Teacher makes a leap of faith into film-making

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Aaron Sorensen was at a cross-roads. He had gone back to school to work on his master's degree in education, but came to the realization that it just "wasn't turning my crank at all."

And though he had been a musician in his earlier days, "I just hadn't really made it as a singer/songwriter and was getting too old to try again."

Then he got it into his head that, despite having no formal training, he would like to make movies, so he told his pregnant wife that he was giving up his teacher's pension to become a film-maker. On Feb. 4, the two were still together. She sat in the audience at the Canadian premiere of her husband's first film, Hank Williams First Nation, shown to an appreciative audience at Peace River's Cinema 72.

Sorensen's story about a young man and his great uncle who take a road trip to Nashville to visit Hank Williams Sr.'s grave was filmed in the Peace Country and features Cadotte Lake and the Woodland Cree First Nation community. In fact, the First Nation has a 15 per cent share of the film having invested $50,000 in its making.

Sorensen had shopped the film's premise around to a number of "standard investment type people" in southern Alberta, but had no luck in raising the $200,000 he needed to get the film off the ground. During a Christmas trip home to Dixonville, located just north of Peace River, his parents suggested he try local merchant Frank Lovsin, who committed the first $50,000 to the endeavor and provided a list of friends to hit up for cash.

"Coming up here, it wasn't just a monetary investment," said Sorensen. "They were interested in the project and being part of the project. I listed them in the credits as patron saints. They were almost like patron investors. They wanted to bring the film up here and they wanted to tell the story."

Woodland Cree First Nation Chief Joe Whitehead, Jr. said once Sorensen established his credentials the council bought into the project right away.

"When he came to our First Nation office and sat down with me the first time, he told me to look at the script and I said 'Where are you from?'

"'I'm from locally here, born and raised. Lived in Wabasca for a long time,' [Whitehead said Sorensen told him]. And we were sold right from the beginning when he said that, because we encourage our neighbors to share and to have business opportunities ... For me, part of being Woodland is that my local town is Peace River, so I encourage anything that would benefit both Peace River and area and our First Nation," said the chief.

Sorensen had been employed in Wabasca on and off since 1989, he told Sweetgrass. First, right out of school as an economic development officer, and then later, after getting his education degree, as a teacher.

When asked if he had concerns that he, as a white film-maker, might be accused of appropriating the Cree culture, he stated an emphatic no.

"Most of my adult life, that's where I've lived and those are the people I've lived among. And you know, most teachers who go to Wabasca, they live in the teacher compounds. The teachers have their compound and the RCMPs have their compound and nurses have their compounds and they fence themselves off from the Indians and they live kind of apart and when the weekend comes they all kind of leave," Sorensen said.

"I wasn't like that. When I went up there, they didn't have housing provided so I had to get my own housing," said Aaron Sorensen. "So I moved to Wabasca and I bought a little house on the corner of Stump Hallow St. and Moonshine Dr. and I got to know the people and the Elders and my neighbors and I got immersed in the rhythms and the culture."

Chief Joe Whitehead views Sorensen as a friend to the Cree people and was impressed with the way he portrayed his community.

"To have him come there was a privilege," Whitehead said.

Stacy Da Silva plays Sarah Fox in Hank Williams First Nation, a teenage girl whose mother and father are absent from her ife and, along with her brother, is being raised by her grandparents played by Gordon Tootoosis and Edna Rain.

She said she could feel the true affection Sorensen felt for the people he was writing about from the very first moment they met.

"He was very sincere and very humble and very warm the way he talked about the people that he grew up with. I knew that he had been touched by them, and they were an important part of his life."

Da Silva, part Cree (her mother is from Saddle Lake) and part Portuguese (her father is from Boston, Mass.), said she felt an instant emotional connection to her character.

