Toronto-based filmmaker Fadel Saleh, above, is a one-man microcosm of Canadian multi-culturalism; a French-speaking Egyptian, born of Lebanese parents, he immigrated to Canada in 1985. Beyond all expectation, Saleh has somehow managed to work exclusively in French since finding his footing with the National Film Board in 1990. He won a Gemini Award for his first Canadian effort, Our Place in the Sun, a French film about multiculturalism among Francophones living in Ontario. Since then he has worked with the NFB, with independent production company Mediatique and as a freelance writer and director.
Saleh’s latest film, Les Conspirationnistes, premiers Saturday (March 26) as part of this year’s Cinefranco International Francophone Film Festival of Toronto (March 25 – April 3). The documentary looks at conspiracy theorists, individuals who dedicate themselves to learning about and exposing what they purport to be government and media cover-ups of the 9/11 highjackings, UFOs, chemtrails, the Kennedy assassinations, the list goes on and on.
But Saleh’s fascination is with the theorists not the theories. “The movie is very personal,” he tells me over tea, across the street from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Cinefranco’s principal venue this year.
“My teenage son got me interested in the subject,” says the filmmaker, “because he was always looking at these videos on YouTube and encouraging me to see them. I said, ‘Yes, it’s interesting but where is it going to take you? The future seems very dark from this vantage point.’ ”
“And it’s addictive,” adds Saleh, “because you feel like now you know things the rest of the world doesn’t know, stories that aren’t being told by the mainstream media. And once you start down this path, you want to know more and more. It took me 18 months to make this movie; I watched hundreds of these videos, read books.”
When Saleh says that he made the film, he means literally. He wrote it, shot it, mixed it and edited it. In fact, he even wrote and laid in the sub-titles himself. Les Conspirationnistes is the first movie he’s made completely on his own without an outside producer or broadcast partner. He got a $40,000 grant from the Ontario Arts Council and threw an extra $7,000 of his own money at the project when the small budget fell short.
“Whether the conspiracy theorists are right or not isn’t the point of the film,” he asserts. “The mainstream media usually portrays them as stupid or paranoid but they’re not. They like to call themselves ‘truth seekers’ and this is what made me wonder is it really truth seeking? Is the truth necessarily covered by lies? Is it always hidden beneath untruths? It’s like saying a Canadian is not an American, which is true, but it still doesn’t tell you what a Canadian is.”
Saleh’s entire oeuvre has been about the search for meaning and identity, a subject that’s close to his own heart. “It’s a common thread in my films,” he confirms. “Maybe I’m searching for my own identity. Am I Egyptian? Or Lebanese? Am I Arab? French? And now, I’m a Francophone living in Toronto, an Anglophone society.”
To keep his Arabic in shape, Saleh meets with a group of fellow Egyptians once-a-week, a disparate collection of souls who have little else in common beyond their shared heritage and a desire to keep their tongues limber. The filmmaker’s description of his little gang of expats sounds very much like the conspiracy theorists in his movie, a rag tag band that comes together in specialty book shops, at conferences and online to explore their shared interest. That interest just happens to be a lot darker than a common dialect.
Photos by Christopher Jones
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