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| I Don’t Know Who You Are |
Released in Canada on 26 April, I Don’t Know Who You Are is the story of a Toronto man, Benjamin, who survives sexual violence only to find himself facing a different kind of cruelty and dehumanisation at the hands of the healthcare system when he tries to get medicine to protect himself from potential HIV infection. We follow his desperate journey to raise enough money to pay for what he needs, and, at the same time, his journey through pain and grief to try to reclaim life on his own terms. It’s a difficult watch in places, as you might expect, but a highly engaging and impressive piece of work.
I met director MH Murray (Matt) when the film screened at the Glasgow Film Festival earlier this year. Mark Clennon, who wrote the script and plays Benjamin, also joined us, together with Nat Patricia Manuel, who plays Benjamin’s closest friend.
“It was a personal story that I wanted to explore,” says Matt, kicking off our conversation. “During the pandemic, I took a lot of time to ruminate and ponder about my life and things of that nature, and Mark and I decided to collaborate on a bigger project. We had done a short film. And then the ball just started rolling and we got a little bit the money together and shot it.”
I tell him that one of the things that really struck me is that often part of the damage caused by sexual violence stems from realising one is seen as less than human. Benjamin goes through that and then confronts a system which treats him in much the same way. Was that one of the things that they were trying to get at with the film?
“Yeah, definitely. I think when something like that happens to you – anything traumatic – as a human, you're basically trying to put the pieces back together or trying to find a way to control something. That's what I was trying to show with the sequence after the assault, when he starts cleaning his apartment. It's his way of trying to get some sort of control over his own environment, since he clearly wasn't able to have any control outside of that environment. I think that juxtaposition is very important.
“It's a difficult thing to contend with, but what I wanted the film to show is that despite all that, there is a way to build your sense of humanness back and build up that agency again. It's difficult to do alone. I think the best way to do it is through community and through feeling loved and loving other people.”
That’s where Ariel comes in as a character, isn't it? She's the driving force at that point, before Benjamin gets back on his feet himself.
Nat nods. “I felt really fortunate to be able to step into shoes like that because I think that it's a very human thing to have people in your life like that. You're down and you're out and you need somebody. All of us need that. Ultimately, I reflected back on the people in my own life that had served that role for me, and felt really privileged to be able to speak to an important issue, on how you would help someone in your life potentially rebuild from such a horrific event. Besides the trauma, facing a system that's just not helping the situation to get any better, making it really hard to move forward.
“It was a great privilege to work with Matt and Mark and be able to kind of craft that person that won't let you give up. You know, when you want to lay down and just kind of take it in, they go ‘No, we're going to get up and we're going to keep going, kid.’”
There's that balance of the need to recover psychologically with, obviously, the need to take practical action as well. How did that work at a script level, weaving those two elements of the story together?
“It was really interesting because Mark and I are similar in many ways, but we also have certain differences, just having different backgrounds and experiences,” says Matt. “One of the things in the script that we spent a lot of time talking about and tweaking and playing with was this sense of pride and just how difficult it can be, especially for – well, anybody, but in this case, a man, a person of colour, a gay man, to be vulnerable with people.
“The scene when he called his parents was a really important scene for us. We wanted to show that despite the fact that he does have a family that does seem to care about him and they do support him and they do love him, even still, it's difficult to ask for help. Something I think about a lot is if something bad happens to me or if I experience something bad, if I talk about it with my parents, it makes them upset, too, and it'll affect how they feel and it'll hurt their feelings. I think that's an interesting part of being a victim of something like this, the struggle to figure out how to ask for help and do that. Obviously, a lot of the decisions Benjamin makes are not the best decisions or not the most rational decisions, but in situations like this, we don't really act rationally. I wanted to show him being broken down.
“One of my big influences for this was Three Colours Blue, just the way that she experiences a tragic incident and then tries really hard to become nobody, as she says in the film, and just retreat into herself. In this film, Benjamin tries to do that. But in both films, it sort of shows how, as a human being, it's almost impossible to escape the people that love you and escape the world and escape other humans. And that's kind of a beautiful thing.”
I ask Mark about the early scenes before anything bad has happened to Benjamin, when we’re getting to know him.
“It was really an interesting experience,” he says. “I felt very supported with everyone around me helping me work through the character. And, you know, I understood very early on what this film was going to be about. And I think that gave me a lot of time to really process it mentally. So some of the scenes that were perhaps a bit more difficult, I had processed it, in a sense. Ironically, the scenes that were the hardest were the scenes I wasn't even thinking of, that I didn't imagine were going to be hard.
“This is my first film, and I just kind of understood that it would be a new experience for me, and a learning curve, and there were going to be a lot of things that I was going to experience for the first time and hopefully continue to do more of and grow. But it was really pleasant, and I felt very lucky to have the people on this set because I've heard stories of other films, you know, where it's not as warm and welcoming.”
It was particularly important for him to have that support in light of what his character was going through, he says.
“There was no doubt in my mind about this role. I like working with Matt, but I definitely had a lot of anxieties and thoughts about it. I think the biggest thing is, you know, I'm Jamaican, and Jamaica has a very homophobic culture. But I feel like homophobia added on top of being a victim of sexual assault is almost the worst thing. I felt like, in context to that, I had to work through that. I spoke to my mom, and she helped me. She didn't actually say anything. I told her about the movie, and she’s super traditional, you know, old school. And she was like, ‘It's a movie. You're acting. That's what actors do.’ And I was like, ‘You're right.’
“That helped me a lot to just get over it, mentally. And I've been in such a supportive team throughout the whole filming experience, Anytime we needed to cut or anytime we needed anything, they were very accommodating.”
“One of the many great things about Mark is that as an artist, he's really good at just throwing himself into things and not overthinking,” says Matt. “It was never going to be any other actor, but I think this film could have been a lot more challenging if there was too much overthinking involved. There was something so natural about the way that Mark embarked on his journey, and I'm so grateful that he was so open and willing to just dive in.”
The camera stays very close to him in a lot of those moments. That's important because we see his emotional responses rather than just the things that are happening around him. But something that I was interested in was in the scenes just before the assault happens. Again, the camera's close, but often it's just behind the edge of a doorway, and that creates a sense of threat. Was that intentional?
“Yeah, it's kind of difficult to explain. I don't know if it makes logical sense. But there's this thing that I had when I was making it, and I spoke a lot about it with my cinematographer and my composer. It's not that it was fate that it happened, but I wanted there to be a sense in the first 20 minutes that this day is going to change his life, but he doesn't really know it yet. There's this feeling of dread that's kind of underneath all the regular things that he's doing in the beginning of the film. And I think that it's something we never really know. Like, you wake up every day and you don't really know for sure what's going to happen to you that day.
“There's a lot of days that we all experience that, you know, they do change our lives. They change the trajectory of who we are. But I think it's like the universe knows it's going to happen, but we don't know. And there's this spooky feeling there. And I also just love when it comes to framing. I do love whenever I do a wider shot. I do like to play with dirtying the frame in different ways. I feel like it can just change so much the emotion that you feel when you're looking at a frame. If it's clean, you know, there's just a bit less going on.”
The film addresses issues around HIV as well, and in the end, there's a relatively positive message about it: it isn't automatically the end of one’s life. Still, that's clearly how Benjamin's thinking of it. He's fighting for his life. And that’s realistic – a lot of people assume that it's still a death sentence.
“People living with HIV who are on medicine, they can live full lives,” Matt stresses. He explains that one of his supporting cast members, Randy Davis, is HIV positive and helped to make sure they had the right information and were telling the story in the most appropriate way. “And the ER doctor, Cheryl [Wagner], she used to work with AIDS patients in the Eighties, so she also had a lot of experience.”
“She was one of the first doctors in Canada to treat HIV patients in the Eighties,” says Mark. “She was a part of an international coalition of doctors who in the beginning of the pandemic were like, ‘We don't know what's going on,’ and they were researching it, sharing documents and talking to each other. So having her as a part of this was incredible. But it is a very complicated thing. The truth is that it is something that is subjective to who's watching it, because there are people who watch it and think about it very differently.
