A Look Inside the 2021 Toronto Black Film Festival

Another Canadian film festival that’s enduring the pandemic, the Toronto Black Film Festival,  has moved online for it’s 2021 celebration of black filmmaking and stories. Running from February 10-21st, this year’s Toronto Black Film Festival features a carefully curated selection of features, shorts, conferences, industry talks, and guest speakers. There’s programming for kids, musical performances, and 154 total films from 25 different countries. It has traditionally been a wonderful festival, but now the Toronto Black Film Festival has the added power of pulling people together at a politically, economically, and emotionally fraught time when having a sense of community means more than ever before. 

Although most films will be available to screen online for the same amount of time across the festival’s duration, the designated Opening Film is the American made indie Foster Boy, a run-of-the-mill courtroom drama and crowd pleaser that earns major points for shining a light onto a topic that gets precious little coverage.

Matthew Modine stars as Michael Trainer, a well paid, staunchly conservative, private jet riding corporate lawyer who’s forced by a judge (Louis Gossett Jr.) – and per his agreement with the bar association – to take on the case of a troubled Chicago teenager named Jamal (quickly rising star Shane Paul McGhie) in a civil case against the for-profit foster care system that led to his abuse, neglect, and rape at a young age. The case has dragged on for six years because no one wants to take it, and the traumatized, stand-offish Jamal keeps refusing settlement offers. Although Michael initially dismisses Jamal as an irredeemable thug, the lawyer quickly discovers that the boy’s story checks out, and that the cover-up of abuse reaches further than expected.

Directed by Youssef Delara, written by Jay Paul Deratany, and executive produced by Shaquille O’Neal, Foster Boy never met an endangered child or courtroom drama cliche that it didn’t want to immediately embrace. There’s an eminently boo-able villain (played with welcome understatement by Julie Benz), whistleblowers that are scared to come forward, evidence planting and tampering, impassioned speeches, objections that are arbitrarily sustained and overruled depending on the plot’s whims, brushes with danger, suppressed documents, impassioned speeches, cynical hearts growing larger, and a fair bit of white saviouring. Foster Boy is as true to a formula as most films tend to get, and the film’s frankly unbelievable opening gets things off to a rocky start.

But the performances – particularly from McGhie and Modine – become worthy of the material whenever Foster Boy starts to have frank conversations about how for-profit, privatized care giving ventures often treat human beings like products. At a time when a great number of people are starting to question the effectiveness of privatization – especially when it comes to the health and well being of others – Foster Boy offers necessary and impassioned food for thought. The overall plot and story of Foster Boy isn’t challenging, but within that static framework lies a message that bears repeating, especially at a point when resources are reaching a breaking point for the underprivileged.

A better film that has also taken on a new form of relevancy is Mia Donovan’s harm reduction documentary Dope is Death, which premiered last spring at Hot Docs.

Dope is Death looks at how one community based treatment centre in the South Bronx employed acupuncture to help curb the spread of a massive heroin epidemic that was ravaging the community. A joint effort spearheaded by the Black Panthers and the Latinex run and founded Young Lords in the 1960s, it turned a local hospital formerly known around the neighbourhood as “The Butcher Shop” into a vital detox centre that the community had been demanding for years. It was still an uphill battle, however, as attitudes towards acupuncture have been sometimes dismissive, and the groups helping to run the centre were constant targets of FBI and CIA surveillance.

Throughout the first half of Dope is Death, Donovan weaves an airtight oral history of the centre’s creation, ethos, and practices straight from the people who lived through the era (including a Canadian connection to a Montreal acupuncture pioneer), with an eye towards similarly inspired practitioners and addicts who’ve picked up where the Panthers and Lords left off. That’s fascinating on its own, but the film starts tackling bigger topics of race, class, and economics in the second half, when talk switches to the difficulties of funding large scale social reforms and revolutions. That’s a much larger topic that leaves the briskly paced Dope is Death feeling a little too short, but hopefully this is the kind of work that inspires a new generation of social advocates just the same.

A true must-see at this year’s festival – and a fellow Hot Docs 2020 alum – is the Centrepiece Film, director Michèle Stephenson intense and incendiary documentary, Stateless, an examination the growing (but always present) racial divide between the nations on the island of Hispaniola, which won the Special Jury Prize for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at that festival.

Despite having a somewhat open border between economically impoverished Haiti and the comparatively better off Dominican Republic, relations between the countries couldn’t be frostier. Dating back nearly a century, DR governments have sought to cleanse their country of any Haitian influence. In 1937, then dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the outright slaughter of Haitians in an effort to “whiten” the Dominican Republic, and as recently as 2013 (despite token advancements), the country revoked the citizenship of Dominicans of Haitian descent retroactive to 1929, leaving thousands of people without a country.

Stephenson looks at this frequently unreported genocide by way of exclusion through the eyes of a lawyer and family woman turned political hopeful, a man trying desperately to be reunited with his children, and a middle aged, privileged, female backer of an increasingly empowered protectionist movement that believes efforts to divert the tide of Haitian immigrants don’t go far enough.

Outside of the obvious racist and nationalistic tendencies exhibited throughout Stateless, Stephenson also makes note that 80% of the Dominican Republic’s population identifies as black or biracial, and there are countless untold stories of people getting caught in the crossfire. It’s a chilling and important look at how hate speech can lead to outright violence and a populace that’s fearful of speaking up against outright injustice. It doesn’t help that the country’s bureaucracy skews towards helping the rich, powerful, or light skinned, or that the Dominican is a republic where many politicians literally buy their votes. 

These issues aren’t unique to the Dominican Republic, and other countries (most notably Kenya) are facing similar human rights struggles. But between the margins of Stephenson’s heartbreaking and evocative documentary lies a warning that this type of thinking and irrational policy making could slowly be creeping into a country near you.

The 2021 Toronto Black Film Festival runs from Wednesday, February 10 until Sunday, February 21. For tickets and a full list of films, programmes, and special events, please check out their website.

Portions of this article first appeared in The GATE’s coverage of the 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.