The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
OTTAWA— “It’s annoying,” Andrée Cazabon says as she screws up her pretty face. “It happened almost 25 years ago. Isn’t someone allowed to move on?”
Her new, heart-wrenching film, Third World Canada, tells the story of eight children who are orphaned when three parents commit suicide in the fly-in native community of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, or K.I. for short, in Northern Ontario. Such is the disturbing portrayal of the social and psychological fabric in the community that all the Canadian broadcasters Ms. Cazabon has approached have turned it down. One of the boys in the film regularly acts out his father’s hanging because he was locked in the room with him when he committed suicide. But she refuses to consider changing it.
Despite her fierce commitment to bringing awareness to the plight of aboriginal children – the film was screened at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa last week as a fundraising event that coincided with a meeting of the Assembly of First Nations – her own story as a former street kid is the one she is often asked about.
The dramatic arc of her early life is always part of her narrative – even if the descent was brief, just two years, starting at 13. At the age of 12, she had been sexually assaulted while volunteering on a farm and didn’t tell her parents. She left her Ottawa home to live on the streets of Montreal and Toronto, addicted to drugs, glue-sniffing and alcohol, a nightmarish journey she documented in Letters to a Street Child, her first film in 1999, based on the notes her father sent when she was in rehab. She was evidence of how a parent’s efforts can sometimes not be enough. Her parents worked as teachers. The family was comfortable, intact.
But the irony of her comment about wishing others wouldn’t dwell on her troubled past now that she’s an accomplished, Gemini-nominated, 36-year-old documentary filmmaker (Third World Canada is her fifth film) is that the experience hasn’t left her. “It’s always with you because your journey has so abruptly changed,” she acknowledges. The independent filmmaker exudes a calm determination. She doesn’t preach about her causes. She doesn’t amplify or glorify the drama of her past. “I didn’t want to live past 18,” she says softly of her 13-year-old self-destructive self.
The stories enter the conversation easily, gently, with a laugh sometimes, a shake of the head, a shrug, as though they’re part of her everyday life, just as her 10-year-old daughter is and her parents, who live near her in Ottawa. A single mother who has never been married, she runs her production company out of the kitchen in her apartment. After rehabilitation for her addictions, years of therapy and some tough years switching high schools, Ms. Cazabon landed at Ryerson University (then Ryerson Polytechnical Institute) in Toronto to study film, where she thrived. “Oh, I was a nerd!” she exclaims with a laugh. “I took out every book in the library!”
But if she was actively distancing herself from her early teenage years – she didn’t tell anyone about her stint on the streets – she soon found that the experience would define her as a filmmaker. Letters to a Street Child began as fiction until she realized the story had more impact if told as truth.
Now empathy is her access point when she talks to subjects about their own traumas and challenges.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/news-and-views/sarah-hampson/andre-cazabon-a-street-kid-turned-filmmaker-on-a-mission/article1830492/page2/