Twitter post leads to feature film that premiered at TIFF
October 16, 2019
Shoot for the stars. If you miss, you could land on the moon.
That was Dr. Ingrid Waldron’s mindset when she suggested that a feature length movie shot with Oscar and Emmy Award-nominated Canadian actress Ellen Page be submitted to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
With the deadline less than a month away, New York-based filmmaker & producer Ian Daniel rightly had his doubts.
“I remember him saying, ‘I will not be offended if we don’t get it in TIFF’,” said Waldron. “He added, ‘We will see what we can do’.”
Just days before the deadline, ‘There’s Something in the Water’ was approved among the 26 Canadian features in this year’s festival line-up.
Submitted in rough form, the film was completed a few days before the festival started on September 5.
“This is true renegade,” said Waldron who is an Associate Professor in the Dalhousie University Faculty of Health School of Nursing with a cross appointment in the Faculty of Medicine. “This film was a six-day shoot done with small cameras and a very limited budget. I am still in shock about how everything has evolved.”
The project is an adaptation of her book, ‘There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities’, that was released last year.
It examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities.
A post using the hashtag for her book that received thousands of likes and shares in a short period caught Waldron’s attention.
“When I went to my twitter page one morning, it was extremely active and I saw that someone named Ellen Page was following me,” the Black feminist scholar pointed out. “I didn’t think much of it at the time because her picture is blurry and the profile reads ‘I am a Tiny Canadian’. I thought this was just someone with an interest in environmental issues. About three weeks later when I went back to the page, the activity had increased further and people were talking about my book. I realized it was coming from Ellen Page and then it occurred to me who it was. She was following me for nearly a month.”
Waldron reached out to Page to thank her for promoting the book and a mutual friend, who owns the Wooden Monkey restaurant in Halifax, connected the actress/producer and author.
“We did a three-way call just before last Xmas and bandied some ideas,” said Waldron. “Ellen suggested she could use her celebrity status and privilege to support the project. I struggled to think how she could help because she resides in New York. I thought she could tweet my postings to her 2.7 million followers. We also talked to some of the Indigenous women and were still trying to bring ideas to life.”
To engage people, Page suggested doing a short film or clip for a twitter post.
The project, that involved travelling across the province to speak with the women in the book, was completed in 10 days in Halifax.
“When we looked at the footage, Ellen said, ‘This stuff is really great,’ and I agreed,” Waldron noted. “It was really deep, extensive and emotional and I didn’t think that posting clips on twitter would do these women justice. It was at that point that I suggested we should do a feature film.”
A movie buff, Waldron saw ‘Juno’, in which Page is the title character, twice and ‘Inception’ in which Page is cast, and was a TIFF volunteer before moving to Nova Scotia.
Never in her wildest dreams did she envisage the publicity that was generated from the book as she spent a busy few days in Toronto attending the premiere and doing media interviews.
“After I did the book launch last fall, I was thinking about another book,” said Waldron was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Women’s Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. “You never know who is going to read your book. I am still in shock, but it’s great to know I have a companion to my book and hopefully it will encourage more people to read the book which has more facts. The movie is 70 minutes and there’s only so much you can get into it. More importantly, the movie focuses on Nova Scotia and my book focusses on Canada. I think it is vital for Canadians to know that I look at environmental racism across Canada.”
Collaborating with Page, who made her directional debut in ‘There’s Something in the Water’, pleased Waldron who won the 2019 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing.
“She’s not the kind of celebrity that I tend to abhor,” said the senior research scholar & team lead for the Health of People of African Descent Research Cluster with the Healthy Populations Institute. “She always appeared to me on television to be real and earnest which she is. In addition, Ellen is Nova Scotian and has got a real connection to that community. Her family lives near Shelburne, she visits Nova Scotia often and she’s very much a social activist. Her personality is authentic and organic and from our phone conversations, I got a sense that she really wanted to help. This is why I felt I could trust her and that she would do the film justice.”
Not only did Page pour her heart and soul into the film, but she also donated $6,000 to finance a community well in Shelburne where the first recorded race riot in North America occurred in 1784.
“Since around the 1940s, there has been a landfill in the south end of Shelburne where the majority of Black people live,” said Waldron whose scholarship focusses on the impact of inequality and discrimination on the mental health of African Nova Scotian, African Canadian, Mi’kmaw, immigrant and refugee commutes in Canada. “The residents believe that the extremely high rates of cancer in the Black community is related to contaminated water from the landfill. When Ellen told me last April she would finance a well, I told her she had done enough. She however insisted on doing it.”
Waldron’s interest in environmental racism started in 2012 when a White environmentalist approached her to take on a project.
“At the time, I didn’t know what that was, but I said I would do it because I am always looking for a challenge,” she said. “I get the health part because I am a health researcher and I get the race part, but I was a bit nervous about the environmental part.”
Environmental racism is the disproportionate location of industrial polluters such as landfills, trash incinerators, coal plants, toxic waste facilities and other environmentally hazardous activities near to communities of colour and the working poor.
Seven years ago, Waldron started the ‘ENRICH Project’ which is a unique and innovative initiative that addresses the health and socio-economic effects of environmental racism in Mi’kmaw and African Nova Scotian communities.
In 2015, the ‘ENRICH Project’ collaborated with New Democratic Party legislative assembly member Lenore Zann to develop the first private members bill to address environmental racism in Canada.
Waldron is currently conducting a study on how Black women in Halifax cope with mental and emotional issues.
“I feel that Black women have a specific location in our society and specific issues around mental health, so I wanted to focus on that,” she said. “This is what I did my Ph.D. on and I welcomed the opportunity to get back to this kind of research.”
Becoming a university professor wasn’t a career that interested Waldron at an early age.
The daughter of Trinidadian immigrants was keen in following the footsteps of her father who was a dentist. George Waldron, who came to Canada in 1967, died in 2014.
Waldron spent five years in Trinidad & Tobago, leaving St. Francois Girls College at age 16.
Completing high school in Montreal, she did her first degree in Psychology at McGill University, her Master’s in Intercultural Education: Race, Ethnicity & Culture at the University of London in England and her doctorate at the University of Toronto’s Sociology & Equity Studies in Education department.
“I pursued a Ph.D. with the goal of perhaps working for Health Canada in policy,” she said. “I was an introvert who couldn’t speak in front of people and my mom (Myrna) felt that was going to prevent me from getting a good job.”
Teaching her first class on race & identity at U of T in 2005 was the icebreaker.
“It was a night class and I walked up to the podium with my notes in front of about 70 students and slowly began to feel comfortable as I was talking,” Waldron recounted. “I was talking about something I actually love and was getting paid for. I went home that night and told my mother, who was staying with me, that I found my calling. She was so ecstatic.”
The implementation of the first water testing projects in African Nova Scotian communities, her policy work with the Nova Scotia Health Authority and the 2016 collaboration with Shelburne community members that resulted in the closure of their landfill were recognized by Dalhousie last year which honoured Waldron with the University President’s Research Award in the Research Impact category.