"The second time that we met, [Sorensen] was telling me about Sarah Fox and there was a lot of her life that I connected to. I was going through some similar experiences in my own life. And as he was telling me about her struggles... I started crying. I got so emotional and Aaron, I don't know what it was, he just brought that side out in me. [He] just hugged me and held me and told me everything was going to be OK."

Da Silva brought that emotion to her portrayal of Sarah Fox. In fact, she cries a lot in the film. But it was not all doom and gloom for her. In the story she has an admirer (Huey Bigstone played by Bernard Starlight) who often makes her smile with his sweet and funny advances.

Another bit of comedy in Hank Williams First Nation is a sequence supplied completely in Cree from Metis politician turned actor Raymond Carafelle. He plays a chief looking to be re-elected.

The film sequence features Carafelle, Tootoosis as Adelard Fox and a plate of hot chicken wings. While chowing down on the finger-food, Chief Chicken-Wings tries to convince Adelard to bankroll the making of his fancy new re-election sign.

Carafelle said he got involved in the film when he was told the character liked money, fancy hotel rooms, chicken wings and women. He said "'Hey, wow, that's me,' and signed on to the project.

Carafelle was a real-life councillor at Peaine Metis Settlement at the time of the filming.

"At first I didn't want to take it. 'Me, an actor? Come on...' I was thinking in the back of my mind, 'Yes, it's a good thing to do it.' I did it for my grandchildren. . . When the time comes that I'm not around, the movie will never die. So I did it for my grandchildren so they could always tell their kids 'your great [grandfather] was in a movie called Hank Williams First Nation...'"

Still, on the night before shooting his big scene, Carafelle was nervous.

"I didn't really sleep that night. I woke up in the morning and I said 'Geez, I'm going to screw up this movie. I should just go home. I'll just go home, disappear and go back home. I don't want to do it..." Then he got some good advice from a cameraman, who told Carafelle to just be himself, act as though he were just visiting and telling stories, and "whatever you do, don't look at the camera."

So, that's what he did. It took two hours to shoot his main scene, and throughout it he ate chicken wings.

"And it had to be hot wings, ta boot," said Carafelle. "Like, why didn't they at least give me straight wings. I mean, we could pretend they were hot wings. And they were really hot. I ate them for two hours. I had a stack of bones about a foot high on this big plate. We had to keep resetting the camera in different directions, and I had to redo it, redo it, redo it, the whole conversation. And we finished that and they said 'We're going for a break, Raymond. We're going to go for lunch. Are you coming with us?'

"'Are you crazy to go for lunch,' I said. 'I've been eating wings for two hours straight.' When I left there I had to come back to Peace River. From Cadotte Lake to Peace River, I thought that I was blowing fire, that's how hot...I had to stay in Peace River just to sleep it off and not move. Because it was just like when you have a bad merry-go-round ride."

His painful first movie experience, though, hasn't put him off showbiz. Carafell said that if there are other film-makers out there that need a guy to play a chief, they can count him in.

"It was a good experience and I am looking forward to doing another one."

Sorensen said he's concentrating on showing Hank Williams First Nation in Alberta first and then he'll try to find an audience for it beyond our borders. Though a quick phone conversation with the director on Feb. 7 revealed that the Palm Springs Native Film Festival in March had extended him an invitation.

"Right now we are looking at Alberta as if that were our country, so we're doing our Alberta release. We've kind of divided the province up into different areas and three rural areas and metro areas and we're starting here and we're going to try and do 14 towns in northern Alberta with theatres in them and we want to hit them as hard as we can.

"We're not trying to make money. I'm not motivated by money, but I'm passionate about the movie. I think what we've done is pretty incredible and I think in some ways it's important. In English Canada we don't make films that we watch. We don't have a film culture really of our own roots. And here's a nice little movie and it's very much ours and it's pretty well done, I think, and I think the film is worthy of some kind of life, that it deserves to have some kind of life of its own. And I don't want to see it just die and get sold to late night CBC and that be the end of it."