhere from downtown main arteries to remote mountain villages. Here, he shares what gave Alberta the edge as a post-apocalyptic backdrop, why the show favoured real sites over CGI, and how they pulled off the scene that had his 18-year-old on the edge of his seat. (For those who are not caught up—episode five aired this past weekend—there are major spoilers ahead).

How did one of the buzziest and most expensive productions of all time end up in Alberta—and how did you get involved?

Nolan: I first heard about the possibility through the Alberta Film Commission. They were putting together a submission package  to pitch the province as the location for the series, so I facilitated some photos of some of the key proposed locations. We didn’t have a lot of information at this point, just the broad strokes. It was definitely a competitive process. A show of this scale isn’t just looking in North America, but all over the world.

READ: Anatomy of a Scene: The Lake

Any ideas about what made Alberta the ideal post-apocalyptic landscape?

It was the variety we have within the province, which is very important in The Last of Us. The story starts in Texas and then goes from Boston all the way to Wyoming. Alberta has the big cities, the smaller towns, the prairies, forests, mountains—all of which are featured in the show. We have pretty much every environment you can imagine other than the ocean, so I think that was our winning angle. I know the cast had a lot of great things to say about Canmore and High River, which are both really beautiful spots. And people on set kept commenting about how clean Canada is, which was funny. 

The Last of Us series co-creator Neil Druckman (who also created the video game) on set in Edmonton, with the Alberta Legislature building in the distance. (HBO)

Once the project was a go, what were your first steps as location manager?  

I started having initial discussions with the producers in January of 2021 and officially signed on shortly after. The first step was getting a bible created by showrunner Craig Mazin, and then reading through the scripts. After that I was working with the production designer to break down certain key locations, get them scouted and presented and approved, starting with the most challenging, complicated sequences. 

 

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I’m guessing episode five’s epic zombie smackdown qualifies. I think I speak for all fans when I say I’ll be sleeping with the lights on this week! 

That was definitely one of the key scenes in terms of planning, budgeting, everything. For all of the major scenes, the first thing we are looking at is whether we are going to shoot on location or build something. From the start, the directive on The Last of Us has been to choose real locations and real effects whenever possible. But due to both the action and the sensitivity surrounding the climax of episode five, a build on a closed set just made more sense. My team found the location, which was a five-acre lot next to the Calgary Film Centre. A production designer and art department came up with a plan to build a real cul-de-sac, including 15 houses—and the hole.

The sinkhole was real, and it was spectacular (HBO)

So that giant sinkhole was real?

Yes. I mean, I’m sure some aspects were touched up with CGI, but our construction coordinator organized a crew and an excavator, and then there were engineers involved to make sure the whole thing was safe. Bloater, which is the name of the large mushroom zombie that you mentioned, was also a real actor in prosthetics. 

Wow. Well, congratulations. It really was spectacular to watch. 

Thanks. I only saw the finished product for the first time over the weekend. I think episode five is everything that The Last of Us is meant to be, in terms of being amazing, terrifying, but also so having much emotion in the relationships between the characters. My 18-year-old son was on the edge of the couch the whole time, so that was cool. 

Nolan found the perfect home for the main character, Joel, in High River (HBO)

Did you shoot mostly in chronological order? 

For the most part, yes. Our first shoots were the opening of episode one, which takes place about 20 years ago in Texas, so we wanted to establish that setting as being distinct. That’s when the audience first meets Joel, as well as his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah. We don’t spend a lot of time in this time period, but their relationship is important to driving the rest of the series, so we needed the right location for their home. We looked at more than 300 options before landing on the final place in High River, Alberta—mostly because of some practical specifications. 

What kinds of practical specifications? 

A lot of technical details that audiences don’t notice, but are important to how scenes are choreographed—like where the house was in relation to the neighbours’ home, because of the action sequence where the Mrs. Elder becomes infected and Sarah must escape. The layout was very specific: we needed the living room on the right and the staircase on the left and the kitchen just beyond. That was important for the scene where Joel carries Sarah up the stairs, which is a key tender moment before he loses everything and his character hardens. I remember finally pulling up to the right house in High River and knowing, Yes, we’ve finally got it. 

A shot from the plane crash scene in episode one, filmed on 24th St. in Fort Macleod (HBO)

Episode one also has that crazy scene where the plane crashes on the street. Let me guess—real plane? 

That was a combination, because you can’t actually crash a jet liner. So the part where the plane was flying was CGI, but the part on the ground and the explosion—that was all real. For that scene we found a location on 24th Street in Fort Macleod. We have agreements with all of the business owners and residents to make modifications. Some buildings were painted, and we added awnings and window dressing. For that sequence, we shut down the street for a week, so we needed everybody on board. 

Before-and-after of the Alberta Legislature Building (HBO)

A good chunk of episode two is set in the Massachusetts State House which, my sources tell me, was actually the Alberta Legislature. How did you manage that? 

We knew right away where we wanted to shoot, because these buildings tend to look similar in most major cities. The challenge was that no one had every filmed in the building before. It houses the government offices where everybody works, including the premier. I made a call, and they were willing to entertain it. We have a lot of support for our industry within government, which is nice. They happened to be in the middle of a restoration project at the time so we had to send the construction company away and pay for that on top of everything else, but it worked out well. All of the external shots were the real building and then as much of the interior as possible. So, for example, the scene where Joel looks out the window and sees all of the zombies coming, that is the real building.

Inside the Alberta Legislature Building (HBO)

But the scene where Tess blows up the capitol was not.

Ha! No, we didn’t blow up the real building. And we didn’t cover it in vines or fungus either. That was all on a manufactured set, created by our greens crew—they do all of the organic set dressing—and then the prosthetics department, which does the mushroom stuff. 

Was that sequence the biggest challenge? At least of the episodes we have seen so far?

One of the biggest challenges was a scene in episode three, where Joel and Ellie are entering Boston for the first time. We shot that on location on The Flyover, which is the major artery into the downtown core in Calgary coming off 108th Street. It’s a location I’ve used in the past—while shooting a car commercial on a Sunday afternoon—but in this case we needed it for nearly a week.

I met with just about every city department: traffic, police, parks, pathways, transit. It took us from Thursday to Saturday to create the set, and then we shot on the Sunday. There were a lot of moving parts—40 police officers, 200 cars on the stretch of highway underneath—but it looked great and captured the abandoned, overgrown quality that was our goal. First and foremost we want the actors to arrive on set and not have to think about where they are supposed to be so they can just focus on their performance. Episode two is the episode I am most proud of. 

The Flyover and 108th Street in Calgary (HBO)

Certainly it was the episode the required the most Kleenex…

Episode three sticks out for being its own thing. We spend time in the world of Frank and Bill, a couple who find each other in the post-pandemic world and have this totally beautiful and unexpected love story. They are connected to the main plot with Joel and Ellie, but in many ways this episode is a standalone. I knew from the moment I read the script it was going to be different and special.

 

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We spent a lot of time looking for a neighourhood that was almost a hamlet, to represent how they were removed from the hell of the rest of the series because of their relationship. Trees were very important, as we the style of house and the neighbourhood. At one point we found a great option for Bill and Frank’s house but the rest of the location didn’t work. In the end we found an abandoned neighbourhood in High River, where all of the streets and sidewalks were still there but the homes were gone. I made an agreement with town council and we took over the area for four months to build the neighbourhood. Every detail is the result of teamwork and consideration. 

The level of detail is mind-blowing. Do you ever miss car commercials? 

I loved working on this project for so many reasons. There is a huge amount of work that went into it—almost an unimaginable amount. I’m happy that it has been so well-received. 

Are you getting a lot of high fives?

Well, my mother, who is in her 70s and rarely watches any kind of television, wants to call me to talk about every episode, so that is probably the biggest compliment I can imagine. 

The post How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world watched Netflix’s Squid Game, but only one turned the hit series into a university course. Paolo Granata is the head of the media studies program at the University of Toronto, where part of the mission is to study contemporary media in real time. In his class “Squid Game and the Media,” Granata’s students examine the broader implications of the show’s global success—and occasionally dress up like the main characters.

Before we get into your class, Squid Game was the most popular series in the history of Netflix. What was it about the show that made it such a hit? 

I think you can look at the rise of the Hallyu or, in English, the “K-Wave”, which had been in the air for several years before Squid Game came out. It started with Korean dramas, and then the rise of K-Pop in general and BTS in particular—the whole world developed an interest in the Korean aesthetic and sensibility, which are very much rooted in contrasts and dichotomy: bright, extreme colours to emphasize darkness, comedy to highlight tragedy, childlike visuals and sounds during the most brutal scenes, which we see a lot in Squid Game and, before that, in Parasite. When that movie had the success it did, that was a significant benchmark. 

Netflix has gotten ahead of Hollywood by developing culturally authentic programming for a global audience, which is essentially the opposite of what they started out doing—bringing Hollywood content to foreign countries. Squid Game is a perfect example of a very region-specific piece of entertainment with mass appeal.  

Squid Game is also a story about wealth disparity, which became a very hot topic during the pandemic. Did that also play into the way the show resonated? 

Absolutely. I’m sure you remember that people talked about the pandemic as being the “great equalizer,” but unfortunately that was not the case. Instead, we saw a lot of pre-existing inequality that was exposed. Similarly, in Squid Game we see this illusion of equality. All the players are “equal”—they all have the same chance to win the prize money. And they seem to have options. 

In the first episode, every player is given the chance to leave the world of the game and go back to their regular lives. Many do, having realized that they are likely to die pursuing the prize money. But most of them come back because they realize that their financial circumstances leave them without options, which is where we see the illusion of free will, and the illusion that equality means equity, when in fact these are two very different concepts. Ultimately, the conditions created by a capitalist society do not make people free. 

I really liked Squid Game and I talked about it with my friends. You must have really liked Squid Game to create a university-level seminar course based on the show.  

I definitely enjoyed it enough to watch the entire series in just a couple of days. And then I went back and watched it again in the original Korean with English subtitles, which is a far better experience in terms of appreciating the performance. But it was only when I saw the numbers—hundreds of millions of viewers, the number-one show in 94 countries—that I started thinking about it from a media studies perspective. This was fall 2021, when we were starting to talk about the 2022-23 curriculum. Our motto in the media studies department is “media in real time.” In 2019 we started offering courses that capture a big trending topic. We did “Trump and the Media,” then “#MeToo and the Media,” then “#BlackLivesMatter and the Media,” and “Indigenous Cultures and the Media.” I thought Squid Game would be great because of how relevant the story was and, of course, because so many people had seen it.

Did the course fill up immediately? 

We decided on an application process because I wanted to avoid students enrolling just because they loved the show. This is a fourth-year seminar class with a group research component. Every applicant had to explain their interest in the class and also what resources they would use to approach the show from an academic perspective. We received a total of 52 applications, including students from my media studies program but also from philosophy, anthropology and creative writing. We ended up with a diverse group, which is exactly what I was hoping for. We have three Korean students who have been able to explain some of the show’s linguistic nuances, students from China who can talk about how the show was received in their country, and students from the creative expression and society program, who can share perspectives on narratology and storytelling that help us to analyze the plot. 

On your syllabus, the classes have the same names as Squid Game’s episodes. How else did you pay homage to the series? 

I had an actor come in for the first class—a former student who was a fan of the show—to deliver the Front Man’s famous monologue on equity… in costume. I thought that was a good way to establish the right mood. I think the class really enjoyed it and they also got into the spirit. One student showed up in the green player’s uniform; another brought the board game, which we will definitely play at some point. And then on the last day of class we’re going to make the Dalgona honeycomb cookies from episode two. 

I really believe that playfulness can inspire creativity, which leads to better research. My role is about more than just content. Information is everywhere these days—you can go online or watch a documentary. The professor of the 21st century is an experience designer. 

Week 2 is called Red Light, Green Light. On the show, that was the game where a giant doll murdered anyone who moved when they weren’t supposed to. How have you adjusted this to avoid the needless slaughter of students?

Ha! For us, it is about looking at “Red Light, Green Light” and how it is played in so many different cultures around the world. In our group there are students from China, from Korea, from Europe, Canada, so we shared how the game differs from one culture to another and what that says about the diversity of cultures, but also commonalities.

In Canada I think it’s called “What Time Is It Mr. Wolf?” 

That’s right. And in Italy, where I’m from, it’s “Un, Due, Tres, Estrella.” The game is an archetype and a metaphor for life, which is true of all the games in Squid Game. In the playground we learn about competition and co-operation. We learn to read symbolic aspects of life, and concepts of justice, equality and inequality. The very nature of play is a symbolic activity; by playing we learn how to live and how to cope. In the show the main character, Seong Gi-hun, comes in as a very childlike character and by the end has transformed into an adult by facing the cruelty of life. It is the idea of metamorphosis that is present in so many classic allegories and fairy tales. I’m a big fan of Pinocchio.

Speaking of archetypes, the VIPs in Squid Game—the evil billionaires who watch the players kill each other for sport—are all white Westerners. The creator of the show has even compared them to Trump. How does your class approach that aspect of the show? 

Definitely the VIPs represent the highest peak of capitalism. The fact that they all wear gold masks evokes the old Greek tragedies. And then when you look at how they arrive on the island where the game is taking place—they fly in on helicopters like gods coming down from the heavens, which is part of a whole religious motif. The piggy bank that contains all the prize money hangs from the ceiling in a way that evokes a modern cathedral, only the religion is capitalism. So I can understand the Trump comparison. One of my students is talking about analyzing the games in the show as an allegory of imperial capitalism. The Trump era certainly feels like an accurate manifestation of that. 

Season 2 is coming to Netflix later this year, or early next. With the key mystery solved and most of our favourite characters feeding worms, where do you think they’ll take it? 

We have talked about this quite a bit in class. I asked my students if they would prefer a sequel or a prequel and most say the latter, so that we could have these characters from the first season return and we could learn more about their already rich backstories. I tend to agree. 

In the meantime, Netflix is releasing a reality show called Squid Game: The Challenge. Did you consider trying out? 

To play? No. But I will definitely watch. I have heard about some contestants on the set talking about the “intolerable conditions.” Netflix is denying that, so who knows what the truth is. 

Any idea of what next year’s trending-topic course might be?

Definitely the hot topic right now, in academia and beyond, is this ChatGPT bot and similar advanced AI language models. I think that might make a good pick.

The post This U of T professor created an entire course on the Netflix mega-hit Squid Game appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Tart Chilean guava berries, plump persimmons the size of tomatoes, and pods of blue sausage fruit, also known as dead man’s fingers. This list sounds like an inventory of the world’s most magical fruit aisle, but in fact, all of this exotic produce (and more) is currently sprouting in a massive greenhouse located just outside of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Exotic Fruit Nursery, an operation built and run by biologist turned entrepreneur Annette Clarke, specializes in fruit varieties native to Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia, but it’s also expanding what the “hundred-mile diet” means to hungry East Coasters.

Clarke acquired her penchant for unique fruits in childhood, during a family vacation to Lake Garda, Italy. She remembers climbing a tree loaded with sweet, ripe figs and eating them right off the branches. “They tasted almost like honey,” she says. “It was an incredible taste that I never forgot.” Clarke, who is originally from Neuss, Germany, first visited British Columbia in the late ’90s, while conducting fieldwork for her forestry and soil science master’s degree from the University of Bonn. She put down roots in the province after meeting John, her future husband, and they settled with their son, Nicholas, in Roberts Creek, a town on the Sunshine Coast. Clarke taught environmental education at public schools and ran a hobby farm, selling run-of-the-mill produce (like tomatoes and cucumbers) at local farmers’ markets in her spare time.

Her passion for exotic fruit kicked up again in 2012, when she discovered a book called Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden by Lee Reich. Clarke read about the pawpaw, a mango-shaped fruit that tastes like banana pudding and is indigenous to the eastern United States. Hell-bent on growing some herself, Clarke contacted online seed sellers and nurseries across the province and throughout the U.S. “I’m a typical German: a bit excessive when it comes to research,” she jokes. “When I learn about something, I want to know everything—150 per cent.” Eventually she found a nursery near Coquitlam that was willing to part with its plants. She made the two-hour trek to bring them home.

The results of Clarke’s loving pawpaw husbandry

Her first pawpaw crop may have been underwhelming —“Horrible, like eating under-ripe bananas”—but a determined Clarke spent years perfecting the delicate art of growing unusual plants on Canadian soil. For a while, she successfully brought flying dragon citrus and gingko biloba trees to maturity. But by 2015, Roberts Creek started issuing water restrictions that made it difficult for Clarke to maintain her growing operation. Then came the forest fires. “The sky was dark red and you couldn’t breathe,” she says. Seeking refuge from looming climate disasters, Clarke sold her land in 2021, purchased a 33-acre property just outside of Lunenberg (sight unseen) and headed across the country, with cuttings, seeds and her son in tow.

Upon arrival, Clarke embarked on her biggest build yet: a 40-by-60-foot greenhouse funded by the profits from the sale of her B.C. home. With Nicholas’s help, Clarke dug a massive pit, laid down gravel for drainage purposes and poured concrete into the trench. She spent $38,000 on the nursery’s mammoth galvanized-metal superstructure, which the duo covered in a double layer of seven-millimetre polyethylene plastic. (When inflated, it resembles a big balloon.) The build came with what Clarke describes as a “rat-tail of problems.” The initial blueprint was missing measurements. Then, a boom truck from a local construction company was needed to safely lift the greenhouse’s arches into place, and Clarke had to manually drill in holes that were conspicuously absent from the building’s steel frame.

All the work was worth it, though. More than 65 exotic fruit varieties, including yuzu and pineapple guava, now bloom in Clarke’s greenhouse. Every day, she manually opens the roof—using a complex pulley system—to make sure her beloved plants aren’t cooked by the sun, and waters them by hand. In the event the outside temperature drops below minus-10 degrees Celsius, Clarke turns on her propane heater and and lovingly wraps her plants in burlap to help protect them from the cold. “If you don’t maintain them properly for one day, they’ll die,” she says. “It’s almost like having a pet.”

Dead man’s fingers zip open to reveal a translucent pulp with notes of cucumber and melon

The slightly creepy (but delicious) Akebia fruit

At the moment, visits to Clarke’s greenhouse are by appointment only, and she sells her produce to a small list of private clients. But Exotic Fruit Nursery is on track to open to the wider public this spring, and Clarke says she’s already received a warm welcome from her East Coast neighbours. Her greenhouse has already appeared on the front page of the local newspaper, and Clarke recently received an invite to deliver a speech at a garden club in Halifax.

Persimmons. In Nova Scotia!

Eventually, she hopes to open a gift shop that sells fruit-inspired jewellery and launch tastings to educate locals about growing patterns, the environmental impacts of pesticide use and what’s possible to grow in their home province—a list that’s changing right along with the climate. Thanks to her, it now includes persimmons that taste like pudding parfaits and juicy, watermelon-esque blue sausage fruits. “It’s not just about picking up a piece of fruit and eating it,” she says. “It’s about getting people to think, Where does this come from?”

The post This woman built a greenhouse that grows eye-catching exotic fruits—in Nova Scotia appeared first on Macleans.ca.

What do Harry Styles, Diplo and Haim all have in common? They’ve all duetted with, covered or shouted out Shania Twain. More than two decades after sweeping the charts, the country superstar is still spreading her influence all over pop culture. It’s hard to imagine Taylor Swift graduating from Nashville darling to international pop icon without Shania doing it 20 years earlier. 

Shania earned the nickname “Queen of Country Pop” after her 1997 album Come On Over became the best-selling record in history by a solo female artist. Along with her producer and then-husband Mutt Lange, Shania created a suite of songs that were playful, infectious and unpretentiously fun—even the ballads. You didn’t have to have a shelf full of George Jones or Waylon Jennings to stop everything when “That Don’t Impress Me Much” came on MuchMusic, or to croon along to “You’re Still The One” on the radio at the dentist’s office. 

These days, Shania is once again ubiquitous on every platform. Scroll through TikTok and you’re bound to hear clips of “Let’s go, girls!” or “Okay, so you’re Brad Pitt.” Shania even recently released a trailer house EDM remix of “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” by the producer Real Hypha, which originated on the social media app. TikTok is the platform where old songs can find new life in cascading remixes, duets and memes. Decades-old tracks from artists like Kate Bush and Fleetwood Mac have become hits again on the backs of popular videos. It’s happening on Spotify, too. In 2021, listeners between 19 and 24 streamed ’90s country as much as listeners over 40. And Gen Z created 89 million playlists featuring songs by Faith Hill, the Chicks and, at the top of the list, Shania Twain. 

For decades, the Nashville machine was controlled by powerful cultural gatekeepers who favoured a specific look and sound: usually white, male and cowboy-hatted. Shania defied those expectations from the beginning. Her bare midriff in the video for the 1993 single “What Made You Say That” caused many country purists to write her off as an artist more focused on image and sex appeal than artistry. “I was a disruption to the image of country music,” Shania said in the recent Netflix documentary Not Just A Girl. She went on to release her 2002 album Up! in three different styles: pop, country and an “international” version that blended twang with tabla, fiddle with sitar.

READ: How artist Stan Douglas recreates scenes of political unrest

Her defiance planted the seeds for other artists to cross over. More recently, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” blended honkytonk with hip-hop and R&B. The success of a country hit from a young, Black, queer artist sparked debates among conservative listeners about whether or not it belonged on the country charts—even though the genre was heavily influenced by the African-American community before executives began marketing it to white audiences in the 1940s. 

This month, Shania releases her latest album, Queen of Me, and just in time—Gen Z can’t get enough of her. At last year’s Coachella, she surprised the audience onstage during Harry Styles’s headlining set, joining him for a performance of “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” Sparkling in matching sequins, the intergenerational artists found new resonance in the song’s undertones of androgyny and gender play. That hit’s subversively sassy self-assurance has been claimed and reclaimed decades later. Billboard recently named it the greatest karaoke song of all time, and it’s a bona fide queer anthem. Like her own biggest influence, Dolly Parton, Shania has become an LGBTQ+ icon in a genre that is often painted as rigid and conservative. 

On her new album, Shania is conversational and colourful, rarely taking herself seriously. The first single, “Waking Up Dreaming,” is about following your ambitions as far as they’ll take you—a nod to Shania’s own hard-fought journey to world domination. It’s the kind of track meant for throwing your arms up on the dance floor, easily slotting into a playlist between Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me.” In the video, Shania takes nods from ’80s glam rock, donning enough wigs and costumes to fill a drag queen’s closet. Now, as then, she wears leopard print like a second skin. 

Shania’s casual refusal to play by Nashville’s rules continues to rankle some genre devotees. A recent article on the blog Saving Country Music asked why she doesn’t go back to her ’90s country roots. But Shania Twain has never made music strictly for Nashville—her target audience is everyone. Going back to the sound of 25 years ago would be to abandon what makes her so relevant now. She never took the traditional country path. She went her own way, and the genre followed.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Shania Twain’s eternal pop empire appeared first on Macleans.ca.

JJ Levine was eight years old when his mother bought him his first 35-millimetre camera. Levine was interested in photography, but at first only shot still lifes of dance shoes and tchotchkes. His mom suggested he try snapping people, too. At the time, his four siblings were in the process of establishing their own identities as young adults. Some of them identify as queer, and Levine studied their lives with great interest. “I had this unique opportunity to see my siblings have unconventional friendships and relationships,” says Levine, who is trans. “When I came of age, living in Montreal, I had them, too—and then I documented them.” 

The series started as a term project for Levine’s fine arts degree at Concordia University, documenting his siblings, friends and lovers. Now, at 150 photos, Queer Portraits is Levine’s most robust collection to date, and a tender, critically lauded chronicle of queer domesticity. The project was exhibited at Montreal’s McCord Stewart Museum in 2022. The Image Centre also recently purchased the photograph “Becca and Miwa” through the Canada Now Photography Acquisition Initiative, which highlights Canadian artists whose work touches on issues of identity and belonging. “Queer Portraits is a reference to the history of portrait photography, which usually meant going to a studio in your best outfit and having your picture taken—and, for a long time, was reserved for straight, wealthy, cisgender people,” Levine says of the ongoing project. “It ended up being more of a personal archive than I initially thought it would.”

The photographs feature exes, friends, and Hubert and Joah—his partner and child. As a result, the shoots look like garden-variety hangouts among close-knit people: they involve hours-long chats and rifling through subjects’ wardrobes. Often, there is food. But where Queer Portraits deviates from pure documentary is in its deliberate construction: the lighting is artificial, the furniture is arranged just so and, sometimes, even the homes are borrowed. 

Occasionally, the scenes themselves are years old, plucked and reconstructed from Levine’s memory. “I’m not catching people at a random moment, or showing you their unmade bed or pile of dirty dishes,” Levine says. “I’m showing you a person in clothes they feel really good in—maybe the best version of them.” In a sense, Levine’s collection of portraits mirrors a model of family that many queer folks can relate to: one born of loving curation rather than genetic obligation.

In the following pages, Levine tells the stories behind his intimate portraits. He is aware that his portrayals of non-monogamy and creative co-parenting dynamics in Queer Portraits might seem like political cris de coeur on behalf of the queer and trans communities at large. They are, but they’re also simply the stories Levine knows. “This was my way of showing care,” Levine says. “I just wanted to make beautiful images of the people I love.” Proud, cherished, safe in their homes. In that way, they are entirely subversive.

Hubert and Joah, 2021

“This image of Hubert (my partner) and Joah (my daughter) is from the middle of the pandemic. During lockdown, we were all forced into these isolated family structures. Hubert and Joah’s dynamic became more like that of a parent and child. That time also changed my work: I couldn’t go into anyone else’s homes, so I took this shot in our place. It’s so funny: people said, ‘Wow, that’s someone’s grandmother’s house,’ and I was like, ‘That’s my furniture.’ ”

Hubert, 2019

“This was the first time I photographed Hubert. There was no plan to have his cat, Adele, in the shot, but she kept jumping on his lap. After she died in 2021, people left us flowers and wrote notes to her. One said, ‘You ruined all of our puzzles during the pandemic, but you brought so much light into our home.’ One person even lit a candle for her.”

 Family, 2020

“I moved in with Bronwen (centre) and Cee (right) in the early 2000s. We were more than roommates; we took care of each other. We were living together when Bronwen and I had our first children. I was like, ‘How does anybody do this without friends around to, like, hold their baby or let them take a shower?’ It was confounding to me.”

Crystal and Harley, 2019

“This photograph features femme-on-femme love—but sometimes, people ask Crystal and Harley if they’re sisters or best friends. This image makes explicit that these people are in a serious, long-term relationship with each other—one that’s not frivolous or for anyone else’s benefit. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Our identity is not for you to consume.’ ”

Oliver, 2015    

“Oliver was my high-school sweetheart. We broke up in 2002 and we’ve been good friends ever since. I’ve photographed Oliver more than anyone, maybe. This was taken in their kitchen. The shoot was actually planned for the previous day, but it took so long for me to set up that we just decided to go to bed and shoot in the morning. The space was so tiny that I was perched on the kitchen table.”

Felix, 2015

“We’ve been friends, and extremely sporadic lovers, for 15 years. After a lunch date, Felix and I went back to his new apartment. He hadn’t set up his stuff up yet, so I found this little spot with a tiny bit of green and wedged these amazing fake flowers in the corner. I had him try on a bunch of different outfits, and this is the one he felt good in.”

Becca and Miwa, 2019

“Miwa (right) was with Becca when we shot this image, but they’re not a couple anymore. I also have a lot of images of my exes. For me, the concept of chosen family encompasses the close bonds we as queer people have with our exes. You can be in a specific kind of romantic dynamic, which can then shift into a friendship.” 

Lee Lee, 2015

“I met Lee Lee around 2009 or 2010. They’re a dancer—and very much an extrovert—and we used to go out to parties and queer events together. We also connected through our creative jobs. The majority of my friends are interested in art, but they don’t have artistic careers. One of the first things my partner, Hubert, and I bonded over was our interest in analog photography.” 

Miwa, 2021

“This image is one of the few from Queer Portraits that I didn’t take in the subject’s space—I shot it in another friend’s apartment. I brought in all the furniture and wallpapered the room with Hubert. Miwa is always down to do weird things. They even helped me pick out the cassette tapes in the background.”

Joah, 2019

“This shot recreates a moment that took place after my separation from Harry, Joah’s other parent. It wasn’t always smooth sailing then. I had moved into another apartment, and Joah was with me for half of the week. One day, I was putting on my shoes at the bottom of the steep stairs at the entrance to my apartment. I remember Joah was just sitting there waiting, and so patiently. I was struck by how calm she was. I had to get used to single parenthood. This image recreates a moment when things were starting to get more settled.”

Mica, 2015

“I met Mica when they moved to Montreal. We used to go camping together. They now live in California, but we’re still good friends.” 

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Chosen Family: JJ Levine’s ‘Queer Portraits’ series appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Michael Goldney called his distillery Lucky Bastard because he launched it on the back of an unexpected windfall. Before that, the Saskatoon native worked as a family doctor, which gives him a unique perspective on Canada’s new alcohol consumption guideline. Down from two drinks a day to two drinks a week (and emphasizing the link between even moderate drinking and cancer risk), the Health Canada–endorsed recommendations have many in the alcohol industry worried about the bottom line. 

Goldney’s company is a bit of an outlier—Lucky Bastard products have included safe drinking guideline labels since 2017. “We want to give our consumers the best information possible,” he says. Here, he explains why he’s planning to update his labels—with or without a mandate—and why the message of “drink responsibly” is not enough. 

You are a former family doctor who now runs a distillery. How did that happen?

I wasn’t one of those young kids who knew they wanted to be a doctor. I fell in love with science and biology at university. In 2006, I was just a couple of years out of residency, working as a locum in rural Saskatchewan, which means I would relieve doctors so they could attend conferences or go on vacation. I enjoyed the work and had no notion of doing anything else. Then, one day after work, I went into the drugstore to buy a magazine and I bought a lottery ticket. The next day, I was doing rounds and I found out I had won the jackpot: $14.6 million! For a while I thought I wanted to stay in medicine, but it got to the point where I wasn’t enjoying it anymore, and because of my windfall, I had options. My wife and I were having drinks with a friend one night. He had just read an article about how micro-distilleries were popping up all over the states and we said, We’re in.  

Did you know anything about the booze biz before getting into it?

I mean, I did one of those make-your-own beer kits in university. And I liked that there was some science involved in distilling, so I wasn’t completely wasting my degree. Because of my newfound wealth, my wife and I had done some travelling and discovered cocktail culture—Manhattans in New York, and then we had these amazing Ramos gin fizzes in… I don’t even remember where.

You must have had a few.

Ha! Right. None of this had reached Saskatchewan at the time, but we thought it was coming, so the timing was good. We launched in 2017 and we called the company Lucky Bastard for obvious reasons. From the start, selling a toxin was something I had to reconcile with my background. As a doctor, I saw plenty of evidence of the harms caused by alcohol: the obvious drunken stuff, like someone coming to the emergency room with facial lacerations after trying to leapfrog parking meters, or esophageal bleeding caused by alcoholic liver cirrhosis.  

As a doctor, what are your thoughts on the new recommendations?

Both as a physician and as a distiller, I rather liked the old guidelines: two drinks a day for women and three for men. That doesn’t seem like problem drinking, but at the same time, if everyone drank that much, our sales would go up. The new guidelines strike me as being a bit extreme, particularly in the way the information is being reported—a 90-page report being boiled down to the most alarmist headlines.  

For example? 

The CCSA report highlights the link between alcohol and many different types of cancer, but the fact that alcohol is a carcinogen is not new. I honestly thought that’s something most people were aware of, but now it’s like this big bad boogeyman. I’m not saying cancer isn’t extremely serious, but if we live long enough we’re all going to die of heart disease or cancer. I think we need context to really understand what we’re looking at, starting with the distinction between absolute risk and relative risk. So maybe I’m 30 per cent more likely to contract a certain throat cancer, but that doesn’t mean I have a 30 per cent chance of getting throat cancer, which is how I think some people are processing the information. In most cases we are still talking about an extremely small number, which consumers should understand and then make their own decisions. 

So then where do you stand on the CCSA’s call for mandatory labelling?

We actually started putting labels on our products in 2017 after I attended a working group spearheaded by the Saskatchewan Prevention Institute called “Let’s Talk Alcohol,” and they made a good case for why it’s important to promote specific guidelines. Of course those were the 2011 guidelines, which also included potential cardiovascular benefits of moderate consumption. I certainly prefer a drink to 30 minutes of cardio. 

This is the warning label currently placed on Lucky Bastard bottles. Goldney plans to update the labels.

Will you update your labels with the new guidelines? 

We will. Our goal is to give our customers the best information possible, and right now I guess that’s the information from the CCSA. I’ve been following some of the criticism. I gather that of the 6,000 studies examined, only 16 of them were used for modelling. That definitely gives me pause, but at the same time I’m not about to dust off my statistical analysis textbook.

Some of your industry colleagues say “please enjoy responsibly” labels should be enough. You don’t agree?

No, I don’t really buy that. What does responsible drinking look like? Every person has a different definition and often it just means that you know someone who drinks more than you do. At the same time, I am extremely sympathetic to the concerns of my industry. Particularly to those who have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders—we’re a very small, privately owned producer, so we can look at it in terms of our ethics. 

You’re still a business, though. If everyone goes from two drinks a day to two a week, that’s a pretty massive hit. 

It is, but I really don’t think that’s going to happen. If we look at, for example, what happened in California following the mandatory calorie labelling on fast food—it’s not like that had a significant impact on obesity rates. Or just look at the way people drive on the highway. You may be safer going at a slower speed, but that doesn’t stop a lot of us from driving faster. 

Critics are comparing the CCSA to a modern-day temperance society with an anti-alcohol agenda. What do you think?

I think of course that is their agenda, but I’m not saying that in a critical way. It’s not the Centre for Substance Abuse and Addiction’s job to promote the positive aspects of drinking alcohol— the alcohol industry already does a very good job of that. And of course there are positive aspects. Alcohol is a social lubricant, we are social beings, and our mental health can be improved by social interactions. 

I’ve asked you about how you feel as a business owner and a former doctor. What about as a guy who likes to unwind with a cocktail? Will the new guidelines influence your personal consumption?

No, they won’t. I love to have a couple of whiskeys and a cigar every now and then, and that’s not going to change. 

The post Are the new alcohol guidelines too extreme? This distillery owner—and former doctor—breaks it down. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

If you hadn’t noticed psilocybin’s move toward the mainstream, a company like Numinus will come as a surprise. Led by founder and CEO Payton Nyquvest, Numinus is a brand-fantasy of the next iteration of wellness: clean, straightforward, empathetic, inclusive and self-aware. It’s one of several Canadian companies—Field Trip Health and Wellness among them—ready to capitalize on psilocybin. Its head office in Vancouver’s Gastown may look like any random vegan café, but instead of cookies, it has ketamine—currently the main psychedelic legally used in therapy in Canada. At some point the company plans to use psilocybin too. Found in “magic mushrooms,” psilocybin is in clinical trials, in Canada and internationally, for use as a potential treatment for mental illness. 

Nyquvest turned to psychedelics to treat his long-term chronic pain, and his healing experience contributed to a significant career change. A smart, aggressive operator, Nyquvest transitioned from a director position at Mackie Research Capital to founding Numinus in 2018­­—the same year cannabis was legalized in Canada.

Why psilocybin? Caroline MacCallum, who is the medical director of the Greenleaf Medical Clinic and a clinical assistant and adjunct professor at UBC, explains that structurally, psilocybin is like serotonin. “This can lead to an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety effect,” MacCallum says. The medical community has heard that some patients have experienced visual distortions like hallucinations, powerful emotional experiences or self-reflective insights, all of which MacCallum says can lead to new ways of thinking. 

READ: How the zero-waste movement is changing fine-dining

Numinus and other Canadian health companies are considering psilocybin for the treatment of addiction, depression, anxiety, PTSD and, perhaps most notably, end-of-life distress via intentionally pursued trips on the drug. A landmark 2006 Johns Hopkins study found that psilocybin might “occasion mystical-type experiences,” and NYU Langone published findings in August of 2022 that saw a significant reduction in alcohol dependence when subjects combined psilocybin and psychotherapy. Following these studies, among others, psilocybin has emerged in the medical community as an exciting potential treatment. But it remains illegal in this country outside of clinical trials and exceptions via Health Canada’s Special Access Program—which provides drugs with clinical promise to treat serious or life-threatening conditions—and through certain exemptions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, in place since 2020. 

Psilocybin research is necessarily slow and expensive. Spencer Hawkswell, who is a lobbyist and the CEO of non-profit group TheraPsil (which advocates for psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy), is working in support of a lawsuit against the government of Canada and the current federal minister of health to allow patients access to psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy; Hawkswell projects that it could be legal and regulated in a little over a year. 

This moment in psilocybin is one of duality. At the same time as it’s being studied for therapeutic use, it’s also an established wellness trend, one of many that have moved from marginalized communities or a global majority culture to the mainstream West via curious outsiders, then influential figures and their followers, then reformed skeptics. Psilocybin has replaced weed as the respectable person’s low-key, illicit-ish drug of choice, in the form of microdose capsules, chocolate, or the magic mushroom as crudité. Celebrities talk openly about using psilocybin; “microdosing moms” have become their own subculture. The hesitant nerd’s guide to psychedelics, Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, has inspired a Netflix docuseries. 

MORE: How science is bringing psychedelic mushrooms out of the shadows 

Unlike the research, perception seems to be progressing quickly. Through recent history, the narrative of psychedelics more generally has been on a wild ride of its own, from psychologist and psychedelic figurehead Timothy Leary’s outré-Harvard 1960s to the Hopkins study and Canadians’ changing attitudes. A 2021 poll done by TheraPsil and marketing research company YouGov found that 54 per cent of respondents, without having any additional information, supported changing psilocybin regulations for medical use. That number rose to 66 per cent when respondents were informed about research findings and current exemptions available. (Perception in the straight-arrow, stigma-avoidant business world is harder to shift, but perhaps this is being addressed by CEOs like Nyquvest and Doug Drysdale, a pharma veteran who heads the Toronto-based psychedelics company Cybin.)

This particular moment, mostly pre-regulation and post-stigma, has created an interesting scene made up of casual users, dealers, advocates, investors, executives and medical practitioners. With illegal dispensaries and home growers, this industry will continue to shift along with regulations and perceptions. If psilocybin turns out to be as effective as current research suggests, it will transcend its wellness-trend status and become a greater part of recognized health care. This is already happening in the medical community, and for people who find themselves on the edge of acceptability; all it takes is an open mind. And you know what might help with that? 

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Trending: Why psilocybin could be used in mental health treatment appeared first on Macleans.ca.

At 107 years old, Winnipeg’s Cornish Library has changed with the times—over and over again. Its basement, which once hosted rousing lectures by Canadian activist Nellie McClung, now shelves Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists. The heritage building bridges the gap between two very different Winnipegs. It’s located just inside the ornamental iron-and-stone gates of Armstrong’s Point, a placid residential neighbourhood complete with million-dollar, manor-style homes. And just north, unhoused people sleep rough under the Maryland Bridge, a major commuter route along the Assiniboine River.

In 2015, hoping to make the Cornish more inviting, the city of Winnipeg commissioned Public City Architecture, a local firm, to reimagine it. “We decided to make the project about opening the library to the communities around it,” says Peter Sampson, Public City’s principal architect. “Libraries have changed a lot in the last 10 or 20 years—they’re no longer just palaces for old books.” The Cornish, in fact, is known to some of its neighbours as “the living room.”

READ: The Building: A Calgary parkade redesigned with the future in mind

On the accessibility front, Public City added a platform lift and a new, gradually sloping walkway to the existing entryway. The library’s century-old bones got some carefully refinished oak panelling, asbestos removal—surgical and extensive, given the building’s age—and generous coats of new burgundy paint on its original wainscotting to match archival photos unearthed by Heritage Winnipeg.

The jewel of the Cornish’s $2.5-million, multi-year makeover is its extension: clad in floor-to-ceiling oak, and supported by a solitary but heavy-duty concrete column, the space is made to house community shindigs and extra reading room, and to host rotating exhibitions by area artists. (The Cornish’s first in-house display is a floral piece by Winnipeg’s Michael Dumontier.) Wrapped in glass, the walls of the addition occasionally seem to disappear altogether. “In certain types of light, it’s hard to find the edges,” Sampson says.

RELATED: The Building: Vancouver’s Stack was built for both work and play

Exterior restorations included preserving the existing outdoor faucet (which provides potable water for cooking and drinking) and dismantling the long-standing chain-link fence that held northern community members, symbolically at least, at bay. Public City also planted a slew of new saplings to line the limestone patio, but left a clear sightline into the library’s public garden—and the new, welcoming reading nook within. 

Limestone slabs, sourced from quarries north of Winnipeg and weighing in at 3,500 pounds each, line the exterior of the Cornish’s addition to form a seating area. Public City planted larch saplings around the perimeter, creating a reading room in the forest.

Four Flowers, a permanent artwork made by local artist Michael Dumontier, is designed to look like a vase. It’s also a continuation of the single concrete column that supports the addition. Its flowers, made of steel, sway along with fluctuations in the air.

The Cornish’s children’s reading room was outfitted with new, concealed heating elements, recycled carpet tile and refinished original oak woodwork in the panels, columns and bookshelves. The colourful plastic dogs, pops of whimsy added later by the library, are stools.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Building: Winnipeg’s Cornish Library gets an inviting makeover appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 1991, my parents and I moved to Kahnawake, a Mohawk community across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. I was just five, but being a military kid, I had already lived on bases in Schweinfurt, Germany, and Fort Riley, Kansas. All that moving around had made me incredibly hyperactive, so my parents decided to enrol me in an Indigenous community-theatre class that only accepted children aged seven and up. They lied to get me in, and then I told people I was seven for three years straight. I was too young to realize it then, but those classes would shape the rest of my life. 

