Engagement is a top priority for every filmmaker. Or at least it should be.
For Victoria screenwriter-producer Joel H. Brewster, subversion runs a close second. “I call my writing philosophy ‘tricking people to eat their veggies,’ ” he said. “That is the best way to do it in entertainment. Get Out was a good example of that.”
Jordan Peele, the Oscar winner who wrote and directed Get Out, Us, and Nope, has made sly political satires his stock-in-trade, and uses the horror genre as the vessel in which to deliver his message. Brewster, 36, is mining the same territory with his recent runs of films, including The Victoria I Know, a 20-minute short he wrote and produced as part of a new initiative aimed at showcasing the work of Black filmmakers in B.C. and Alberta.
The film stars Kiomi Pyke as Amber Ryley, a Black photographer struggling to find her personal and creative identity. Brewster gives viewers a look into life as a person of colour in Victoria, but but does so subtly and purposefully.
“Whenever racism is tackled in a lot of films, it is very, very overt. That was something our [production] team wanted to tackle with this. Our team is made up of people of colour, for the most part, and immigrants, too, so we looked at it from a number of different perspectives.”
Brewster’s project was greenlit by Storyhive, the Telus-funded initiative that offers production and distribution opportunities for up-and-coming artists. The Victoria I Know is one of several films created through Storyhive’s first-ever Black Creators Edition, the results of which are available for free on Telus Optik TV and on Storyhive’s YouTube channel.
Brewster was born in England but has lived in Victoria since 1992. He currently works for the Times Colonist as a digital marketing and advertising consultant.
He received $26,000 in funding through Telus and Creative BC to create, finance and finish the project. The majority of the film, which was directed by Mik Narcisco, was shot in Victoria, though some interiors were filmed in Vancouver. Work on the screenplay began in 2021, but the film came into being over the span of a year, he added.
It is the second time Brewster has had a project funded by Telus through its Storyhive program. He also wrote and produced The Man in the Rabbit Mask, a five-minute horror short that was released with financing from Storyhive in 2017, one of seven films Brewster has produced, written or co-written since 2016.
The father of two is a horror film aficionado, and The Victoria I Know is given an unxpected twist in the second half, when a shadowy figure hinted at in some early scenes is finally given a name: Martha Ann Telfer.
The screenwriter drew a parallel between his familial roots in Barbados and those of Telfer, the Barbados-born mother of Sir James Douglas, the former governor of Vancouver Island.
Telfer is someone he wanted to explore on screen, after learning about Douglas’s mixed-race heritage much later in life, Brewster said. “I had never heard that mentioned before,” he said, providing additional subtext to The Victoria I Know. “I only found out about it four years ago. It was all new to me.”
For that reason, he hopes his film finds an audience in Victoria. “I’d love for people to share it. I’m trying to get these types of stories out there for more people to see.”
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