Director’s Italian outing a bittersweet journey

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This article was published 31/08/2019 (2455 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Road to the Lemon Grove is a movie so steeped in Italian culture, it should probably be served with a full-bodied Malvasia.

It’s the story of a man (Charly Chiarelli) who travels to Sicily to make peace with the spirit of his recently deceased father. In contrast to that dramatic premise, the film is very much a comedy, as Chiarelli’s Calogero befriends an Italian movie star (Rossella Brescia) and is obliged to make peace between the warring factions of his mother and father’s extended families, even as his father’s spirit (also played by Chiarelli) finds himself stuck at the Pearly Gates awaiting admission.

The story raises the question: How did this movie end up in the hands of a Manitoba Mennonite from the village of Halbstadt near Altona?

Director Dale Hildebrand, on the phone from his home base in Toronto, explains the basics:

“When I moved to Toronto, I first moved into the Italian neighbourhood,” he says. “I fell in love with the Italian community and I eventually married into the Italian community… so I am — how do you say? — famiglia.

“A lot of the inspiration came from my wife and her family and the great sense of humour they have… and their love of life.”

Before this film, Hildebrand was known primarily as a cinematographer, with credits including the Paul Gross-directed war movie Hyena Road. (In addition to the Manitoba filming, Hildebrand accompanied Gross to shoot location footage in Jordan.) While he did briefly study theatre at the University of Winnipeg, his career started in earnest in Toronto, where he studied film at York University.

Lemon Grove started in a roundabout way, he recalls.

“While I was working in this industry, I was commissioned to do a documentary on Italian immigrants,” he says. “And during the making of that, I ran into a guy who does these one-man stage plays. Like Nia Vardalos did for My Big Fat Greek Wedding, he did these Sicilian Italian one-man plays.”

Thus Hildebrand first met Chiarelli, whose stage shows Cu’Fu and Mangiacake created rich soil in which Lemon Grove could be planted.

“The story he was telling was very similar to the story I wanted to tell,” Hildebrand says. “I jumped in and it sort of poured out. We collaborated on a lot of elements, we brought in a lot of real-life stories from from his side and from my side, and we merged them into the script.”

As it turned out, the theme of a son coming to terms with his deceased father proved to strike close to home for Hildebrand.

“The day we went into preproduction, my own father passed away,” he says. “So that became a big part of the journey of making this film. In fact, six other members of the crew lost their fathers while making it, and my mother passed away about six weeks ago in Manitoba just as we were completing the film. “So it’s been a strange happenstance and it’s caused some soul-searching,” he says. “It carries with you.”

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Here’s another unexpected rural Manitoba element to a movie largely set in Sicily. The voice of God we hear, denying an old man an easy path to paradise, belongs to none other than Loreena McKennitt, the internationally acclaimed Celtic songstress from Morden.

McKennitt and Hildebrand are just friend-of-a-friend acquaintances, but when someone comes calling to offer you the voice of God, you give it consideration.

“I asked my staff first,” McKennitt says with a laugh on the phone. “‘I’ve been approached to be the voice of God. What do you think?’ And it was: ‘Oh, yes, definitely do that.’

“The fact that he chose a female voice, and one that wasn’t too bombastic, that was an interesting creative choice.”

McKennitt, who lives on a farm outside of Stratford, Ont., had a long flirtation with an acting career that began on Rainbow Stage and culminated in the four years she spent at the Stratford Festival, all before her 1985 debut album Elemental decisively shifted her focus to music.

“When I moved to Stratford, I had auditioned in a musical capacity and I was part of the chorus in HMS Pinafore,” she recalls. “But it was the time (Manitoba Theatre Centre founder) John Hirsch was in Stratford and he had asked me to audition in acting roles. I went on to study and perform the part of Portia in Julius Caesar when (Winnipeg-born Broadway star) Len Cariou was playing Brutus.”

McKennitt was familiar enough with the process that she was in no way dismayed when it came time to perform her part — recorded at her own dining room table in her home.

“I’d been around the building of films off and on over the years, and I am not unfamiliar with the slow assembly of parts that entails,” she says.

In yet another Manitoba connection, McKennitt had just heard of the death of Winnipeg Folk Festival founder Mitch Podolak, and offered her own tribute.

“When I think back on the origins of my career, I feel it’s Mitch who gave me one of my first significant professional opportunities, and that was to perform at the Winnipeg Folk Festival,” she says. “Thinking of his role in my own career, not to mention folk music and world music in this country, it’s a huge loss, really.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing