Filmmaker gets personal in TIFF short film

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This article was published 10/09/2020 (2160 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the Toronto International Film Festival begins today, the annual movie binge comes available in a scaled-down iteration, with only 50 feature films and 35 short films screening either online or in physically distanced screenings. This is a drastic reduction from previous years, when the number of feature films alone numbered closer to 300-plus.

So it’s that much more impressive that local filmmaker Ian Bawa managed to get into the fest with his short film, Strong Son.

Bawa attended the festival in 2016 with the short Imitations, a collective effort by MarkusMilosIanFabian, a group consisting of Bawa, Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco.

That film was a pointed satire of celebrity worship. Strong Son, by contrast, is a slightly comic yet deeply personal solo effort by Bawa, featuring his father, Jagdeep Singh Bawa, watching his son exercise at the gym.

For artistic purposes, Bawa’s stand-in is his friend, actor-filmmaker-bodybuilder Mandeep Sodhi. The senior Bawa’s words are part encouragement, part critique: “A strong back means a stable home.”

The film is shot on Super-8 film, because it started life as part of the WNDX Film Festival’s annual One Take Super-8 Event, in which filmmakers shoot a film on Super-8 stock with only in-camera edits.

“I’ve done a bunch of these Super-8 films for the last few years and the last three I’ve done are about my dad in some regard,” Bawa says in a phone interview, acknowledging he committed this time into making something that probes “full-tilt into my life.”

Bawa, 34, says he lived at home with his father till the age of 30; his mother died when he was just 20.

“My dad’s health isn’t well, so I stayed there for a very long time. I still sleep there a lot and I take care of him,” he says. “I do his laundry and take him to the doctors all the time.

“Whenever I go to the gym, I wanted to get him out of the house because he’s kind of an introvert, so he would come to the gym with me.

“It didn’t really work out. He would just sit on a bench and watch me work out,” Bawa says, laughing. “I didn’t care. It was funny, but it became a thing. I would just take him to the gym with me and he would just sit on the bench and that was it. And we would play ping-pong after.”

In the film, the elder Bawa participates in a passive way, for example, sitting on the back of his “son” as he does push-ups.

“This movie is basically about all my insecurities, all my issues with my body, and my relationship with my dad,” Bawa says.

The film subtly touches on the family’s Sikh culture as well, specifically the cultural norm that sees parents move in with their children as they age.

“Mandeep, the actor, he has a wife and two kids and his mom lives with them. And that’s not weird,” Bawa says. “In North America, it’s weird for kids to live with their parents till they’re married, but in India that’s normal. You live with your family till you’re married and then they get old and they move in with you.”

In a way, the film deals with Bawa’s own insecurities about settling down, an anxiety exacerbated by his father, who encourages his son to find stability.

“When I wrote the script, I was going through a really bad breakup that happened on my birthday,” he recalls.

During dinner at a restaurant that evening, he started crying in front of his father. “My dad was like: ‘Don’t cry! Be strong! You’re a man. Be strong!’

“He gave me a birthday card that said: ‘It’s time to settle down.’ He didn’t know at the time.

“That’s why there’s a line in the movie: ‘I’m worried about my son. He spends too much time working out and not enough time settling down.’”

The film is an effort by Bawa to allow himself to open up to his audience.

“The more vulnerable I am, the better response I get,” he says.

“It’s really hard to be vulnerable and so I hide it a lot. I even hide it in this film,” he says. “I hide it by having Mandeep play a bigger version, a better version of me. I’m hiding all my insecurities and I’m saying all the things I’m insecure about. But I’m saying it through my dad.

“For some reason, it’s hitting people’s emotional core,” Bawa says.

When he heard Strong Son had been accepted into TIFF, he was emotional. “I cried for sure,” he says.

“I honestly needed a win. A lot of people had a rough year but I needed this win.

“I’m going to miss (the action in) Toronto, yes, but this is the new world and we’ve got to adjust to it,” he says. “I’m not going to worry about the old way. I’m not going to worry about going to Toronto and partying. I’m going to worry about what can I do from home and how can I leverage this experience and the situation the best I can.”

Information on how to see this year’s crop of films at TIFF is at tiff.net/how-to-festival-2020.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing