Dance dance
revolution

>> Toronto filmmaker Ian Iqbal Rashid on
his rousing musical How She Move

by MATTHEW HAYS

Filmmaker Ian Iqbal Rashid never thought he’d end up directing How She Move. The London-based director, whose debut feature, Touch of Pink, is a gay romcom that was a hit at Sundance in 2004, was called in for script development on How She Move. But as he worked with screenwriter Annmarie Morais, he found himself drawn into the script and its characters.

“At first glance, I know it doesn’t seem a fit,” Rashid says, pondering his latest film. “But as I worked on it, the characters grew on me, and I could understand them and what it was they were going through.”

Rashid grew up in an immigrant neighbourhood in Toronto, where the son of Tanzanian-Canadians felt the sting of racism as he came of age. The script of How She Move called for a sense of kinship with its heroine (played by Rutina Wesley), a Caribbean-Canadian girl with dreams of busting out of her lower-class confines via her step-dancing talents. Cue the music, Wesley is joined by a kick-ass cast who compete in a series of invigorating dance numbers. Rashid manages to tell a heartfelt story about Wesley’s family woes (the film opens with her sister dying of a drug overdose), her clashes with her mother and her forays into the sometimes vicious competition between step-dance rivals.

Rashid handles the drama and dance steps well, though his first film, the semi-autobiographical comedy Touch of Pink that featured closeted gays finally coming out to their parents while haunted by the ghost of Cary Grant, might not have made him seem like the most logical choice to sit in the director’s chair. “How She Move did make more sense to me as I worked on it. This is a film about the scars of migration. The mother is a character whose migration to Toronto has failed her. This means the daughter feels that much more pressure to make it in their new world. But also, like any self-respecting homosexual, I love the musical. Doing a dance movie takes me one step further in that direction.”

But then came the offer to direct, and Rashid confesses he had second thoughts. “When I found out what the budget was, I wanted to get out again,” he says. “We had $5-million, and 25 days to shoot it. We’re talking 14 dance numbers and lots of kids in the cast. But I barged into it anyway.”

Cutting to the chase

DRAWN INTO THE DRAMA: Rashid

Rashid says the act of making a dance movie was an entirely different experience. “It’s a whole different way of shooting, and of course the editing process is crucial. It’s much like shooting and editing a car chase. It wasn’t fun in the way I thought it was going to be fun. The DOP, Andre Pienaar, and I agreed that it was best to go doc-style. The numbers were shot in Super-16, with lots of hand-held camera. The dancers were chased on the stage as they performed.”

Rashid adds that he was buoyed by his standout cast, most of whom were culled from Toronto’s Caribbean community. And a perfect fit was the lead, Wesley. “We had been looking for some time, interviewing literally thousands of girls. No one seemed quite right. But Wesley sent us a tape, and I just loved her. It had to be someone who had the right combination of tomboy, femininity, vulnerability—someone who was gorgeous but not in a conventional way. Rutina was all of those things. She’s phenomenal.”

Understandably, there were some nerves a-fraying when Rashid was at Sundance last year with How She Move. It was there that his first feature had won over audiences, critics and distributors, landing a deal almost immediately after its premiere. “The audience that came from How She Move was a mixed bag. There were critics there who knew me from my first film, Touch of Pink. Then there were a lot of industry people. During the screening, the response seemed muted. I couldn’t tell if people were enjoying it, or getting it. Then the final credits rolled and we got a really enthusiastic response from the crowd.

“Obviously, people liked it. It was sold to Paramount Vantage an hour after the screening was over.”

How She Move opens
this Friday, Jan. 25