“I think in rhythm,” says filmmaker Rhayne Vermette. “It’s like, with music, I’m always looking for transitions from one song to another, working oppositions, those notes that incite physical shivers, improvisation, the ways producers fill the room with tone, what makes people dance.”
Describing the tempo of Vermette’s new feature “Levers,” which makes its world premiere this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a daunting task. It’s somehow languorously slow and synapse-quick at the same time — a superbly controlled exercise in surrealism that forces the viewer to meet it on its own terms and then rewards them with one indelible, uncanny image after another.
To the extent that the film has a plot, it pivots on a possibly supernatural occurrence: an unscheduled solar eclipse that plunges a Manitoba community into an extended period of darkness. The event is inexplicable, but the reactions of the characters in its aftermath — searching for explanations — convey fear and terror. Fittingly for a film shot with broken cameras, Levers conveys a palpable and unsettling sense of fragility.
A native of Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes who lives and works in Winnipeg, Vermette was previously the surprising — and deserving — winner of TIFF’s Best Canadian Film prize in 2021 for “Ste. Anne,” an impressionistic, unpredictable homecoming story starring the director.
“‘Ste. Anne’ really dug into the natural, whereas with ‘Levers,’ there’s definitely an interest in what is artificial,” says Vermette, who based the script’s episodic structure on a set of tarot cards — 22 chapters in all, each with their own cryptic symbol.
”I wanted to stay true to a structure, so I built this script of poetry, these visual cards, wherein the exploration was just written into it,” she says. “Even in editing, there was no thought to work outside of the model — you are seeing the chapters and events play out as they were written.”
Like “Ste. Anne,” “Levers” was produced in a collaborative, nonhierarchical fashion that Vermette refers to in her director’s statement as a combination of “collective interpretation, creation and FAFO (f—k around and find out).”
“It’s chaotic, because I love chaos and surround myself with chaotic people, which is intended as a compliment,” she says. “Making ‘Levers’ was very ride-or-die at times, but there was always somewhere to find a beautiful sense of sovereignty in what we were doing. It’s most definitely not a perfected process, but I see it as a way of beginning to think of other models.”
“My authorship comes in (since) I’m the one caring for the whole ship,” she adds. “It’s a mostly unsustainable model that only works in large part because I am volunteering most of my time. It’s a small budget, small crew — and my finger touches every facet, a multitude of times and in many ways. It’s belief-based filmmaking, wherein I just start the journey with like one grant, and somehow exactly what is needed to get the film finished comes in.”
When “Levers” shows a TIFF, it will be in the Wavelengths section, a vital bulwark for avant-garde work at a festival increasingly in thrall to Hollywood.
“Presenting the film at TIFF will be a huge moment of celebration for the large group of collaborators convening together for the premiere,” says Vermette, “and I guess it makes sense to throw my low budget, unconventional film into the Wavelengths section. But I do see how the conversation and language of ‘experimental’ or ‘Wavelengths’ absolutely keeps certain people from engaging in my work. It’s a shame that critics and programmers often only speak in terms of experimental work from decades ago. Personally, it really just demeans both my intention and what is at stake in my work. There is no dreaming or vision in the language around experimental film; it’s just caught in this bad time warp, and this in turn affects the form and how people perceive it, and how people make experimental films.”
Last summer, “Ste. Anne” was presented as part of a double bill with Victor Masayesva Jr.‘s Hopi documentary, “Itam Hakim, Hopiit.”
“In a discussion on the subject of experimental film, he told me something to the effect of, ‘I think we need new words,’” she says.
