The Hot Docs film festival opens tonight but Toronto-based filmmaker Juan Baquero, left, will have to wait until Sunday for the premier of his first Canadian documentary feature, Listen To This. The beautifully-shot film tells the story of a City-funded music program in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood; conceived by pianist/teacher Thompson Egbo-Egbo and backed by the City’s Arts in the Hood progam, Listen to This zeros in on a handful of the 40 students — there’s Whitney, the confident, funny girl; the shy but talented Jasmine; and Donta, the engaging youngster who ultimately quits the class before its big recital.
“About a third of the way through filming I started to understand who the main characters would be,” says Baquero. ”In documentary filmmaking there is always an inherent tension stemming from your choices of where you stand and who you point the camera at but in this case it was heightened. At the beginning it was 40 kids, two classrooms and four teachers but there were several kids who showed signs of eventually being the fabric of a great story.”
Baquero was drawn to the outwardly troubled Jane and Finch corridor partly because he suspected that, like his native Columbia, there were hundreds of other dramas unfolding outside the media’s tight focus on drugs and violence.
“When you live in a place,” he observes, “you understand that the reality is way more subtle than what’s depicted in the headlines. I imagined there must be another side of Jane and Finch to explore, not that I was trying to avoid a certain reality, but I thought one could look at the reality from a different perspective, in this case, from the perspective of the children.”
Listen to This overflows with hope even though the ending is not unanimously upbeat. Donta’s departure (shown above) from the film reminds the viewer that challenges prevail in spite of the good being done. There’s a magical moment when young Jasmine, working with teacher Stokes, below, suddenly comprehends that she’s “an artist.”
“As a documentary filmmaker, I strive to create something that is more than mere anecdote,” offers Baquero. ”I think the film tells a story that is greater than a tale about a few musicians going out to teach music at Jane and Finch. Anything can make a good story, you just have to look closely enough and be patient enough to find the subtleties that make anybody’s life interesting. Everyone’s life is full of conflict and excitement and ups and downs, we all live our own lives as an epic.”
At the heart of the story is Thompson Egbo-Egbo, below, a Canadian immigrant, who grew up in circumstances not unlike those depicted in the film. He was a young “troublemaker” whose excess energy was positively channeled into an after-school music program. Egbo-Egbo has since established his own arts foundation to give back some of the caring and compassion he himself benefitted from.
“He’s just an amazing, amazing guy,” marvels Baquero. ”He’s always thinking well beyond himself; he finds the time to be great at what he does but he also thinks and works outside of his own interest and that good work comes back to him. He would go out to Jane and Finch four times a week to work with the kids one-on-one, he attended all the classes . . . his mind and his heart were completely in it.”
Baquero also goes out of his way to acknowledge the contribution to his film of production assistants Amanda Lo and Alexandra Lorgu: “They were like psychologists and ambassadors with the families, without them there would have been no film, it’s just that simple.”
The debut screening of Listen to This is sold out but Live With Culture has obtained three pairs of tickets to an encore showing May 9; just leave a comment below with a working email (will not published) where we can contact you to arrange for delivery of the passes.
Social bookmarks
Scroll to the Form to leave a comment.
It’s great that stories like this are being told by local filmmakers. Can’t wait to see the film.
This sounds wonderful; I really hope there are still tickets available to May 9 screening.
Would really like to check this out. Any tix still avail?
Thanks.