Halifax filmmaker’s Black Cop questions complacency

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This article was published 31/05/2018 (3044 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In Canadian dramatic film, it is a bit of a cliché that filmmakers will hedge when it comes to setting the action within the specific Canadian locations on their films. Rendering locations deliberately nebulous is generally done so that their films have sales potential in the vast American film marketplace.

But it’s best not to paint filmmaker Cory Bowles with that particular brush. He had good reason to be vague about the Halifax location of his movie Black Cop, a story about a black police officer driven over the edge by the racism of his fellow officers, compounded by the complacency of the white citizenry he serves. The officer, played by Ronnie Rowe, embarks on a campaign of vengeance, treating white citizens with the same casual violence white officers may mete out to black citizens.

Born in Montreal before his family moved to Truro, N.S., Bowles (who divides his residences between Halifax and Toronto) acknowledges Halifax has “had its fair share of racial tension from the riots in the ’90s to (the ’60s demolition of) Africville, to the current studies we’ve had where it was discovered that minorities in Halifax are more likely to be pulled over.”

“It kind of goes without saying that those kinds of interactions are pretty universal, at least here in North America,” Bowles says in a phone interview. “We’ve all had our moments of being profiled or intimidated or having things happen to us in that situation.”

Bowles chose not to set his story specifically in Halifax, however.

“It was deliberate because I find when you make movies like this, it tends to put the responsibility on the place you’re setting it,” he says. “So if I make it specific to Halifax, it’s a Halifax problem.”

“I find it’s weirdly dismissive when you do that,” he says, adding that decision has paid off when the film was screened throughout North America.

“A lot of the places where we showed it, everywhere from St. Louis to New York, they were feeling like it was their town,” he says. “So that was kind of interesting.”

The film invokes the Black Lives Matter movement within the first few seconds of the film, and Bowles says Canadians cannot be too complacent about that movement reflecting a solely American issue.

“Of course, it’s a little different in the States, there’s a lot more tragedies there,” he says. “But we have our tragedies here when things escalate quickly.”

Bowles, 44, who might be most easily recognized for his acting role of Cory in the series Trailer Park Boys, says his experience taking the film to festivals has been “all over the board, from one end of the spectrum to the other.

“Most of it has been good. Some of it has been sad,” he says. “People have shared a lot of their own stories.”

“But other times, I think it was in Kansas where we had a gentleman who was quite adamant to tell me that he bled what he called ‘Republican red’ and he said the film was not enjoyable for him, but it changed his perspective.

“And I’m not setting out to do that with anyone, but that was really impressive,” he says. “It’s great if (the film) could create empathy.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing