| If you’re looking for a fish-out-of-water story, this isn’t it. Filmmaker Aaron Sorensen certainly seems to be right at home in Hollywood.
There is something unassuming about his acceptance of his quick rise to fame with his first film, Hank Williams First Nation, which premièred at the American Film Institute (AFI) Los Angeles Film Festival on November 10th. Sorensen is an alumnus of the University of Calgary and has been teaching high school to northern Cree students for the past few years. Perhaps it was watching a community of young people grow from adolescence to adulthood that sparked the idea to make a road trip film, which is, at heart, about self-discovery. Hank Williams First Nation explores a relationship between two people, 75-year-old Martin and his 17-year-old nephew, and follows them on a Greyhound bus ride to the grave of country music legend Hank Williams. Eventually, the story is picked up in the U.S. by the media as a juicy human-interest story. News quickly travels back home via television, which has a unifying effect on the northern community they left behind.
Sound interesting? The selection panel at the AFI thought so and they picked up Sorensen’s film immediately, but this hasn’t seemed to faze him. Although he was invited to walk the red carpet at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Sorensen still talks about the technical stuff, less interested in the trappings of celebrity.
"The nice thing about it (in Hollywood) is that we just have all the technical expertise and these great guys around who know everything and know all the answers, whereas when I am at home, it’s always Aaron rifling through books trying to look up this and look up that," he says. Sorenson doesn’t seem to be in awe of Hollywood’s state-of-the-art production studios and competent film-processing labs. "It’s just that here, you don’t feel like such a complete alien."
Making a film in Calgary can be an exercise in patience, and this film was a labour of love for Sorensen. With no funding from the government, he sought alternative means of bankrolling his film. It is owned by 15 Alberta business people who bought shares in the production, Sorensen himself, and the Woodland Cree. "We kind of made this whole thing under the radar," he says. "Nobody in Canada knew who I was. I had never made a film and we didn’t deal with any of the normal channels. So nobody was tracking this… project and then all of a sudden we got invited down to AFI."
Shot on location in a sleepy northern Alberta town, Hank Williams First Nation has caused quite a stir in Hollywood and Sorensen isn’t ruling out causing a stir in Cannes and possibly Berlin, too. After his invitation to L.A., his phone didn’t stop ringing with requests for interviews and inquiries about the film.
"A few weeks ago, nobody would take my calls and this week I am getting calls from major Hollywood studios and agents asking me to see the film before anyone else does," he says.
If you want to know what Hank Williams First Nation is really about, you should go see it at its Calgary première, anticipated to happen sometime after Christmas. What the film is not about however, is the politics that usually surrounds First Nations cinema. It does not focus on the moral rights and wrongs of the reservation system, or address ways to realize self-determination. Rather, it focuses on capturing the character of the people in the community where Sorensen spent so many years. At the heart of this film is a common thread that ties people in the community together.
"I lived in that community and among these people for years and I always thought that they had good taste when it comes to country music," he says. "You can go to any reserve in northern Alberta and you will find old men who know how to sit down with a guitar and play every song Hank Williams ever wrote." In looking at the journey an Elder and his nephew make to the southern United States to uncover the truth about the country-music legend, Sorensen manages to capture the legends of First Nations people and country music simultaneously, without caging them in any cinematic cliché. Judging by the response from L.A., his approach has been successful. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.