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Quebec takes Manhattan >> Tree Weeks profiles Christmas tree salesmen by MATTHEW HAYS
Soiferman learned more about the milieu, and once he returned to Canada after graduating from film school, he decided that profiling Manhattan's Québécois tree salesmen would make for a fascinating doc. Along with filmmaker Adam Steinman, he has created a sometimes bizarre and often funny look at the phenom. The 45-minute film, titled Tree Weeks, features testimonials from the tree sellers themselves, their clients, homeless activists (who argue that tree salesmen are in fact homeless) and a police officer. Living in a trailer in downtown Manhattan for a month in winter is indeed perilous; trees must be watched around the clock to secure against theft, and one salesman shows us all eight layers of clothing he's wearing to fend off the cold. The salesmen are certainly characters. One woman, from Alaska, says the biggest difference between Manhattan and her home state is that "we don't have fags in Alaska." Though the filmmakers do interview salesmen from various backgrounds, most of those profiled come from Quebec. Soiferman speculates this has something to do with the fast--and abundant--cash that can be made from the sale. Also, he suggests Quebecers' ability to brave the cold might have something to do with it. Though Tree Weeks has its jolly moments, Soiferman and Steinman reveal a darker side to the trade. In 1994, a salesman working in New York was gunned down, mob-style (the crime was never solved). Apparently, this salesman had always priced his trees to undercut the competition. And one pair of salesmen interviewed discuss the exploitation they suffered at the hands of some rather nasty tree suppliers. Eventually the two were so fed up that they returned to Canada with thousands of dollars of sales money and the supplier's giant plastic Santa. They later received a letter from the NYPD inquiring as to the whereabouts of the money and the Santa, but haven't heard anything else since. Soiferman says he was blown away by the sheer numbers of Quebecers involved in the trade. "They really are the big shots in this business." And when Tree Weeks premiered at the World Film Festival last summer, Soiferman says he was particularly surprised by one reaction. "After the film, an usher walked up to one of the tree salesmen and said, 'You had the hardest role to play and you handled it really well.' The salesman couldn't stop laughing. The usher thought it was a drama and not the real thing." Soiferman, who's now hard at work on what he calls a hip hop/folk album (on which he sings and plays the guitar and harmonica) says making Tree Weeks was difficult but entirely worthwhile. "If you really want to make film, you have to go out and do it. Yes, it's a hard business, but you must be determined about it." Tree Weeks plays this Saturday, Dec. 19 at 10pm and Sunday, Dec. 20 at 4pm on CBC Newsworld
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For filmmaker Ezra Soiferman, inspiration for a film about Quebecers came in a strange place: the streets of Manhattan. "When I was studying at NYU," he recalls, "I noticed some Christmas tree salesmen with a truck that had Quebec license plates. I struck up a conversation with them and found that many of the tree salesmen in Manhattan were from Quebec."