Documentary celebrating Tomson Highway’s life and work to premiere at TIFF Lightbox

By Rick Garrick

TORONTO — The world theatrical premiere of the Tomson Highway: Permanent Astonishment documentary film by award-winning Cree-Métis filmmaker Barbara Todd Hager is set for November 11 at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. The feature documentary was inspired by Highway’s award-winning memoir, Tomson Highway: Permanent Astonishment, which explores the experiences that shaped his life and creative vision.

“I’m very grateful that I was chosen as the subject and that my work is featured,” says Highway, an award-winning playwright, novelist, and musician who wrote The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and Kiss of the Fur Queen. “We all need help with exposure of our work, so that’s a tremendous boost to my work and I appreciate it endlessly. I’ve been the recipient of so much kindness in this life; people have been so kind to me every step of the way. The reason why I’m where I am today is because so many people poured their life and love into me and my work, so I’m extremely grateful for that and I will be for the rest of my life.”

Highway says his plays, The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, made their mark.

“The Rez Sisters in particular has been playing almost nonstop for 40 years somewhere in the world, including Japan in Japanese translation,” Highway says. “So, I’ve been very fortunate with that, and I’ve known a lot of success.”

Highway says he was first a musician before he began writing.

“I play concerts here, cabarets, and I slip over into musicals because I’ve had such an extraordinary musical training,” Highway says. “I’ve had extraordinary teachers who helped me every step of the way and encouraged me. So, I was able to write original music that went with those plays.”

Highway says his play, Rose, which premiered at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa this past March, has a very important place in his heart.

“It took a long time to produce because it’s expensive,” Highway says. “But I’m a patient man and I waited for many years. A lot of those songs from the show, we kept doing in cabaret form in nightclubs, and eventually we sang [those songs] in nightclubs around the world, including great places like Barcelona and Berlin and Rio de Janeiro.”

Highway also stressed the importance of the land and waters where he grew up on in northern Manitoba at Barren Lands First Nation, where he used to help his father with his fishing when he was young.

“We had 500 lakes to ourselves, and that water was clean, blue drinkable water,” Highway says. “When was the last time you drank water from Lake Superior untreated, it’s unimaginable. But that’s what we had up north, that’s where I come from — I come from paradise.”

Hager says her work on the documentary film was “so enjoyable.”

“Tomson really let me into his life in a way that most filmmakers or writers don’t get that kind of access,” Hager says. “So, making it to me was more than just doing a biographical documentary about a well-known celebrated writer, it was really about who he was at the core of his being and his personality, which is joyful, which is a very positive happy man who wants to save his language and wants to encourage people to be creative.”

Hager says she first saw one of Highway’s plays, The Rez Sisters, in 1992 at a college in Kentucky.

“I was absolutely startled and excited and astonished by this Native Canadian playwright having a play in Kentucky,” Hager says. “It inspired me to think more seriously about being a writer and realizing if I went back to Canada, Native writers are already doing plays and … we’re being accepted as legitimate and serious writers.”

Hager says she wove in scenes from the Tomson Highway: Permanent Astonishment memoir into the documentary.

“I wanted to take excerpts and turn them into little mini-stories about him, like little glimpses into his childhood,” Hager says. “All of those scenes are live action film layered with different software, making it into kind of a painted look, and then Tomson reads over it. So that’s how I imagined the book excerpts to be, and then it happened.”

Antonio Michael Downing, host of CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter, is scheduled to moderate the post-screening conversation with Highway and Hager at the documentary film premiere on November 11.