I danced, performed in musicals and learned to sew and make costumes for the next 13 years. When I was 18, I left my community to pursue a health sciences degree at nearby Dawson College. I stopped doing theatre to focus on my studies, but I slowly became depressed without it. In 2005, a friend encouraged me to audition for a burlesque show. It sounded like what I’d been doing, but with a provocative twist. A few days after my 18th birthday, I signed up to audition for the Blue Light burlesque troupe at Café Campus on Rue Prince-Arthur. I wore a pink men’s suit and a black hat and did a chair dance to “Stop This World” by Diana Krall in front of 300 people.

I remember hearing cheers and claps when my number ended, but a part of it felt odd: there was a sexual element to burlesque that wasn’t included in Indigenous community theatre, and my time in Catholic school did little to make me feel comfortable removing my clothes in front of an audience. And yet I felt more at home on that stage than I did conducting experiments in a lab. The venue asked me to sign a contract to become a monthly performer, and I was hooked.

Soon, I was booking performances several nights a week at clubs around the city—the MainLine Theatre, Café Cléo and lots of random bars. I didn’t want to give up on school, so after finishing my degree, I did two years of law school at McGill, then studied art history and film at Concordia. I was still nervous about what my colleagues and family might say if they found out I was a dancer. One night, I was performing at an off-campus fundraiser for legal and medical aid for sex workers, and I heard someone shout from the crowd, “Hey, it’s Lauren!” A bunch of my classmates were there. I was mortified, but they thought it was cool that I had a hobby that had nothing to do with academia. When I told my grandmother about my night job, she said, “If you’re going to do it, be the best at it.”

By 2012, I decided to see if I could make it as a full-time dancer. I did local shows, so I wasn’t making that much money, but I took solace in the fact that I was at least doing something that I loved. When I gave birth to my daughter two years later, making more money from burlesque became top priority. I invested tens of thousands into my act— costume pieces like boas, ostrich-feather fans, competition-entry fees and bus tickets to venues farther and farther from home. It wasn’t glamorous: I left my daughter with her father on weekends to take 12-hour buses to New York City. From there, I’d take another bus to Long Island, where I’d perform in local steakhouses. 

Those Long Island venues were pandemonium, with back rooms full of costumes and tons of performers—mostly from Manhattan—trying to make it big. It was classic burlesque: opulent productions combined with gritty off-stage bedlam. I’d get ready in a public bathroom with six other girls and run through the back kitchens to the stage. One time, I nearly got splashed with cooking oil.

My near-burn moment is a good metaphor for my first years in the business—I did what I had to do to stay in the game. Sometimes, when you’re trying to monetize your art, you’re faced with compromises that test your integrity. At festivals and corporate functions, I felt like I had a better shot of being booked if I did well-known numbers instead of creating original pieces. At other events, producers would fixate on my Indigenous roots and ask me to do a Pocahontas-themed act. Those requests weren’t common, but they were certainly demeaning. I refused to work with those people. I wanted to control my own act.

The 2018 New Orleans Burlesque Festival was a pivotal moment: I entered the Queen of Burlesque competition and did a spider-queen dance wearing a skirt with extra legs and a butt reveal. I had straps tied to my back that I used to swing my body into the air at the end of the striptease. I won that contest with a costume made by designer Christina Manuge. A lot changed for me after that. I had a bunch of run-ins with celebrities, for one. I did a private dance for Jason Momoa. It was just his people and me, hoping I wouldn’t forget how to take off my clothes. There was a new liberty that came with success. Thanks to my newfound notoriety, when I asked producers what they wanted my act to involve, they’d say, “You’re the performer, do what you want.”

I felt like I had more freedom to explore different themes. One of my newer acts was about the decolonization of Indigenous sexuality. My costume has classic burlesque elements, like a feather duster and corset, but the beadwork is the real highlight. The entire outfit is purple, which is an important colour to Iroquois people. The reveals aren’t bodily, but cultural: I remove my head covering and my hair falls to the floor in braids. I lift my skirt to reveal moccasins, not heels. At the end, I look joyful, a depiction of Indigenous people that’s not often seen in the media. It’s a very emotional dance for me to perform. In 2019 and 2020, I was named Canada’s number-one burlesque performer. Last June, I won Miss Exotic World—the Olympics of burlesque—and soon after, I was named the second-most-influential dancer in the world by 21st Century Burlesque magazine, which felt like the cherry on top. All of that coincided with a massive reckoning across Canada, exemplified by the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential schools. These atrocities weren’t news to my community. Representation has always been a mission of mine, and I don’t want to make “comfortable” art, so if my shows spark conversation, that’s a win in a different way.

My recent success has triggered a massive moment of now what? I still intend to dance until my knees give out, but I’m shifting away from competitions and toward giving back to my community. I’m about to start working with the Burlesque Hall of Fame in a production role, but I also recently started teaching at Anowara Dance Theatre, a Montreal-based Indigenous dance company run by Barbara Diabo. I remember how isolating it was to be a new artist, let alone an artist of colour. But I don’t know if any of this would have come my way if I hadn’t performed as my true self. I’m wearing many costumes these days. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

—As told to Alex Cyr 

The post Lauren Ashley Jiles is a global burlesque superstar celebrating her Indigenous roots appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Growing up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Anika Sawni was the rare kid you’d call a wellness buff: she ate nutritiously, hiked, skied and played ringette. Then, shortly after she left home in 2014 to study cognitive science at McGill, Anika abandoned her healthy habits in favour of tipsy nights out in Montreal. By her fourth year, she’d gone straight-edge—and not just because of the hangovers. “I saw my friends engage in sloppy behaviour, like regrettable hookups and missed tests,” she says. “I thought, Why is binge-drinking so normal?”

These days, there’s no shortage of zero-proof proxies for partying Gen Zs, the most alcohol-free cohort in recent history. But back when Anika was newly sober, she had to settle for soda water with lime. After graduation, she pitched a booze-free beverage business to her older brother, Niki, who’d just quit his account-executive gig at Salesforce. “For major breweries, like Budweiser and Heineken, the non-alcoholic market seemed like an afterthought,” Anika says. In 2019, the siblings co-founded Grüvi, named to evoke a fun-and-loose ’70s feel, but also the countercultural aspect of staying sober in a drinker’s world. 

Dividing the work was the easy part. Niki handled the finances, while design enthusiast Anika created Grüvi’s punchy marketing using a combo of instinct and tips gleaned from brand-awareness webinars. The brewing process is a bit more complex. To simulate the taste of boozy beverages, Grüvi’s products are brewed with the alcohol, which is later filtered out. Wine and beer were Grüvi’s pilots—plus prosecco, a staple of birthdays and showers, where there’s extra pressure to imbibe.

Buoyed by money raised from family and friends, Anika secured a U.S. investor visa and partnered with a brewery in Denver, an area with a booming fitness (and booze) culture. She evangelized Grüvi at farmers’ markets and mom-and-pop shops, eventually landing a distribution deal with Sobeys in late 2020. “When I used to tell people about the concept, they were like, If I wanted to drink a beer, I’d have a beer,” she says. “Now, they seem excited about us.”

Grüvi has 18 full-time employees and sells its zero-proof sangria and nitro mocha stout at 3,500 North American stores. Anika, now 27, was named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in its food and beverage category in 2021. At the moment, she’s laser-focused on growing Grüvi, but eventually, she’d like to make use of her degree and found a company focused on brain-based interventions. Healthy habits die hard.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Toronto entrepreneur Anika Sawni is making alcohol-free drinks mainstream appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Abby Spadafora was two years old when she joined the Bluewater Gymnastics Club in Sarnia, Ontario. Her mother thought the sport would make a good outlet for her daughter’s abundant energy. Spadafora loved everything about the gym, especially flipping her little body into the foam training pit. By the time she was seven, in 1990, Spadafora was accepted into Bluewater’s competitive program and began training with the gym’s esteemed husband-and-wife coaching team, Dave and Elizabeth Brubaker. 

Most days, she would wake up at six so she could practise for two hours before school, then leave class early so she could train for several hours more. The Brubakers told her she was on the path to a gymnastics career—and maybe, one day, the Olympics.

Spadafora craved the Brubakers’ approval, but it was hard to come by. They would yell at her if she didn’t master a skill or hesitated in a routine. As part of her training, the coaches measured Spadafora’s height once a week and her weight twice a day. Sometimes they used calipers to gauge her body fat. She learned to hang her heels off the scale to dip the numbers and hide the granola bars her mother packed as a snack. 

When she was 11, Spadafora became the first Canadian to perform a difficult maneuver called a Rulfova—in which a gymnast launches herself backward from a standing position, twists in the air and lands seated in a straddle on the balance beam. But the Brubakers always asked for more. One time, when Spadafora couldn’t nail her routine the way Dave wanted, he became enraged and repeatedly pushed her from a handstand position off a five-foot-high bar. Each time she crashed headfirst to the ground.

Spadafora believed that the yelling and the fixation on her weight were normal parts of the coaching. She learned never to complain about her frequent injuries (the list included a dislocated finger, a broken foot and torn shoulder cartilage). Even as she feared the Brubakers, she also saw them as parental figures. If they pushed her, it was so she could be better. In 2000, when Spadafora was 17, Dave and Elizabeth relocated for two years to a gym with better facilities in Burlington, Ontario. Spadafora followed, boarding at their house.

Soon Dave Brubaker’s attention took on sexual overtones. According to Spadafora, Brubaker expected her and the other girls to greet him with a kiss. At training sessions, he would snap Spadafora’s sports bra. During a team trip to Taiwan when she was 17, he pulled her onto his lap while they were in the pool, placing her buttocks directly over his crotch, and tickled her. On the same trip, he entered her hotel room at 2 a.m., claiming that his roommate was drunk and he needed a place to sleep, then climbed into her bed and spooned her.

Spadafora knew what was happening made her feel awful and that it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t process it as abuse. She loved being a gymnast, loved being a competitor. Then at night she would cry herself to sleep, thinking she’d done something wrong, dreaming of escape from the gym. “Looking back,” she says now, “I was in complete survival mode.”

Abby Spadafora, now 39, began training at Bluewater at age two. Here, she’s pictured at a competition in 1997 (right), stretching with Elizabeth (far left) and with Dave in 1997 (bottom). (Portraits by John Kealey & Jackie Dives.)

In 2002, she left Bluewater to join the gymnastics team at the University of Arizona, where she had an athletics scholarship. Three years later, after suffering a back injury, she dropped out, returned to Sarnia and got married. She tried working as a coach at Bluewater, but left because she couldn’t bear being so close to Dave Brubaker. As an adult, she rarely spoke about what she refers to as her “gym days.” She told her husband, her sister and a therapist only the barest details. Then, in October of 2017, she received a call from the Sarnia police. Melanie Hunt, a 35-year-old health-care worker and a former Bluewater athlete, had filed a complaint about Brubaker. She had named Spadafora as a possible fellow victim. Spadafora told the officer that he was “opening a can of worms.” Abuse was so endemic within gymnastics, she felt, that one case would unearth countless others.

She was right. Eleven women, including Spadafora and Hunt, came forward to share similar stories of abuse at Bluewater. Women alleged Dave Brubaker kissed and fondled them, some when they were as young as 12. They say he screamed at them, repeatedly called them fat, and forced them to perform dangerous moves that resulted in injuries. They say they were manhandled into painful positions—their bodies stretched, yanked and pushed beyond what they could endure. The Brubakers denied any wrongdoing.

The case is one of many prompting a widespread reckoning within gymnastics, as parents and athletes question why this notoriously high-pressure sport attracts and tolerates abusive coaches. The crisis was a long time coming and, by many measures, inevitable. Gymnastics’ problems don’t end with a pair of coaches or a single gym—it’s infused into the DNA of the sport itself. The question now is not simply whether it can be made safe for thousands of young girls, but whether it deserves to be saved at all.

Perhaps more than any other sport, gymnastics burdens children with expectations of extreme excellence. Many kids begin as young as 18 months and, like Spadafora, start training competitively by age seven. A coach can have an overpowering influence on how a young athlete views herself and her self-worth. This dynamic leaves kids in an impossible position: even if they’re being mistreated, speaking up could risk everything they’ve worked for, including an identity formed around the sport.

The notion that ideal female gymnasts should be young, thin and lithe took hold in 1976, when the tiny 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the uneven bars at the Montreal Summer Olympics. The feat—something no Western gymnast had done—ushered in what one journalist at the time called the “attack of the mini-monsters.” Gymnasts in North America and Western Europe started competing at much younger ages and attempting infinitely more daring handsprings and mid-air twists. Soon, girl gymnasts were idealized as the perfect mix of precious and powerful, feminine and determined. They wanted to be the next Comaneci or Mary Lou Retton or Natalia Yurchenko. In competition, they sparkled and shone and, as they performed incredible athletic accomplishments, they always smiled.

In Canada, more than 250,000 gymnasts are registered with the national athletic body, Gymnastics Canada. The organization was established in 1969 with the express purpose of advancing the sport and putting Canadian gymnasts on the world podium. Based in Ottawa, it has a board of directors, 13 staff and, in 2022, a $5.6-million annual budget. Ian Moss, its CEO since 2018, previously held management and leadership roles at Rowing Canada, Speed Skating Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Throughout the criminal trial, the Brubakers stood by their training methods. (Photograph courtesy The Canadian Press/Mark Spowart)

GymCan, like so many athletic organizations, exists to train athletes for the podium. Winning means more fame and funding for the sport. This comes with a potential conflict: an organization incentivized to pressure kids to perform better, higher, faster is also responsible for their well-being and policing its own glory-seeking coaches.

While preparing athletes for the Olympics, GymCan, in partnership with its regional partners, directs education and training for coaches and judges, shapes its gymnastic programs, and manages any complaints brought forward by gymnasts in the country. Athletes and GymCan-accredited coaches must sign a code of ethics that covers anti-doping rules and anti-racism policies and prohibits abusive and sexual behaviours. If anyone is reported to have violated the code, it’s up to GymCan to decide whether to investigate or dismiss the accusations, and what punishment to dole out if it determines they’re substantiated. In other words, GymCan has historically had complete power to make, arbitrate and then enforce the rules.

Moss estimates that the organization vets two or three complaints about safe sport violations per month. In the four years that he has been CEO, 13 complaints have triggered a full investigation and disciplinary process. Some of those involved sexual assault and misconduct charges against underage gymnasts. On its website, the organization discloses basic details about disciplinary decisions and a list of suspended or expelled coaches (a total of 31 since 1996, the year GymCan started collecting such data).

