By Sam Laskaris, Local Journalism Initiative reporter, Windspeaker.com
Hayley Morin has already received an accolade and praise for her latest film.
And now the filmmaker from Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta will get some more attention for her latest work titled ‘i’ll tell you when i’m ready’ will be shown on Sept. 11, the opening night of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.
The film is about jaye simpson, an Indigiqueer writer, poet, activist and drag queen. It includes scenes of Simpson talking about losing her mother as well as experiences in the Canadian child care system.
The film had its world premiere this past March overseas at London’s LGBTQIA2S+ festival titled BFI Flare.
It was also screened at Toronto’s Inside Out Festival, held in late May and early June where Morin was awarded the Emerging Canadian Artist award at that festival.
“It was really shocking,” she said of her award. “I’ve been producing indie documentaries for about seven years now. You do a lot of projects and there are some projects where I go into and think this is going to be a really big commercial hit. Or this is going to be really successful among these audiences.”
Such wasn’t the case with the film about simpson.
“With jaye’s project, it really felt like a passion project from the beginning,” Morin said. “I didn’t really know who the audience was going to be. I didn’t necessarily know what story we were telling until we were telling it. By the time we had finished the edit and we had seen the final cuts and everything, it was a piece of work that I was so proud of. You just never know how films, especially like this where it’s a bit more experimental at times, you don’t know how they’re going to be received by the bigger audiences, especially at film festivals. It’s kind of a big lottery every time you go to a screening.”
Morin, 28, said she originally thought she’d have an opportunity to work with simpson long before she did.
“It’s actually a really interesting story and it’s not how I’ve done any other film before,” Morin said. “I got approached about two-and-a-half years ago by a production company, Salazar, based out of Vancouver. And they were pitching this second season to a webseries they had done for TELUS. They wanted to feature Jaye in an episode of that documentary series that they were doing.”
“At that point I had never met jaye. We had run in a lot of similar circles and I had always heard her name come up. But at that point I had only been in Vancouver for about a year. I was super fresh to the scene out there and we kind of got paired up through this TELUS project.”
But as it didn’t out, that project did not materialize.
“And then we ended up pitching that as a short film independently, sort of a one off,” Morin said. “Our first prep meeting is the first day I met jaye, which is a very different way to do a documentary about someone.”
Morin said the film was indeed challenging to make at times, in part as she was learning about Simpson along the way.
“There really wasn’t any pre-conceived notion that I had of her,” Morin said. “Really all I knew was her poetry and doing some research of her online and her persona and doing a little bit of backchecking on some of the interviews she had done.”
The scenes where Simpson goes through foster care files had to be handled delicately.
“We were getting to know each other, building this trust, and making a film, all at the same time,” Morin said. “It really just allowed for there to be a lot of authenticity in the story I felt. I felt like I was learning things about her. It just felt so natural to chase parts of her story rather than having my own narrative going into the film.”
Morin added there were plenty of tears shed by simpson and crew during filming.
“There was a lot of emotional moments,” she said. “But I think in that sort of process we were able to create this really safe space where Jaye was sharing herself on camera, we would take a break and we would talk about our lives. And we would have lunch and we would take a coffee break. So, it was really like building a friendship while building a film while building a working relationship with each other.”
Meanwhile, simpson is hoping viewers get a small window into her life.
“But also I hope that they take away from this that this is my life experience, it’s my singular experience,” she said. “It’s not every Indigenous person’s experience.”
And simpson is glad that life story has been made into a film.
“For me, it’s always been about making sure that my story is as authentic as it can be,” simpson said. “And when I got approached I thought that this was a unique opportunity.”
Viewers across the country will have an opportunity to see the film on the TELUS originals site starting on Sept. 16.
(This story has been updated to reflect how jaye simpson and the title of the film prefer the use of lower case.)