“Living in Toronto, though we do have a tremendous amount of inequities in our health care system, it is a developed nation, so there are resources available if we do become HIV positive. Whereas, you know, for people in other parts of the world where those resources aren't available, it means something different. I think the thing about this film is that it touches you differently. What I love about this film is every time I go to a festival and talk to someone, they all come at it from a very different angle.”
In its way, I note, the film touches on both those experiences, because the resources are theoretically there but Benjamin can't access them. And even if we look at it as a chronic illness, if he can't get preventative treatment, he's going to have to buy more treatment for the rest of his life. So it's still a huge burden.
Matt agrees. “Something Randy said that really stuck with me when were filming the HIV test scene, because he is a very prominent HIV activist, he's very positive about it. But he said to me, ‘You know, as much as HIV has changed my life and as many opportunities as have come to me because of it, if I had a choice, I wouldn't want to have HIV, because obviously, it does change your life, and you do have to take medicine every day for the rest of your life. So even though you can live a happy life and a long life, it is still going to have a drastic effect. And there's still so much stigma around it.
“There's a lot of people, even in the gay community, who still don't really understand it and still will judge you if you are HIV positive, even if you are on medication and you can't actually spread it to anyone. And the truth is that there's a lot of people who have HIV that don't get tested and don't know they have HIV, like, potentially, the man in the film who assaults Benjamin. The people who have HIV and are on medicine, they're being responsible, not spreading it, you know?
“It's important to get tested, know your status, and learn as much as you can, because the information is out there. People just don't want to look at it or they just don't care. And I hope that this film can present some of that information in a way that maybe tricks some people into learning something that they might not have ever cared to think about before.”
We have a little more time left than we expected, so I ask Mark and Nat how they approached building their characters in a way that would put the focus on their humanity, beyond the demands of the plot.
Nat goes first. “Knowing myself when I auditioned, and having looked over the script and knowing the subject matter involved, I wanted to make sure that I built a character that, as much as she was the witty sidekick and the hype person, also was showing up for the character of Benjamin as chosen family, in every way possible. Again, we're lucky when we come across those people in our lives. And so I tried to approach the character of Ariel with that constantly being at the forefront.
“To me, it's a platonic love story. You're watching someone go through a horrible moment in their lives, and I think we all have those people in our lives that we would show up for, no matter what. 04:00 in the morning, walking across hot coals, it doesn't matter. That's what I really wanted to keep at the forefront of their friendship, is that ‘We can do anything. This is temporary. I've got you. You've got me,’ thing. And this is just the way that we move forward.”
“For me, I felt a very strong responsibility to tell the story in a way that was respectful,” says Mark, “because as Matt mentioned earlier, this is a personal story, and we love him. And so we wanted to support that part of the journey. Also, I haven't experienced those things specifically, and I'm not someone who lives all of the experiences that Benjamin does. So I felt a responsibility to represent that well.
“I'm not HIV positive, and I haven't been a victim of that specific crime, so I felt it was very important to talk to people and get a deep understanding of this character in a way that's meaningful and gives service to the people who we want the movie to impact. That's the main thing about this movie. It's entertaining, but it's also a movie with a very strong mission. And Matt could have chosen to write about, you know, fairies and race cars, but he chose this story. I felt like we have an opportunity to do something interesting with this and educate and inspire.
“The movie is not out yet, but I've had so many lovely experiences with people that I've met at festivals that have come up to me and been like, ‘I didn't know that you could do this,’ or ‘I didn't know that this is a thing.’ Or ‘Now that I've seen the movie, I know what to do if that were unfortunately ever to happen to me.’ And so for all of us, this is a little bit more than just a movie. It's a message. We all felt a deep responsibility for telling that story authentically and in a real way.
“We want this movie to actually affect change. We want this movie to inspire a conversation in Canada about Pharmacare and hopefully get to a place where this never happens again. That would be all of our dreams – if, a year from now or two years from now, a hypothetical Benjamin in Toronto just goes to the ER and goes home and calls his friends and is not traumatised by the journey.”