Along with gymnastics, several other sports are facing a wave of abuse allegations. Last March, bobsled and skeleton athletes wrote a public letter calling for the resignation of their national federation’s president and of its high-performance director, citing a culture of fear. Two months later, more than 100 boxers signed their own letter, calling for the resignation of Boxing Canada’s director. They wrote, in part, that any athlete or coach who spoke out against physical and psychological abuse often found themselves sidelined from competitions. And in October, the CEO and entire board of Hockey Canada resigned after allegations of sexual assault surfaced against members of the World Junior team—and complaints of a corresponding culture of silence and cover-ups.

Last October, following the public furor over both gymnastics and hockey, federal sport minister Pascale St-Onge began toying with the idea of a full public inquiry into the country’s sporting organizations. She also catalogued accusations of mistreatment, sexual abuse or misuses of funds directed at eight national sports bodies, including rugby and rowing. Until now, abuse was tolerated as the price of victory.

***

The barn-like main facility at Bluewater Gymnastics is lined wall-to-wall with blue gymnastics mats and training equipment. Over the years, it’s been decorated with mementoes from the Brubakers’ triumphs: flags from the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio, the 2011 Japan Cup, the 2012 Olympics. For 34 years, Bluewater was the Brubakers’ second home.

Dave and Elizabeth met in the 1980s as students in the gymnastics coaching program at Toronto’s Seneca College. Dave, a sporty teen, had started coaching part time at a local club in Waterloo during high school, mostly because he needed a job. He fell in love with gymnastics and, soon after, with Elizabeth—a gymnast since age 10 who grew up in Scarborough and had also coached in her teens. After the new couple graduated, they searched for a club where they could coach together. In 1984, they landed jobs at Bluewater Gymnastics, which is run as a non-profit. Dave soon became the head coach.

After his arrest, Dave Brubaker wrote an apology letter to his wife and the complainants. “I am guilty of crossing the line,” he stated. “But I want you to know that my intentions weren’t sexual or premeditated.”

Next came marriage and two sons. Both Brubakers were well-liked, thought to be trustworthy and committed. While they were busy shuttling their athletes to competitions across the province, their athletes’ parents babysat the Brubakers’ kids, creating a close-knit gym community. When the two left town for Burlington in 2000, Bluewater secured funding from the city to upgrade the facilities and woo them back in 2002, offering Dave a job as gym director and Elizabeth the role of program director.

Their gymnasts placed consistently on the podium at provincial and national events, and there were some, like Spadafora, who performed notably difficult skills. In 2012, 18-year-old gymnast Dominique Pegg, under Dave’s coaching, made the national team and competed at the Summer Games in London—the first Bluewater athlete to make it to the Olympics.

Before the 2012 Games, Canada’s gymnastics team was never on the level of major players like the U.S., China, Romania and Russia. That year, however, Team Canada finished a historic fifth in the all-around competition, only four points behind China. Not only was it Canada’s best-ever showing at women’s gymnastics, it was the first time the team had made it to the finals since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, when the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc sat out the competition. To the team, and to a thoroughly charmed Canada, the fifth-place finish was as good as gold. Pegg herself finished 17th—the fourth-highest ever by a Canadian gymnast in a non-boycotted Games. Justin Bieber congratulated her on Twitter.

In 2014, GymCan gave Dave Brubaker an award to honour his long-time service and recent success. That same year, it named him the national director of the women’s artistic gymnastics team, officially handing him power over female Canadian gymnasts’ Olympic dreams. Brubaker told the Sarnia Observer that he had hesitated to take the influential position because he didn’t want to spend so much time away from Bluewater and the kids he loved. Still, he added, “I think I’m the right guy for this job.”

In 2015, under Brubaker, Canada placed sixth at the women’s team finals at the World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow. “People said it would never happen again,” Brubaker said. “Never say never.” At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Team Canada’s Ellie Black finished fifth in the all-around category. It was the country’s best-ever showing by an individual gymnast. Brubaker told reporters he was already looking for athletes to compete in the 2020 and 2024 games.

He wouldn’t have the chance. In late 2017, based on reports made by Hunt and Spadafora, Sarnia police charged Brubaker with one count of invitation to sexual touching, three counts of sexual interference, three counts of sexual exploitation and three counts of sexual assault, dating back to a period between 2000 and 2007.

Shortly after Brubaker was arrested, he wrote an apology letter addressed to the complainants, as well as to his wife. In it, he stated: “I am guilty of crossing the line, but I want you all to know that my intentions were not sexual or premeditated.” (He later said the investigating officer pressured him to write the letter and told him what to write.)

Bluewater placed Brubaker on unpaid leave and banned him from the premises. GymCan followed suit, putting him on administrative leave pending the outcome of the criminal investigation. And yet Brubaker still had his supporters in Sarnia and the national gymnastics community. Elizabeth stuck by him, while continuing to train gymnasts at Bluewater.

Brubaker’s trial was scheduled for October of 2018 in a Sarnia courthouse. The judge, Deborah Austin, had 30 years behind the bench and a reputation for compassion and efficiency. By the start of the trial, the Crown had reduced the charges to one count each of sexual assault and sexual exploitation involving Hunt. Brubaker pleaded not guilty to both charges.

In the courtroom, Brubaker wore a suit jacket and tie, his short, greying hair styled into spikes. On the stand, Hunt described incidents that echoed Spadafora’s own experiences. She testified that from the time she was 12, Brubaker made her kiss him hello and goodbye on the lips. She also said that he would pick her up from school and take her to his house before practice, sometimes proposing that they take naps together, then spoon her in bed and tickle her belly. She alleged that he touched her inappropriately during massages.

In response, Brubaker’s defence team argued that Hunt was “bitter” she was not named to the Olympics team, unlike others he had trained. On the stand, Brubaker said Hunt had initiated the kissing out of “habit.” He added: “I don’t come from a kissy family, so to me it’s just part of the gymnast culture. It’s not something I need as a man.” He admitted that he had massaged Hunt, including touching her pubic area and around her breasts, but said it was only to improve her performance in the sport. As for the spooning and tickling, he said, “It never happened.”

The case against Brubaker began to fall apart mid-trial, when the Crown learned, then shared with the defence team and Justice Austin, that the investigating officer was in fact related by marriage to Hunt and had shared with her details of Brubaker’s interview with police. Brubaker’s defence lawyer, Patrick Ducharme, argued that the officer’s investigation lacked professional distance and that he had “cajoled a favourable statement out of her.” Justice Austin agreed and acquitted Brubaker. The Crown’s case, she wrote, was fatally compromised when the investigating officer abandoned both his oath of impartiality and his oath of secrecy. Austin stressed that none of her criticism of the officer should be taken as an indictment of the complainant: “She was forthright and appeared to be doing her best.” Her testimony, the judge said, was sincere and genuine.

With his case dismissed, Brubaker hugged his wife, and his supporters applauded. Ducharme told reporters that they would soon restore his client’s good name. The celebration was short-lived. Minutes after the judge read her decision, GymCan CEO Ian Moss stood outside the same Sarnia courthouse. He announced that during the trial, GymCan had received nearly a dozen written complaints about Dave and Elizabeth Brubaker from former Bluewater athletes, including Spadafora and Hunt, spanning from 1996 to 2017. The allegations were familiar: groping and fondling, pushing athletes to perform dangerous skills, belittling their weight and appearance, forcing them to train through injury. In response, GymCan was launching its own investigation. “We want to maintain the sanctity, the beauty of the sport,” Moss said. “We know we have work to do. Every sport has work to do.”

***

To investigate complaints against its own members, sports organizations like GymCan typically set up their own judicial systems. An internal investigation is meant to guarantee a fair process for the complainants and the accused, but it also helps protect GymCan from getting sued for erroneously dismissing or banning anyone. 

Brubaker’s defence team argued that the complainant was “bitter” she wasn’t named to the Olympics team. Brubaker said she initiated the kissing out of “habit”: “It’s just part of gymnast culture. It’s not something I need as a man.”

To lead the investigation, GymCan hires an independent case manager who usually has a background in labour law, workplace investigations or human rights. The case manager weighs whether to refer the case to the authorities, to recommend a mediation process facilitated by GymCan or to begin their own investigation. 

At the end of an internal investigation, the case manager presents a report and GymCan decides if a full disciplinary hearing is warranted. The case manager recommends the disciplinary panel members—usually two lawyers (one of which is named chair of the panel), and one sport or subject expert. Both GymCan and respondents like the Brubakers have a chance to either accept or reject the recommendations of the hearing panel. The closed procedure is at once a mock trial and an event that can destroy lives.

In September of 2020, more than a year after Brubaker was acquitted by the province, his GymCan hearing commenced. Similar to court proceedings on sexual assault and misconduct, GymCan’s process requires complainants to recount their allegations at the hearing—where the accused has a right to be present, and often is. And so the Brubakers, their lawyers, Moss, the three discipline panel members, GymCan’s lawyers and the case manager, plus 11 Bluewater gymnasts, all gathered over Zoom (the pandemic prevented them from meeting in person).

Spadafora spoke from a lawyer’s conference room in London, Ontario. The Brubakers’ counsel, civil litigation lawyer Tanya Pagliaroli, cross-examined her for over three hours. Spadafora remembers repeated questions about her hotel room in Taiwan. Next, Pagliaroli asked her about a photograph which showed her sitting on Dave’s lap in a pool, suggesting Spadafora wasn’t really on his lap at all but merely floating above it.

Spadafora found the experience traumatizing. Afterward, she had nightmares. “This is not a matter of a victim just explaining their story,” she says. “You have to prove this happened to you—time and time and time again, you have to prove it.” Spadafora and the other complainants told me how the hearing was the first time most of them learned about the extent of the Brubakers’ abuse. Hunt was deeply disturbed by how close her fellow gymnasts’ experiences matched her own.

Melanie Hunt testified that the Brubakers’ harsh methods gave her an eating disorder and that Dave touched her inappropriately. Here, she’s shown practising at ages nine (top left) and five (right), and at age 16 (bottom), sharing a hotel room with Dave during a competition in Ukraine.

During her testimony, she went into greater detail than she had at the trial, telling the disciplinary panel that, like Spadafora, she joined gymnastics as a young kid, at age four. Her parents wanted a safe place for her to do the kinds of things she was already doing, like flipping off swing sets. To Hunt, gymnastics was the closest she could get to flying. By age seven, she was part of the elite program, and the sport became her life. She convinced herself from an early age that the sport required a mindset of “no guts, no glory.” If she died attempting a cool gymnastics move, well, it would be an honourable death.

Hunt felt the harder she worked, the more likely she was to please Dave. The coach-athlete relationship became more toxic when she moved in with the Brubakers at age 12, a year after Spadafora. At the coaches’ home, milk and carbohydrates of any kind were forbidden. Thinking back to that time, she only remembers hunger. She developed a bingeing disorder and, after moving back home, quickly gained 10 pounds. She tried everything to lose weight, including taking diet pills and laxatives without her parents’ knowledge. Dave enrolled her in spin classes for extra exercise.

At 12, she says, the abuse turned sexual. First, Dave told her to kiss him in the morning when she arrived at the gym and in the evening when she left. He gave her massages and ran his fingers under her panty line. She recounted how he made her nap with him, putting his hand under her shirt and playing with her stomach. “I was living with Dave’s voice in my head and I didn’t know how to make a decision,” she told me. “I turned to him for everything.”

Imogen Paterson—shown at competitions at ages 12 (top) and eight (bottom right), and at age 14 at the Pacific Rim Championships in 2018 (bottom left)—says an uncomfortable encounter with Dave Brubaker, then in charge of Canada’s women’s national team, eventually led to her quitting the sport

One former gymnast who testified wasn’t a Bluewater athlete. In 2017, when she was 14, Imogen Paterson, who lived in Vancouver, desperately wanted to make the national team. That year, she had a chance to impress Dave Brubaker when they both attended an international competition in France. She remembers walking by him during warm-up, on her way to get some water, proudly wearing a Team Canada leotard she’d been given for the competition. When she was about 10 feet away from her coaches, Dave slapped her on the bum and remarked, “You look good in that suit.” She remembers the exact way he said “good,” the word drawn out, elastic. She forced herself to push it to the back of her mind so she could compete. Paterson told her mom what had happened on the ride home from the airport. With her Olympic dreams on the line, Paterson begged her mom not to make an issue of it. Three weeks later, after Dave was arrested, her mom told her coaches everything.

Paterson made the national team. But within a year, one of her coaches in B.C.—who Paterson says constantly demeaned, berated and gaslighted her—kicked her out of the gym, allegedly because Paterson’s parents were too demanding. Paterson found another gym and kept competing for Team Canada. Still, her experiences took a cumulative toll: shortly after testifying against Brubaker, Paterson realized gymnastics was destroying her mental and physical health. She let go of her Olympic dreams and quit the sport.

In March of 2021, after hearing testimony from Hunt, Spadafora, Paterson and eight other athletes, the discipline panel released its decision. It ruled in favour of the complainants. In total, the panel found 54 counts of misconduct and ethics code violations, including physical abuse, sexual harassment, child abuse and neglect, and discriminatory and unethical behaviour. “The Brubakers demonstrated a willful and persistent disregard for the ethical principles that governed their conduct and their obligations as coaches of child and young athletes,” the panel wrote. GymCan permanently banned Dave from gymnastics in Canada and suspended Elizabeth for five years. A year later, in April of 2022, having spent $300,000 in legal fees and believing the process was stacked against them, the Brubakers abruptly withdrew an appeal of the panel’s decision.

The Brubakers told me they were scapegoats—the first Canadian coaches to fall on the wrong side of #MeToo. They insist they never heard any accusations of mistreatment until Dave’s criminal trial. But how could 11 women get it wrong?

GymCan’s hearings and the reasoning behind its decisions aren’t public—sometimes not even to those directly involved. The Bluewater athletes I spoke to have GymCan’s final report on their case, but have collectively agreed not to share it as some athletes are not ready to have their stories heard.

