Covering film in Toronto

Alias (Director: Michelle Latimer): Actor, pro­ducer, writer, dir­ector and former Hot Docs pro­grammer Michelle Latimer unveiled her first feature-length doc­u­mentary at Hot Docs 2013 on Friday, a por­trait of Torontonian rap artists and pro­du­cers, entitled Alias.

The film is a labour of love, four years in the making, an intimate look at the lives and careers of Alkatraz, Alias Donmillion, Trench, Keon Love and Master Knia. If some of these names aren’t familiar to you, Torontonians might know Alias Donmillion through his high-profile arrest and con­vic­tion, stem­ming from an incident at Caribana in 2007 where he attempted a “West Indian Salute” and fired a weapon in the air in a crowd. Out of jail and trying to recap­ture the career that he lost, Alias and this group of artists try to keep their lives from get­ting too real and over­shad­owing their art and dreams.

While Toronto does have a respected hip-hop and rap cul­ture, there hasn’t been much respect given through main­stream media cov­erage. But as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Latimer really took the time to con­nect and under­stand her sub­jects and they provide her access that is almost start­ling in its intimacy.

In one of the earliest scenes, Master Knia is organ­izing a hip-hop night at the Opera House, trying to get lesser-known artists on a bill for the evening. As he admits, things don’t start quite on time as the crowd arrives late, the show starts late, and the night runs out with sev­eral artists still left to per­form. While the con­cert fea­tured a bevy of young, mod­er­ately tal­ented artists boun­cing around with more entourage on stage than ori­ginal hooks, our seasoned sub­jects are left standing at the side, ill at ease with the organ­iz­a­tion of the night, but trying not to give Knia a hard time, watching their chance to per­form slip away. All five of them have kids, and as any parent knows, taking a night off from child care requires not just finding a babysitter, but losing out on quality time with their kid, and when reality sets in and they can’t get onstage, it’s hard to watch as they each reveal their dis­ap­point­ment. Not exactly the first per­sonal reveal you’d expect to see in a film about hip hop artists and the scene.

After this scene, it’s very evident that we’re not watching a film about cocky, up-and-coming artists; these are vet­eran per­formers looking to stay rel­evant and get that next big break, while also jug­gling other com­mit­ments like family, work and edu­ca­tion at the same time. But as the film pro­gresses, it reveals the dark­ness that sits at the edges of each subject’s psyche. Violence, crime, dis­crim­in­a­tion and poverty, in some form or another, are daily reminders of the dif­fi­cult reality during the day-to-day of their lives. Keon Love reveals early on that she’s lost 11 people to viol­ence alone in the last year, and as two others admit to hust­ling on the side to sur­vive, they live in fear from cops on a reg­ular basis. But throughout it all, the doc­u­mentary is full of moments that high­light the hustle and the struggle that this group puts towards their art, des­pite any mixed res­ults. A mid-afternoon music video shoot is delayed by late dan­cers, a less-than-ideal weather situ­ation and dis­or­gan­ized friends, but still they manage to pull it together in the end. In some moments how­ever, real exhaus­tion seems to set in. For all the pos­it­ives, there’s always the threat of viol­ence, and when the instance occurs in the film, it’s from the hands of a force you least sus­pect, but unfor­tu­nately, ulti­mately expect.

Overall, Alias is a tight, unflinching look at a musical move­ment that is def­in­itely gen­er­ated by class struggles and geo­graphy, a genre cre­ated when people are told they can’t expect to do much with their lives and fight back through art, and a group of local artists trying des­per­ately to not fall into the trap of living a life realer than their lyrics.

Alias plays with My Black Box, a short doc­u­mentary about Quebecois hip-hop artist Dramatik and his use of rap to con­quer his stutter.

Tagged as: #hotdocs13, Alias Donmillion, Alkatraz, Keon Love, Master Knia, Michelle Latimer, music, Trench

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