West side story

>> A Caribbean immigrant community confronts violence in the engaging drama A Winter Tale

by MALCOLM FRASER

In Toronto’s west-end Parkdale neighbourhood, a 10-year-old boy is killed by a stray bullet in a street drug deal. The boy’s immigrant Caribbean community struggles to deal with the tragedy, caught between the streets’ anti-snitching code of honour and a collective desire for solutions to put an end to the violence. Such is the scenario of A Winter Tale, a powerful new drama from director Frances-Anne Solomon.

Gene (Peter Williams) is a middle-aged social worker and Trudeau-era immigrant who tries to organize a support group for black men to address the neighbourhood’s issues; the men who join the group, and those who hang around the roti joint where they meet, represent the scope of the community.

DX (Michael Miller) is a young student and parent who works as a street dealer to make ends meet; Lloyd (R.O. Glasgow) is the drug boss whose financial support the neighbourhood grudgingly accepts; Ian (Peter Bailey) is a young man who left the area after his brother was killed in an earlier shooting, and finds himself drawn back in to make peace with his past, and Clip (P. Barrington) is an unbalanced, heavily medicated street dealer who struggles with the secrets he knows about the shooting.

The film is the end product of several years’ work for Solomon, who conceived of the project as a means to delve deeper, beyond media stereotypes of the black community in the wake of several similar shootings in T.O. Drawing on her background in improvisational theatre, she workshopped with the cast over three years, and the effort pays off, with the actors deeply inhabiting their characters and capturing a genuine sense of community spirit between them.

As could be expected from a low-budget Canadian film, A Winter Tale has moments of overwrought drama and earnest dialogue, as well as a kind of kitchen-sink political correctness that comes from trying to fit in every single possible issue that’s relevant to its characters’ community. But its faults are overcome by its principled approach and engaging feel, as well as the sheer, refreshing novelty of seeing an under-represented and much-stereotyped community having the chance to speak in its own voices.

A winter tale screens during kasserian
ingera weekend at the grande
bibliothèque,march 28–30

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