The women who testified against their former coaches are now campaigning for greater changes in gymnastics. In response to the panel’s decision, they released a collective statement as the Bluewater Survivors. They commended the ban on Brubaker, but criticized the way GymCan handled their complaints. “It compounded the trauma of survivors and prolonged what had already been an open-ended nightmare,” they wrote in an open letter. “That process cannot be allowed to continue as is.”

***

Last October I interviewed the Brubakers, at first over email—while they wanted to ensure their voices were heard, and that the reporting was “balanced,” they were also nervous to meet with a journalist. Later, we spoke over the phone. Throughout our conversation they finished each other’s sentences, speaking warmly about their marriage and family and wistfully about their time as coaches. That demeanour shifted, however, when the conversation turned to the allegations against them, the GymCan investigation and Dave’s ban.

The Brubakers feel they are scapegoats—the first coaches to take the fall in GymCan’s quest to be on the right side of #MeToo, and the international backlash against gymnastics culture. To them, GymCan was forced into a difficult situation and acted with the intent of kicking the Brubakers out of the sport; they were never going to triumph at the hearing, let alone at an appeal. They insist that they had never heard any accusations of mistreatment until Dave’s criminal trial and are angry that GymCan seemed to suddenly change the rules on them after 40 years of coaching, during which they only received praise and success. They asked me, without really expecting an answer: if there are issues around the treatment of athletes, why was that treatment accepted for so long, only to change without GymCan communicating it to the coaches?

We talked about their coaching history and philosophy. In response to questions about the trial and the complainants’ experiences, the Brubakers were often evasive, explaining why they believe themselves to be the bigger victims. But if the allegations are false, I asked them, where did they come from? How could 11 women get it wrong? The Brubakers said they don’t know. In general, they tend to look away from the sexual misconduct allegations, preferring to frame the complaints as both historical and centred on alleged too-tough coaching. They say they love the sport and they want to help fix what they see as the “problem”—not an abusive culture, but rather a gap between how coaches do their jobs and how today’s athletes, who they consider overly sensitive, want them to do their jobs. “Gymnastics in Canada is being destroyed, and coaches are fleeing the country,” Dave said. “Coaches call us every week. They’re afraid. They’re saying, ‘If this can happen to the Brubakers, then it can happen to anyone.’ ”

***

Late last summer, I met Ian Moss and GymCan board chair Jeffrey Thomson over Zoom. Moss was at a cottage, and Thomson was in the middle of a long period of travelling, first to the U.K. for the Commonwealth Games and then to Turkey for the Islamic Games. Both men were eager for a chance to acknowledge GymCan isn’t perfect. “We know in gymnastics that we need to change. We all accept that. We’re not hiding behind some sort of rock,” said Moss. “We all believe that this sport cannot survive in a moribund state. It has to evolve.”

He added that national sport organizations like GymCan were traditionally set up to guide their sports on technical matters—how to reach the podium, how to excel, how to dominate—and that their staff usually don’t have expertise in dealing with abuse. Questions about whether, and how, organizations influence the outcome of complaints against their own members‚ the coaches, are fair, he allowed. He also pointed out that sports bodies have argued for years that it’s difficult for them to police themselves. That statement is true of any organization: everyone is biased toward their friends, their colleagues, themselves.

Thomson believes the criminal justice system failed the Bluewater athletes during Brubaker’s trial. He’s proud that GymCan did not let the couple go back to coaching without its own investigation. “It was a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of resources to make sure that they never coached again. We went hard and it was not easy,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for those girls and those women, but, you know, we got ’em in the end.”

To date, more than 100 athletes have signed onto a class action suit against Gymnastics Canada and several provincial federations, saying they contributed to their abuse by creating a toxic culture and failing to protect them

Last June, GymCan hired the consulting firm McLaren Global Sports Solutions to conduct a study of the organization’s culture. The firm will analyze GymCan’s safe sport policies, compile international findings of similar investigations across the world and interview athletes and members of the GymCan community. The company only takes on such work for a body like GymCan if the organization agrees to make the findings public.

The firm has completed investigations into abuse for several international and Canadian sports federations. Many gymnasts have said there’s no guarantee from McLaren that the process will avoid making them relive traumas—or that it’s meant to help them at all. After all, McLaren’s stated mission is to help its clients—in this case, GymCan—“protect and enhance their brand” and to “navigate difficult organizational issues.” It wasn’t hired to rewrite an entire sport’s culture. By the end of 2022, McLaren had collected hundreds of surveys and interviewed dozens of GymCan stakeholders, including a number of athletes who described being abused and wanted future kids to be protected.

For many gymnasts, the McLaren study is a half measure. Last spring, a former B.C. gymnast named Amelia Cline filed a class-action lawsuit against GymCan and several provincial gymnastics federations. The lawsuit states that the sport’s governing bodies contributed to the abuse of athletes by creating a toxic culture and failing to protect athletes in their care, many of whom were children. To date, more than 100 former athletes, including Spadafora and Hunt, have signed on to the lawsuit. Some of those athletes are pushing for a third-party investigation into both the sport and GymCan itself. An independent review, they argue, is the only way to ensure that, if needed, the harshest recommendations will be made: tear it all down, fire everybody, start over.

This past July, a possible saviour for gymnastics arrived in the form of a new federal office dedicated to sports integrity. Pascale St-Onge, the sports minister, modelled the commission on a similar body in the U.S., which was swamped with reports of abuse from the moment it was founded in 2017. In the 2022 federal budget, the government granted $16 million to the office over three years and appointed Sarah-Eve Pelletier, a lawyer and former national competitor in artistic swimming, as commissioner. The idea is for the office to operate as an independent, third-party investigator into any complaints received from athletes, parents or coaches.

The federal government isn’t giving sports organizations any choice but to change. In July, it suspended GymCan’s annual $2.9-million funding. The freeze was to last until GymCan became a signatory to the sports integrity office. If it signed on, GymCan would no longer receive abuse reports, investigate its own coaches or decide on disciplinary action; a case like the Brubaker one would be completely out of its hands. Sport organizations still have questions about how exactly the office will operate, how it will collect complaints, whether there will be a public database of sanctioned coaches and what support will be offered to athletes who complain of abuse.

Three national organizations initially signed on: Volleyball Canada, Weightlifting Canada and Hockey Canada. Then, in December, GymCan finally agreed to participate. It will still be responsible for keeping athletes safe, but it will no longer be the body that gets to decide how adequately it does that job.

***

It took a criminal trial and the Gymnastics Canada investigation, plus years of therapy, for Spadafora to fully confront what she had endured at Bluewater—that it wasn’t just tough coaching and inappropriate moments, but grooming and deep, constant abuse. Today, she feels closer to healing, and she’s also aware of how her experiences continue to affect her. She suffers from anxiety and panic attacks and was recently diagnosed with obsessive-
compulsive disorder.

In November, Spadafora met with eight former gymnasts for another round of testifying—this time in Ottawa, speaking at the Status of Women’s hearings on the safety of women and girls in sport. She’s joined dozens of other athletes organizing under Gymnasts for Change Canada. Together, they’re lobbying the government for a federal inquiry into Canadian sport. It can be exhausting to push for change, to share your deepest trauma, only to see the needle move the smallest bit. It can be frustrating to feel like too few care about the vulnerability of young athletes. But she’s determined to keep going. There’s too much at stake: the well-being of every athlete and the future of the sport she’s always loved, even when it didn’t love her back. She still believes it can change for the better. No kid should suffer abuse to taste victory.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Harder They Fall: Inside Canada’s gymnastics abuse scandal appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Earlier this year, the Vancouver-born visual artist Stan Douglas represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world. It was the type of career-crowning opportunity that could fluster even the most seasoned pros. 

Douglas, who’d shown at the biennale several times before, kept his cool. He attended a party DJed by Detroit musician Carl Craig, went to a few galleries to look at the work of Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and hung out with some of the other famous artists in attendance. “It gets easier and easier every time,” says Douglas, who lives in Vancouver and Los Angeles and is the chair of ArtCenter College of Design. Since the early ’80s, Douglas has been shown pretty much everywhere—MoMA in New York City, the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. So, in a sense, headlining the Venice Biennale was a long time coming. 

Douglas is an astute social critic, often using film and photography to reimagine and rediscover the past, whether it’s by recreating Penn Station in the early 19th century or Vancouver’s Gastown Riots in 1971. He also has a knack for focusing his lens on moments of political unrest. In his 2012 series Disco Angola, for example, Douglas documents two worlds in the 1970s: New York’s disco scene and the civil war in Angola.

His latest work—2011 ≠ 1848, which made its debut in Venice—offers a similar juxtaposition. The exhibit is made up of two parts: a series of photographs showing political protests from 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the London riots) and a two-screen video installation depicting a hip-hop cypher, which involves freestyle rapping. At first glance, each protest image looks like a photograph taken in real time, as if Douglas documented the incidents as they happened. But he didn’t: these pictures are fabrications, made by digitally rendering models and props onto a photo template. To recreate each scene, Douglas researched the events, examining photos, articles and videos­—anything to help him reimagine the moment. The result is that Douglas becomes an omniscient storyteller, able to re-examine history by packing complex political turmoil into a single, striking image. 

The video installation is deceptive, too. It features two screens on opposite sides of the room, facing each other. On one, the U.K. grime artists TrueMendous and Lady Sanity; on the other, the Egyptian mahraganat artists Joker and Raptor, who play electronic folk music. As the videos play on separate screens, it seems like the artists are rapping back and forth in a call-and-response, listening intently before delivering their rebuttal. Think again. Each video was filmed separately and stitched together afterwards, merely creating the appearance of a live dialogue. 

So what does it all mean? Well, there are some clues in the title of the exhibit. Starting in 1848, there was a series of political upheavals in Europe, known as the Springtime of the People, that brought sweeping changes to governance but largely ended in failure. As the ≠ symbol (which means “does not equal”) indicates in the exhibit’s title, Douglas thinks these years were similar but not quite the same. In 2011, events like the Arab Spring were politically promising but didn’t bring many tangible changes. “The events of 2011 were policed and ignored,” says Douglas. 

With the video installation, Douglas uses music to draw a connection between the uprisings. During the London riots, grime became an unofficial soundtrack of the movement; throughout the Arab Spring, mahraganat music played a similar role. Douglas wants to offer a utopian idea of how those two cultures could have communicated using music, which overcomes language and geographic barriers. He shows the artists in conversation, connecting, without them ever interacting at all.

Since the biennale, 2011 ≠ 1848 has been sweeping across Canada, with stops at the Polygon in Vancouver, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and, most recently, the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, where it’s on display from January to April. Here, Douglas describes how he created some of his most indelible images.

1: Vancouver, 15 June 2011

STAN DOUGLAS: “The people who rioted following the Canucks’ loss in the Stanley Cup enjoyed upturning the power dynamic. Vancouver is a place that’s inequitable. People can’t afford to buy or rent, which leads to a general sense of discontent. For the plate shot showing the background, we had to recreate the old Canada Post building using CGI, because it’s now being renovated by Amazon. In the middle, that’s the same model of truck that was burned at the protest. We found the truck and hired a pyrotechnical team, who lit it on fire at the PNE Amphitheatre in Vancouver. We used some of the same performers who appeared in another shot we did depicting Occupy Wall Street, except they’re shot from the front here. All the costumes are historically accurate based on what people were wearing in reference photographs.” 

2: Tunis, 23 January 2011

“This event took place near the beginning of the Arab Spring. I first saw images of it in European news footage. People were out in the streets, talking politics, disobeying curfew. Early on, there was a lot of optimism. The police weren’t arresting anyone. But the revolution didn’t pan out the way everyone wanted. We planned to shoot the plate shot from a hotel across the street, where most of the news coverage was filmed during the event. But the hotel has since been condemned, so we stationed our photographer at an office building next door. When I’m directing shoots remotely, I give the photographer direction over emails and phone calls—lots of back and forth. The people in this image are also performers.”

3: London, 9 August 2011 (Pembury Estate)

“This image depicts the London riots, following the shooting of a 29-year-old Black man named Mark Duggan. I went back to the location six years after the event. During my research, it took me a while to figure out where everything happened. I got GPS coordinates by referencing hours of Sky News footage of the event and Google Maps, and then I flew overhead in a helicopter and shot my plate shot. I chose this vantage point because it showed the entire housing estate. Once I had the backdrop, I had to add the protesters, police, onlookers, fire and smoke, which we clipped from video footage of the actual event. I enhanced the flames and smoke with CGI.”

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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These days, companies won’t be able to entice their employees back to the in-person grind with any old cubicle set-up—new offices will have to dazzle. One such design statement is the Stack, a brand-new 37-storey tower in the heart of Vancouver’s business district. Upon its completion at the tail end of 2022, it will become the tallest commercial building in the city. 

Vancouver’s Department of Planning, Urban Design and Sustainability demands that any proposals for buildings surpassing 400 feet must demonstrate design merit. (The Stack tops out at 530.) In other words, if a building is going to take up a ton of space in the downtown skyline, it better be pretty. “The Stack had to earn the extra height,” says James Cheng, architect at Vancouver’s James K.M. Cheng Architects, the tower’s parent firm. 

Its interior may be all business, but the Stack’s ground-level park—complete with a pedestrian footpath, eye-catching art and a healthy helping of trees—is also designed for the public to enjoy.

Shipping delays on glazing materials from Kamloops and stone travelling up the California coast pushed tenants’ official move-in dates back by a few months. But now that the glass-coated edifice has taken its final form, it’s easy to see how it got its name. Four “boxes,” each containing 10 floors or less, are stacked vertically. No standard cubicles, but plenty of cubes. 

Each box has its own unique layout: the ground-floor box, which features soaring ceilings and functioning windows, is a draw for big-thinking tech firms; box two has multiple open-air decks; and box three is set slightly askew for a Jenga-esque element of visual intrigue. Box four, with its harbourside views, is where any future patio parties will pop off. 

A splashy rooftop terrace, which tops the Stack’s fourth box, offers stunning views of the North Shore mountains—not a bad backdrop for company barbecues. “You can have a real party up there,” Cheng says. “It’s the best view in Vancouver.”

The Stack’s developers have also built an impressive suite of amenities. Nook, an Italian restaurant, takes up 5,000 square feet on the first floor. Elsewhere in the building, there’s a fitness centre with a dedicated studio for group workouts—like yoga and Pilates—and lots of showers. And because it’s Vancouver, there are 250 bike stalls, plus a one-megawatt, 21-plug electric-vehicle charging station in the Stack’s expansive lower parking area. Remember commuting? 

