These 6 brilliant directors (including Aberdeen's Ryan Cooper & Eva Thomas) are poised to be TIFF's breakout stars

Written by Corey Atad & Winnie Wang, Toronto.com, September 6, 2024

The Toronto International Film Festival has long been the launching pad for many a young director's career. And while its name stresses “International,” one of TIFF’s missions is to celebrate emerging Canadian talent. It’s one of ours too.

Among this year’s pack, these six stand out: R.T. Thorne, Ryan Cooper, Eva Thomas, Amar Wala, Arianna Martinez and Kaniehtiio Horn.

Their five films are notable for their bold themes, naturalistic performances and/or subversion of genre conventions, running the gamut from postapocalyptic drama (Thorne’s “40 Acres”) to riveting character study (Cooper and Thomas’s “Aberdeen”) to coming-of-age comedy (Wala’s “Shook”) to time-bending romance (Martinez’s “Do I Know You From Somewhere?”) to humorous horror show (Horn’s “Seeds”).

Tackling, among other things, the Black and Indigenous experiences in Canada and the Indian experience in Toronto, these movies reveal what it means to live in this country now.

And they boldly demonstrate why our homegrown filmmakers matter.

RYAN COOPER AND EVA THOMAS

TIFF 2024 FILM 'ABERDEEN'

In Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas’ absorbing new drama, “Aberdeen,” downtown Winnipeg is transformed into a forbidding labyrinth of dead ends and doors that keep slamming shut in the face of its namesake — an unhoused middle-aged Peguis woman (Gail Maurice) struggling to maintain her spiritual equilibrium as she faces various personal crises.

Not that Aberdeen makes things easy on herself, or anybody else. No matter how justified she may be in venting her frustrations at the rotating parade of social workers, police officers and government functionaries in her path, she has a unique talent for escalating bad situations over the top and past the point of no return.

“I was obsessed with my aunties and their very strong personalities, and how they never took no for an answer,” says Cooper, a Manitoba native who conceived the original scenario for “Aberdeen” more than a decade ago. “There’s this matriarchal energy that I’ve always been attracted to, both as a gay man and a member of our community.”

The film’s long development process meant a lot of adjustments were made to the story and the character, but Aberdeen’s stubbornness was always part of the equation, as was the half-humorous, half-harrowing spectacle of having such an irresistible force meet a series of immovable objects. “I knew I wanted to tell a story about that experience of getting the runaround,” says Cooper. “It’s second nature to me at this point: I just get told no all the time.”

“There are different reasons why you get told no as an Indigenous person,” adds Thomas, who was born in Michigan and now resides in Wallaceburg, Ontario. “Sometimes it’s racism, sometimes it’s bureaucracy, and sometimes people just don’t trust in our abilities. On the face of it, Aberdeen is aggressive, and she can be hard to take at times. What I was hoping we would do was let the audience see why she might feel that way, or when they see people on the street who are pissed off, they understand that they’re just trying to deal with their lives in the best way possible.”

While both Cooper and Thomas have experience working on short films (the latter’s “Redlights” played at TIFF last year), “Aberdeen” marks their dual directorial debut, a collaboration that began after he asked for her assistance with the script. “I’m in the business of helping to guide writers,” says Thomas, who also worked on Danis Goulet’s award-winning thriller “Night Raiders.” “My job was to help Ryan manifest the film.”

Perhaps their most crucial decision was the casting of Maurice, whose ferocious performance eschews easy sentimentality. “She was fearless,” says Thomas of her star. “And we tried to create an environment on the set where she could do that.”

“I’d never been on a set like this before,” says Cooper. “It was so free. People said they felt like it wasn’t a machine, but that they were doing something meaningful, which was amazing to hear.”

To streamline things, Thomas worked primarily with the actors during the shoot while Cooper kept his eye on the frame. But everything about the planning and editing was a joint process. “It was a really good approach for working together,” says Thomas. “The story is so personal to Ryan, and it was very emotional. I gave him the space he needed for that. I think that it would have been hard for him to do it alone.

For Cooper, the most powerful ideas in the film have to do with identity — a theme introduced through the device of Aberdeen’s lost Indian status card, which, over the course of the narrative, proves nearly impossible to replace.

“This is something we always have to deal with,” Cooper says. “Like ‘this card proves my Indigeneity? This card proves who I am?’ … When I first wrote the script, it was about identity. I was struggling with living on the rez and being pushed into the city because my house was flooding and needing this fricking card to prove everything all the time. Does anybody else in the world have to deal with this bulls--t? It turns out that nobody does. It was an eye-opening moment about our system here.”

Mixing social commentary with storytelling is a difficult proposition, and “Aberdeen” walks the line between character study and critique with confidence. For all the film’s clear-eyed observations about inherited trauma and institutional impasse, it succeeds primarily as an emotional experience — which is exactly what its makers were hoping for.

“We felt a sense of obligation to make sure that our community was represented properly, because we haven’t always had the power to do that,” Thomas says. “Making a movie is so hard; you use your whole life energy. Where I’m at right now, I just want it to be good. I kept telling Ryan, ‘We’re making art here.’ I wanted to let Ryan and I shine as directors, and to set up the next project, and the next project after that.”

“My ancestors fought through so much for me to be here in this position,” Cooper says. “I think about that — no time for failure. That’s what I thought about whenever I wanted to give up when it was hard, to jump through all these other hoops that people don’t have to jump through. That’s what motivated me to just do it.”