Danielle Sturk is a bilingual multi-disciplinary artist. Sturk’s films have screened at over 30 film festivals, and have been broadcast on most major Canadian English and French networks, such as CBC, Radio Canada, and Vision TV. Her credits include “Soul Sisters,” “A Good Madness,” and “Farandole.”
“El Toro” will premiere at the 2019 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on April 28.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
DS: Romance and tragedy bind my mother’s seven siblings, who work with their parents at their family-run truck stop diner deep in the entrails of 1960s industrial Saint-Boniface, Manitoba. The diner, El Toro, no longer exists between the old Canada Packers abattoir and the Union Stock Yards, but it very much exists in the minds of the surviving DeGagné brood, my family.
“El Toro” rebuilds the walls, stools, and atmosphere of the restaurant, recreating a surreal, rich, and imaginative world, evoking a lost time and place through the lens of memory, nostalgia, and love.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
DS: The stories my aunts and uncles told at family gatherings evoked strong images, smells, and vague memories from my early childhood of the abattoirs, truckers, great home-cooked meals, and my Mémère and Pépère’s hard work ethic. The cacophony of the siblings’ voices, one outdoing the other’s story, is a strong memory for me and, gladly, is the powerful basis of this film.
The unique time and place, now gone along with my grandparents, is a stiff reminder of the impermanence of all things. I wanted to put a marker on this time and place, on my family.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
DS: I want people to feel connected to themselves and to their loved ones, to their aunts and uncles and the family members they may have lost touch with, and to be curious about the ones they know little about –because they all have stories to tell.
I want people to think about community and family, to appreciate some of the tough stuff that makes us who we are—how it is all so meaningful and, ironically, so completely insignificant in the end when we are gone.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
DS: Building images for 45 minutes of an audio story without ever seeing one of voices speaking was definitely a challenge I gave myself. I wanted to expand my artistic capacities and delve into animation, which was absolutely fantastic. I love it.
I also established a collaborative process with other artists like visual artist Diana Thorneycroft, who provided illustrations that I animated, as well as Peter Graham, who made the miniature set.
Although inviting the ideas and work of many contributors may be threatening for some, it was a pure delight for me, and the film is better for it.
Editor Dany Joyal was also a fantastic artistic partner in building the film during its final stages of storytelling.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
DS: “El Toro” was entirely funded by Canadian Arts Council grants in national, provincial, and municipal competitions: The Canada Council for The Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Winnipeg Arts Council. Its total budget was $85k for production, and I received seed funding from the arts councils as well to develop the early stages of the film.
Over 90 percent of the budget went to artists and craftspeople in Manitoba.
I do have to fundraise to attend Hot Docs with the film, and I have no budget to promote the work other than personal funds.
I chose this path to finance the film because I wanted to take the time to investigate new ways of working and to consider whether this story is best told as a dramatic fictional tale, a documentary, or an experimental film. In the end, I think it has the feel of all three approaches.
I also wanted to take risks, to push my filmmaking voice into new places, and to test out new collaborations with artists I had not worked with before. I am entirely satisfied with this choice. It has been an incredibly satisfying experience from the start to finish.
I could now use help with distribution and sales, so that the film could be seen by a wider audience.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
DS: I was a modern dancer and choreographer, and I loved it. Eventually, I wanted what went on in my head and in my body to be translated into work that could be understood by more people, to connect with an audience more directly and less abstractly than dance seemed to.
That being said, the film work I enjoy the most is highly creative and less conventional in its form and means of expression.
Also, practically, I was on my third out of four babies and wanted to finish my degree. My spouse reminded me that I always spoke of film and I should consider that, so I switched from English Literature to Film Studies and never looked back. He’s an astute man!
Film is storytelling. All necessary things can be spoken in a gesture, in the geography of a room, in the length of a shot, or the rhythm of an edit—it’s so incredibly detailed and powerful.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
DS: Worst and best advice was “You can’t have everything.” Specifically as a woman, I’ve heard this many times as a way to signal to me that I should content myself with either raising a family or doing my art, something my male spouse has never been told. It also comes from women who have had to painfully give up something very core to themselves, having had to choose between their work or a family because of conditioning and cultural gender biases in our society.
The message is that I do not have the right to live both if I am female. So I push back on that a lot, but life has taught me that I can’t have everything all at once all of the time. Sometimes one aspect of who I am or who I am with takes precedence over the other. I listen to that the best I can. It’s fluid.
I also love the Rolling Stones’ lyric, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.” I feel that we have an obligation to fight for what we need, and making art and making family is what I need. So I do it.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
DS: Please just do it. Do bad work, do good work—just do some work. Make your work environment how you want to make it: shut yourself in a cabin alone for a couple of days, bring your babies along in the studio other days, do whatever you need to do. Stretch the space by doing you, and let people go that aren’t contributing to a positive, respectful, supportive, and risk-taking working environment.
There are a lot of creative people out there, and many will love to work the way you need to do it in order to get your work done.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
DS: Jane Campion’s “The Piano” is one of the best films I’ve experienced. Visceral, sexual, earthy, female.
W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?
DS: I feel that the issue is no longer a big hilarious joke. Due to the #MeToo movement, I feel more room and permission to feel my long-standing anger toward misogyny. I’ve noticed some shift in the awareness in the industry—some allies have made themselves known, some tentative conversation between men and women about the issue has begun. That feels good — like we aren’t crazy. There’s some validation about our collective experience as women.
There also seems to be a quieting of the Wild West, free-to-harass environment, but I have yet to see any change in the toxic masculinity that I see in society at large.
Violence toward women is still accepted, and it is present even in youth today; my teen daughters live it every day. So I don’t have a lot of hope.
It will take a tremendous amount of profound systemic shifts in all aspects of society to change the deep rooted misogyny that permeates our world. The #MeToo movement called it out—some men have been removed at this time. But I’m afraid the reasons for this behavior and the environments that cultivate it have not changed.
