Interview with Clement Virgo
Screening of Brother
Wednesday, March 19 / 6:30 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

This program is presented in partnership with Carleton University School For Studies In Art and Culture: Film Studies and the Ottawa Black Film Festival.

Interview \

It’s been three decades since Clement Virgo’s stylish, decidedly daring debut feature film, Rude, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1995. Born in Jamaica and growing up in Toronto, Virgo’s early work announced a distinctive, restless cinematic voice in the Canadian cinema of the mid-1990s. Since that impressive first feature, Virgo has gone on to write, direct, and produce not only feature films such as The Planet of Junior Brown, Love Come Down, Lie With Me, Poor Boy’s Game, and Brother, but also a prodigious number of television series, including the award-winning The Book of Negroes. One of Canada’s foremost filmmakers, Clement Virgo is a bold, articulate, startlingly versatile moving image artist whose searching, sometimes searing work investigates and recalibrates notions of race, history, power, and shifting identities in Canada.

Clement Virgo will discuss his extensive career, his multiple award-winning films and television series, his approach to filmmaking, and his experiences as a creator in a prolific career spanning over three decades.

Interviewer: Aboubakar Sanogo, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University

Feature presentation \

Clement Virgo’s most recent feature is an award-winning, powerful drama of two brothers growing up in Scarborough in the early 1990s. Propelled by the pulsing beats of Toronto’s early hip-hop scene, Brother is the story of Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), sons of Caribbean immigrants maturing into young men in a housing project called The Park. The brothers’ bright hopes are thwarted during the summer of 1991 when escalating tensions set off a series of events that change the course of their lives forever. Based on David Chariandy’s celebrated novel, Brother crafts a timely story about the profound bond between brothers, the resilience of a community and the irrepressible power of music. A story of family, love, memory, and survival, Brother is the winner of a record 12 Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Picture and Best Direction.
- Tom McSorley

“Clement Virgo’s masterful drama... It’s superb: a wide-ranging piece, elegantly structured and thoughtfully measured in its pacing.”
- Wendy Ide, The Guardian

This program is presented in partnership with Carleton University School For Studies In Art and Culture: Film Studies and the Ottawa Black Film Festival.