Into the wild

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This article was published 09/02/2024 (946 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A feature drama shooting in the wintry wilds of Manitoba has been underway for a week under the helm of co-directors Alexandre Trudeau (perhaps best known by his nickname, Sacha, and, yes, the son of the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau) and his friend, Winnipeg teacher/filmmaker James McLellan.

Titled Hair of the Bear, the film is a survival drama shooting in Lac du Bonnet, 115 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, starring Malia Baker (of the Netflix series The Baby-Sitters Club) and Roy Dupuis (The Rocket, Shake Hands with the Devil). Scheduled to shoot until early March, it is the narrative feature debut for both Trudeau, 50, and McLellan, 49.

The friendship between Trudeau and McLellan could be a movie itself, the way Trudeau describes it in a phone interview from the location.

“We met in the officer training corps,” Trudeau says of their time in CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick in 1996. “We shared a barrack room, and a lot of laughter through the incredible tribulations of basic officer training. And we stayed fast friends.

“At the time we were both black sheep in the military context.”

McLellan stayed in the military for years afterward, while Trudeau, the younger brother of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, went on to produce documentary films.

In that, Hair of the Bear is a seeming departure for Trudeau, whose film output has largely consisted of geopolitical documentary work, including the W5 documentary Embedded in Iraq in 2003 and The Fence (2004), a film about two families on either side of Israel/Palestinian territories around the West Bank.

Trudeau says the documentaries and this feature drama share a common denominator of examining an issue through the lens of individual human experience.

“This movie is somewhat of a departure but in some ways, it’s really about following characters in extraordinary situations and seeing how human beings react under tremendous pressure,” the filmmaker says.

“This film came about through my long friendship with James, who was telling me about anxiety amongst teenagers and how it’s becoming an epidemic.”

“It became quite pronounced about five or six years ago in a wave where all these kids were disconnecting and cutting and scratching up their arms and missing a lot of school,” says McLellan, who has been teaching in Winnipeg for 27 years and currently works at Oak Park High School in Charleswood, where he runs a digital 35mm film-production program.

“And it’s still going on. It’s quite noticeable after 25 years to see the trend kind of explode through these issues of debilitating anxiety.”

In the film, Baker plays a teen girl named Tori whose social-media-centred life causes her debilitating anxiety. When she refuses to go to school, her concerned mother sends her to stay with her grandfather Benoit (Dupuis) in a remote wilderness cabin.

Benoit proceeds to refocus her life on survival skills, until a crisis finds Tori quite literally fighting for her life.

Trudeau says the film is not political in any way.

“I don’t think (my documentary work) is political. They were geopolitical. They were mostly character-based: human beings reflecting on their fate in a war zone,” he says.

“It’s not that different from being a teenager in a personal crisis with this story. She’s fighting for her life both in an internal way and an external way. It’s really a human story above all else. I always called myself a humanist filmmaker … and this is very much a humanist film. Looking at what makes us who we are, how we deal with extreme pressure, and how we found find ways to survive.”

The cast cuts across a wide swath of Canada, encompassing the Quebecois actors Dupuis and Catherine Berube (who plays Tori’s mother), the Vancouver-based Baker and Indigenous actor Sage Boulanger McLeod.

The one crew member from outside the country is celebrated German cinematographer Stefan Ciupek, who has credits on films such as 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire and Dredd.

“It’s a deeply Canadian production, cast and crew and all the rest, but to have a European eye looking at this from the outside really adds yet another twist to this production,” says Trudeau.

The film intends to pay tribute to Canada and its often challenging landscape, but also the characters who live here, who are at the core of the Canadian spirit, he says.

“It is a universal element that will hopefully appeal to a wide world. This is the Canada they dream of: the snowy forest, the wintry world and these tough, tough, generous people.”

Hair of the Bear is produced by Julijette and Same Adventure Productions in association with levelFILM. Juliette Hagopian (whose credits include the survival/horror film Hunter Hunter) is producing with Trudeau and McLellan. Michael Levine, Malia Baker and Roy Dupuis serve as executive producers. The film is slated for a 2025 release.

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