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Building: Vancouver’s Stack was built for both work and play appeared first on Macleans.ca.

There are few dishes as luscious as a tomato salad at the height of the season. At the Acorn, a haute vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver’s Riley Park neighbourhood, head chef Devon Latte drizzles wedges of jewel-hued tomatoes with a vinaigrette and contrasts their sweetness with a creamy homemade mayo. He textures the dish with cheese and croutons, then showers it with basil. What diners don’t see are all the scraps that Latte has layered onto the plate: the tomato leaves used to make that verdant, herbaceous vinaigrette; the scraps of tomato reduced with caramel to make a savoury, silky sauce; and even the mayonnaise, made with chickpea miso and smoked tomato scraps, and emulsified with leftover aquafaba.

The Acorn is one of a growing number of Canadian restaurants subverting expectations about fine dining through the thrifty, ingenious use of ingredients that other kitchens might toss in the compost or garbage bin. Scraps, peels, seeds, cores, leaves: through creative reinvention, these change from trash into culinary treasure. As the food world faces more pressure due to the climate crisis and skyrocketing inflation, zero-waste restaurants offer an intriguing template for how the industry can adapt. Like veganism is to vegetarianism, zero-waste aspires not to limit waste but to nearly eliminate it altogether, without compromising on the quality of the dining experience. And restaurants are gaining recognition for it: the vaunted Michelin Guide began awarding “Green Stars” in 2021 to recognize exceptional sustainable restaurants.

MORE: This Iranian-Canadian food stylist is raising awareness with these stunning dishes

In zero-waste kitchens, chefs don’t throw out any ingredients until they’re well and truly used up: pickled for preservation, simmered for stock, squeezed for every last drop of flavour. At the Acorn, celeriac skins are fermented into complex bases, peach pits transform into syrups and kiwi skins turn into powders dusted over dishes—reframing food scraps into fine-dining adventures. The end result is not one of conspicuous sustainability, but of innovative presentation and surprising flavours. We go to restaurants for culinary epiphanies, and the zero-waste approach shows us what we’ve been missing all this time. 

The zero-waste movement entered the mainstream in the 2010s, when blogger Lauren Singer made headlines for fitting four years’ worth of trash into one mason jar. Interest has escalated gradually since then: in 2016, the Saskatoon chef Christie Peters, owner of the acclaimed restaurant Primal, hosted a zero-waste dinner that featured dishes made from vegetable stems, butcher trimmings and stone-fruit pits. And in July of 2021, 29 Canadian restaurants and bars participated in a global “Zero Waste Month,” designing cocktail recipes that incorporated scraps and peels. Initiatives like these signal a growing interest in sustainability from restaurants and consumers alike. They also reveal how challenging it is to shift consumption patterns across an industry. 

Shira Blustein, the Acorn’s owner, has focused on sustainability since the restaurant opened in 2012. “Restaurants are notoriously wasteful,” she says, estimating that in a typical kitchen, one- to two-thirds of all produce is trimmed and discarded. A recent federal report, meanwhile, found that kitchens in hotels, restaurants and other institutions waste almost 40 per cent of their produce. Even before the food is prepared, it’s often delivered in large quantities by suppliers, swaddled in packaging that goes straight into the dumpster. 

The Acorn’s cauliflower risotto uses cauliflower and mushroom trimmings in the stock and the potato-nest garnishes. (Photograph by Gabriel Cabrera)

A zero-waste philosophy is good for a restaurant’s bottom line because it maximizes each ingredient’s value. “If you’re paying for the roots and carrot tops, you might as well use them,” Blustein says. The process requires considerable planning, not just day to day but season to season. The staff at Big Wheel Burger in Victoria turn food scraps, wrappers and plates into compost and convert used oil into biodiesel to fuel their restaurant van. The Acorn preserves, pickles and cans as much summer produce as possible, which helps cut down on food costs in the winter. Reducing waste, according to Blustein and Latte, isn’t particularly difficult, nor does it involve special training. It does mean spending more on kitchen labour—perhaps the greatest roadblock to its widespread adoption. And yet Blustein and Latte have found that being thrifty with food scraps can help offset labour costs, resulting in a sustainable equation that has kept their doors open for over a decade.

Waste reduction doesn’t end in the kitchen—restaurant staff must consider where the food comes from, how it’s transported, and what happens after it leaves the kitchen. At Primal, the kitchen practises whole-animal butchery to ensure it uses up each part of the animal; kitchen staff use the bones for stock, then grind them into compost. 

This dedication—and the labour needed to process each ingredient—translates into a premium price tag. The tomato dish at the Acorn is $23, and a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at Primal is $32. Blustein believes that the quality of the ingredients, and the kitchen’s efforts to extract a symphony of layered flavours from each, justifies the cost. “People are always surprised by how good peak-season food is,” she says. “You’re never going to get anything like it at Safeway or Superstore.” 

To increase support for these kinds of sustainable restaurant practices, diners will have to start caring a lot more about what goes into their food: how it was grown, where it came from, how it was prepared. Restaurants have always sold us on the plated dish; zero-waste requires us to look beyond it. The strongest case for this approach comes from the food itself. “When you take a peach that has ripened on the tree, and it comes directly to our restaurant without ever seeing a fridge, it’s absolute perfection,” Blustein says. “There’s nothing better than that.”

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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When Naila Moloo delivered a TEDx Talk on climate-saving tech last February, the inventions she name-checked were her own. The first was a wee, flexible solar panel; the second, a bioplastic made from duckweed, an aquatic plant. Moloo also discussed the butterfly effect, which posits that the faintest flap of the tiny creature’s wings could cause a tornado halfway around the world. 

It’s a fitting metaphor for Moloo herself, who, at 16, is already making waves as an environmental innovator. Her body of work—which, along with the plastic and the solar panel, includes two fantasy novels—recently earned her a spot on the Women’s Executive Network’s list of Canada’s Most Powerful Women and, last April, a Woman of the Year honour from the DMZ, a business incubator at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Growing up in Ottawa, Moloo was—shocker—a walking straight-A. “In Grade 5, while working on a project about geothermal energy, I was horrified by fossil-fuel statistics,” says Moloo. “That planted the seed for me to find my own solutions.” Three years later, Moloo competed in the Canada-Wide Science Fair with a project aimed at reducing teen mobile usage: a cautionary digital wallpaper for cellphones. (Its message: “Get off your phone.”) Moloo didn’t advance to the finals, but her work caught the attention of the Knowledge Society, or TKS, a 10-month after-school program that runs next-gen Canadian geniuses through a rigorous academic boot camp. Moloo received a full scholarship.

Moloo dreamed up her solar cell and duckweed concepts while navigating TKS’s heavy-duty course load. Where most solar panels are quite clunky, Moloo’s portable prototype is small enough to fit on an iPhone. As for the bioplastic, Moloo decided on duckweed, which is relatively cheap to harvest and can double its biomass every 24 hours. In May of 2021, she successfully pitched the premise to Denmark-based bioplastics company Pond Biomaterials, whose corporate partners include Adidas. Now, she spends her days off school developing her material remotely, in a lab at Carleton University. 

During her other off-hours, Moloo plays basketball and preps for her SATs. (No doubt she’ll have her pick of schools.) Still, her growing suite of inventions is always top of mind. “One day, climate change will be the problem of today’s youth to solve,” she says. As ever, Moloo has a head start. 

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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Armita Hosseini was 11 years old when she immigrated with her family from Tehran to the Greater Toronto Area. “We lived a very comfortable upper-middle-class life in Tehran, but my parents gave that up,” she says. “They knew my opportunities would be limited there because I’m a woman.”

Hosseini, a registered psychological associate, spends her off hours styling plates of food on Instagram. Since Iran’s civil uprising, Hosseini has been posting her support for protesters on social media. Until recently, she would regularly visit Iran to see her extended family and explore its regional food culture. Now, like many Iranians living abroad, she fears for her life and safety if she were to go back. More than 448 people have been killed in the uprising so far, including 29 women and 60 children; 15,000 have been detained and face horrors like torture, rape and potential execution in the course of their incarceration.

“After the death of Mahsa Amini and reading the news about my people getting murdered by the state, I felt helpless watching from the sidelines,” she says. But in October, she came across #CookforIran, a volunteer-led movement in which social media users cook and share Iranian recipes to amplify the plight of protesters. “That’s what got me sketching plate designs again,” she says.

Food styling started as a pandemic hobby. Hosseini has long had a flair for cooking and design, but it turned into a solid side hustle as photos of her intricately plated dishes attracted nearly 10,000 followers on Instagram. Her work is not just about pretty designs: from the start, she’s tied it to meaningful causes. In one past project, “Baking for Beirut”—conceived after an explosion rocked Lebanon’s capital in 2020—she sold namoura, a syrup-soaked semolina cake, to her Instagram followers and raised more than $3,000 for the Lebanese Red Cross.

In her most recent work, the Toronto-based stylist has turned her attention to the uprising in her home country of Iran. The idea is to use food as a vehicle for awareness—not only for her people’s struggle for freedom, but for Iran’s diverse culinary heritage and the enduring roles of food and joy in its culture, even amid heartbreaking conflict.

Her piece features 10 dishes from some of Iran’s most populous provinces. The choice to feature dishes from across the country’s culinary landscape was deliberate. “One way the Iranian regime sows division within the population is by producing propaganda that emphasizes the lines between provinces,” she says. “But with the revolution, for the first time in a long time, people are united no matter where they’re from. That connection is what’s keeping this movement going, and food is an important part of that thread.”

Kurdish tribes in this province have been the focus of crackdowns by the Islamic regime during the revolution; Mahsa Amini herself was Kurdish. This deconstructed version of the salad features finely chopped lettuce, cucumber, sprouts and edible flowers in a ring around a pool of homemade yogurt topped with sumac and salt.

Iran is the world’s largest exporter of pistachios, and Kerman is known for its verdant green pistachio fields. This frittata, filled with fresh herbs like parsley, is a popular dish in the region. Hosseini adds tomatoes, pickles and chopped pistachios and serves it with yogurt on the side.

Iranian celebrity chef Mehrshad Shahidi, often described as Iran’s Jamie Oliver, was beaten to death in Arak by security forces during an anti-hijab protest on October 31. Hosseini honours Shahidi’s culinary roots with these meatballs made with fresh tarragon, parsley, cilantro and walnuts, served on fried onions with puffed bread. “This dish brings back nostalgic memories of my grandfather’s farm in Arak, where I spent time running between haystacks and wheat fields,” she says. “The fried onions look like hay to me.”

Shiraz, a vibrant cultural centre known for its wine, gardens, and artists, is home to Hafez, one of Iran’s greatest poets. It’s also a major protest site. This salad of cucumber, tomato, onion, verjuice, olive oil and mint is a go-to for many Iranians. Hosseini designed it to evoke the brightness and liveliness of Shiraz.

This dish has Turkish roots, and is a staple in several Iranian provinces. Hosseini fills tidy parcels of grape leaves with beef, rice, fresh herbs, raisins and lentils, wraps them in leek, and draws circles of pomegranate molasses around them. “This dish just brings you joy and makes you happy, like a gift, so I wrapped it like one.”

Here, Hosseini reimagines baklava as a bird’s nest on a delicate tree painted in pomegranate molasses. “Some of Iran’s most delicious and sophisticated cooking is from this region,” Hosseini says. “Influenced by the history of the Safavids and Ottomans, this Turkish-speaking city is one of the largest cities in the country.”

“In the north, there are green olives everywhere,” Hosseini says. “In between the mountains, with its mild Mediterranean climate, this evergreen region is close to the Caspian Sea. Its recipe are often tangy and sour.” This tapenade is made of olives, walnuts, pomegranate molasses and lime juice.

Halva is a common dessert throughout Iran, with variations in each region. The theme of this geometric plate is symmetry, representing unity between Iranian provinces.

A favourite childhood treat, Iranian cotton candy comes in flavours like sesame, cardamom, orange blossom and rose water. It’s often served with cake or other desserts, as in this winter wonderland design with a rosette pastry and edible flower on top. Yazd, Iran’s centre of Zoroastrian culture and religion, is known for its sweets.

This sweet, colourful breakfast dish of angel hair with egg and saffron, reflects the flavours of cuisine in this region by the Persian Gulf. Bandar Abbas is a port city with an Iranian navy base. In the third month of Iran’s civil uprising, industrial, gas and oil workers went on strike in this region to support the movement.

To check out more of her work, follow Armita Hosseini on Instagram (@cookingwitharmita).

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Every year around Christmas, Canadians living in Newfoundland and Labrador participate in the costumed cultural practice of mummering. The Newfoundland version of the tradition, which has been around for roughly 200 years,  consists of groups of friends disguising themselves in outlandish costumes made from a hodgepodge of household items. Once dressed up, the mummers visit the homes of five or six friends—completely unannounced—and ask: “Any mummers ‘lowed in?” Each household must then guess who’s hiding underneath the masks, lampshades, doilies and more—and it’s often harder than it sounds. In true Newfoundland fashion, there is also plenty of drinking and dancing. 

Photographer Adam Coish, who grew up in Labrador City, remembers the tradition fondly. “I had mummers visit our house many times in my childhood,” he says. “It was just one of the most incredibly captivating and exciting hours of my Christmas.” Coish, 36, has lived in Toronto since he was 18, but he says he’s wanted to capture the spirit of mummering in photos for years. When he visited St. John’s last July to attend his grandmother’s funeral, he decided it was time. “I knew if I didn’t do it then, it could be years before I finally got around to it,” says Coish. “I didn’t care that it wasn’t the right time of year.”

With the help of Lynn McShane, the executive director of the Mummers Festival, Coish found local mummering enthusiasts willing to get dressed up in the middle of the summer. More than anything, Coish hopes that his photo series will show the rest of Canada that Newfoundlanders are experts at having a good-old time, no matter the season. Here, he shares the stories behind the mummers and his photography: 

“Helen Mackey was the very first person I photographed in this whole series. She’s been mummering since she was 15 or 16. Her disguise is always an old man. She got different parts of her costume from her dad, her sister’s husband and her brother-in-law—her whole outfit has been passed down to her from different people in her life. Every article of clothing has some meaning behind it, which I thought was a really beautiful thing.”

“Helen came in with her friend Sharon Hynes. You could just tell that mummering was a huge part of their lives. There was a show going on right next door to where we were shooting: a bunch of teenage girls were doing Irish step-dancing. When Helen heard that, she was like, ‘We should go and surprise them! No one’s expecting to see any mummers, right?’ She and Sharon completely crashed the party, right in the middle of the girls’ dance.”

“Sharon is so full of life—laughing constantly and willing to be goofy for the camera. I always envision the colours of a mummer’s outfit to be a bit more subdued, like Helen’s, so I was really impressed with Sharon’s outfit. Apparently, she has a big ‘tickle trunk’—as she calls it—full of different outfits that she can use. She has a lot of friends who look through the trunk to find their own. No doubt the one she was wearing is just one of the many she has in there.”

“James Murphey is from my hometown, Labrador City. I grew up with her mom, Nicole. When Nicole saw that I was doing this project, she immediately reached out to me and said they wanted to be part of it. James, who is probably seven or eight, is obsessed with mummering. She really lives for it. Usually, you’d expect parents to be like, ‘Let’s go and do this for your grandparents.’ But, no, James wanted this. One of my favourite details about her is that she wears an oven mitt on her hand and her foot. That’s her little signature.” 

“This could be just another story of a creepy mask, but the most genuinely sweet woman is behind it. Jill Richards has been mummering for roughly 27 years. She plays the accordion, which I thought was amazing. When she goes mummering, people always make her break out the squeeze box and play a few tunes while they’re going from house to house. Jill’s been part of the parade, and sometimes she’ll go around mummering in different places, like retirement homes. She knows how much it makes people smile—that’s really why she does it.”

“Sharon Brophy lives on a street called Tunis Court, where a big group of neighbours go mummering together. She reached out to me and got her whole group involved. Sharon’s been doing mummering since she was four or five years old. Her go-to look has always been one-piece PJs, rubber boots, a bra on the outside and a lampshade—which, believe it or not, is a common style. People are so different with their mummering outfit on. It just lets them bring their walls down. That’s one of the beautiful things about the tradition: it allows you to be wholeheartedly yourself.”

“Susan and Paul are newbies: they’re actually from Whitby, Ontario. In 2017, they came to Newfoundland for a visit and just loved it. They closed their business, sold their house and moved here the following July. Sure enough, they soon learned about mummering through their friends on Tunis Court, the same street as Sharon Brophy. They only partook in the festivities for the first time last year, so they’re still relatively new. A couple that mummers together is a recipe for a long-lasting relationship.”

Tunis Court crew

“This crew got to know each other through mummering. They all got together and made their ‘ugly sticks’ as a group. People usually nail a bunch of bottle caps to it to give their stick a jingling sound. Then they’ll nail a rubber boot to the bottom and create a head—often with tin cans and some kind of mop for hair. The stick is almost like an extension of themselves; it gives people something to make music with when they’re all dancing. You don’t need a stick in order to be a mummer, but they’re very common. This group became even closer through mummering. It really brings people together.”

The post Masks, mops and “ugly sticks”—a look at Newfoundland’s tradition of mummering appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 1973, The Second City opened its first Canadian location on Adelaide Street East in Toronto. A year later, it moved to an old firehall downtown, which became a long-standing icon of the improv group in the city. Comedy would never quite be the same after that. The Second City quickly became an incubator for some of the funniest people in history, including John Candy, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and Mike Myers.

 And when Saturday Night Live debuted, in 1975, it borrowed a handful of cast members from The Second City, tapping into a definitive source of laughter. Soon after, The Second City launched its own show, SCTV, beaming iconic characters like Bob and Doug McKenzie across the Canadian airwaves. Canada was the butt of every joke—in the best way possible. 

 Then something funny (or maybe not) happened. In 1997, The Second City moved from the aging firehall into a bigger, better venue in downtown Toronto, with a training centre and a 350-seat theatre. By 2020, after changing Toronto locations on a couple of occasions, The Second City closed its doors to make way for a condo.

 But there’s reason to smile again: the Second City just opened a new Toronto location, with three theatres and nine studio classrooms, where the latest class of jokesters could hone their comedic sensibility. The nearly 30,000 square foot space, located at One York Street, also features a restaurant by top-class hospitality group Oliver & Bonacini. Here’s a look inside the new, improved Second City. 

The entrance to The Second City is located near the corner of Harbour and York. It’s right off the PATH, making it easily accessible for the cast members, students and visitors.

On the exterior of the building, at the entrance, there’s a distinctive red chair and a bunch of sitting silhouettes. The red, bentwood chair has been the logo of The Second City since the beginning, dating back to its first Chicago location in 1964. They’re a mainstay of every stage. Improv scenes at The Second City can take place anywhere—outer space, the Sahara, a train car—but the bentwood chair always remains the same.

The Second City is located on the third floor of the building, accessible via escalator or elevator. There are three bars and a restaurant up here, along with The Second City’s three improv stages and nine training centres. 

There’s banquette seating near the bar. Here, guests can enjoy food by Oliver & Bonacini, made in a kitchen on-site.

This is one of the three bars at The Second City. “It’s true that the more audience members drink, the funnier we get on stage,” says Carly Heffernan, creative director of The Second City Toronto. Above the bar, a neon sign reads, “Yes, And…” That’s a reference to the golden rule of improv, whereby participants are supposed to accept their partner’s suggestion and add something to it.

Here’s another bar,.

To the right, the main desk, where guests can buy tickets, ask for information or purchase some merchandise. Tickets for shows range in price from $29 to $69, t-shirts and sweaters cost anywhere from $20 to $40. To the left, it’s Theatre ’73, named after the year The Second City was founded in Toronto.

Check out the inside of Theatre ’73. It was created by set designer Camellia Koo to look like the exterior of The Second City’s first Toronto location, The Old Firehall, at 110 Lombard Street. (Hence the brick and big red doors.) The maximum capacity in this room is 160.

This is the Main Stage, also designed by Camellia Koo. It looks sort of futuristic. The lights on the stage are LED. “They can change colour, flash and move throughout a performance,” says Heffernan. “It’s a party set.” The main stage is where The Second City’s primary cast performs eight shows a week. Max capacity: 244.

Comedy nerds will love the John Candy Box Theatre, the student performance space. It features original floorboards from The Old Firehall. “When students are on stage, they’re quite literally following in the footsteps of comedy greats,” says Heffernan. “John Candy, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy all walked across those floorboards.” 

The post Inside the new Toronto home of The Second City appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Early 2022 carried the promise of a joyful, back-to-normal-ish post-COVID life. Then a tsunami of gloomy news dampened our optimism: inflation, climate disasters, the brutal Russian assault on Ukraine. The ugly political polarization south of the border crept northward—and a horde of trucks in downtown Ottawa led the charge. Some depressing trends are set to continue into 2023, but there are also many rays of hope. Canada is on the forefront of the fight against climate change, developing ingenious new gadgets and technology to reduce emissions. Drones and self-driving cars are going from sci-fi to mainstream. Hospitals will run on artificial intelligence, and Canadians will cope with exorbitant housing costs by devising clever living arrangements that come with the happy side effect of making us all feel a little less alone.

Here is our guide to the Canada of tomorrow:

The post The Year Ahead: Our Guide To 2023 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This story is part of our annual “Year Ahead” collection. Read the rest of our predictions for 2023 here.

This year, a handful of new museums and movie studios kick CanCon up a notch. Meanwhile, new stars continue their ascent, with fresh releases from Drake’s pal Daniel Caesar and bestselling author Ashley Audrain. Here’s a look at the year ahead in culture: 

1. Sook-Yin Lee will take us back to the ’90s

In 1996, Canadian radio host, musician, actor and film director Sook-Yin Lee split up with her boyfriend, the cartoonist Chester Brown. Fifteen years later, Brown published Paying For It, chronicling his post-breakup decision to pay for sex rather than deal with emotional entanglements. Now Lee is directing a feature film based on Brown’s memoir, in which her namesake character has a significant role. It’s quirky and irreverent and perfectly on-brand for one of the country’s most original multi-hyphenates, who also has an acting role in the upcoming The Incident Report, executive-produced by madcap maverick Charlie Kaufman.

2. Dune: Part Two will stage a battle of the hunks

When Canada’s auteur of moody action Denis Villeneuve signed on to make a film adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 sci-fi novel, he insisted on doing it in two installments. A good call, given the book’s famously byzantine plot and Game of Thrones–level character roster. The first film, released in 2021, told the cosmic love story between Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya). Part Two, out in November, will expand the focus to include the Atreides family’s mortal enemies, House Harkonnen, fronted by Elvis star Austin
Butler—arguably the only young Hollywood actor who gives Chalamet a run for his reigning-hunk status. 

3. Shania Twain will return as the queen of country (and techno?) 

Man—it feels like a lifetime. In fact, it’s been five years, two rounds of open throat surgery, and one surprise, sequin-soaked duet with Harry Styles at Coachella 2022 since Canada’s country queen released new music. “Waking up Dreaming” is the first single off Twain’s sixth album, Queen of Me, out in February. The song’s technopop beats and Twain’s Gaga-esque appearance in the music video feel and sound like a diversion from those cowgirl karaoke classics that most Canadians can belt by heart. Lest long-time fans fear Shania has left her roots behind, here’s a dose of reassurance: last September, she celebrated her return by posing topless with her beloved Stetson. 

4. Eleanor Catton’s new novel will give us another reason to worry about billionaires

Ten years ago, at age 28, Eleanor Catton became the youngest author in history to win the Booker Prize for The Luminaries, a historical mystery set during New Zealand’s 19th-century gold rush. Now Catton—who was born in London, Ontario—returns with a contemporary thriller in the emerging sub-genre known as cli-fi, or climate fiction. Birnam Wood (a Macbeth reference) follows two idealistic environmental activists who encounter a mysterious magnate with a nefarious agenda. Catton has said the book explores the current political moment without being partisan: the plot mirrors a real-life trend of American billionaires (including Trump adviser Peter Thiel) purchasing doomsday bunkers in rural New Zealand.

5. Daniel Caesar, pal of Drake, Bieber and the Weeknd, will get us grooving

Signing to Republic Records was a big deal for the 27-year-old Caesar, who previously shied away from major labels. But that was before the Grammy win, before the 2021 “Peaches” duet with Justin Bieber that went to No. 1 on the Billboard 100 chart, before the Biebs crashed his 2022 Coachella set—topless—to perform their hit. While often compared to fellow Six stars Drake and the Weeknd, Caesar draws more from gospel and soul influences. Last year’s single “Please Do Not Lean,” featuring the Toronto collective BadBadNotGood, is a ’90s makeout jam with hints of Motown. 

6. Three museums will inject new life into history

A trio of history hubs are upping Canada’s cultural cred, starting with the Canadian Canoe Museum, a new $40-million, 65,000-square-foot facility located on the shores of Little Lake in Peterborough, Ontario, and shaped like—you guessed it—a canoe. Inside are hundreds of examples of our national transport vehicle, including birchbark versions from the 1700s and one that belonged to prolific paddler Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Further north, the Yellowknife Historical Society Museum and Interpretive Centre will explore the history and geology of the city (the site is located on a former gold mine). And in Montreal, the Holocaust Museum is breaking ground this year on a new $90-million complex, with classrooms, exhibition spaces and a memorial garden. Its mandate—to advance human rights, and fight anti-Semitism and discrimation—couldn’t be more timely.

7. Ashley Audrain’s latest page-turner will give us the creeps

A boy falls from his bedroom window after a boozy neighbourhood barbecue, and his family and neighbours must reckon with their roles in the horrible incident. Toronto author Audrain’s new novel, The Whispers, features the same brand of engrossing domestic noir that made her a global superstar with 2021’s The Push, a dark take on motherhood that earned a $3-million deal, weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and a forthcoming screen adaptation. In The Whispers, the drama plays out over a single week and is recounted by three narrators. 

8. Hollywood North will heat up

The battle over which Canadian city can lay claim to the “Hollywood North” title gets a little more interesting with three major film hubs adding to their arsenals in 2023. Montreal’s new $53-million studio, MELS 4, will focus on attracting more blockbusters (movies from the X-Men and Transformers series were shot at MELS locations). In Toronto, Basin Media Hub will plant eight new soundstages along the Port Lands and generate a predicted quarter of a billion dollars in economic activity. And in Burnaby, an LED volume soundstage will feature the same kind of cutting-edge tech that produced Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian. All of which is to say that Hollywood could eventually be known as Canada South. 

9. Canadian superheroes will prevail over Marvel villains

Marvel has discovered Canada. Iman Vellani, a 20-year-old actor from Markham, Ontario, is the superhero in Ms. Marvel, and Orphan Black Emmy-winner Tatiana Maslany stars in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (both shows are on Disney+). The Canadianization of the comic book universe will continue in a series about an Indigenous superhero: Marvel’s Echo, a spinoff of 2021’s Hawkeye, tells the story of a young deaf woman who must contend with her special powers and her ancestral roots. The titular role is played by Native American actress Alaqua Cox, and the supporting cast is a who’s-who of Indigenous Canadian talent: veterans Tantoo Cardinal and Graham Greene, and newcomers Devery Jacobs and Cody Lightning.

10. The natural world will get a glow-up with a high-tech art experience

Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art is one of 10 international locations to simultaneously host “Seeing the Invisible,” an augmented-reality exhibit that places virtual art against natural backdrops (in Toronto, the leafy hectares of Sorauren Park and High Park). The out-there art pieces—including original work by acclaimed artists such as Ai Weiwei and Pamela Rosenkranz—explore the slippery boundaries between art and technology and inspire contemplation of the fragility of nature. No fancy headsets required—just download the app and show up at the GPS-marked locations. And we suggest you bring your Airpods: some of the pieces include complementary soundscapes.

This story is part of our annual “Year Ahead” collection. Read the rest of our predictions for 2023 here.

Correction: This article originally referred to Charlie Kaufman as the producer of the film, The Incident Report. Kaufman is the film’s executive producer. 

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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