It’s a story from our nation’s past that isn’t widely known among Gen Xers and Millennials; Canadians in the know usually call it the Sir George Williams Affair.
The Sir George Williams Affair began in earnest in early 1968, but its most dramatic day was February 11, 1969.
The location: Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (better known today as Concordia University).
On that wintry day, clouds of smoke billowed out from the broken windows of the ninth floor computer lab.
Eight months before, several black students from Trinidad had formally accused a white professor of grading their work unfairly.
Fed up with the administration’s inaction and bungling, a large group of students opted to occupy the university’s computer lab.
For two weeks, the sit-in was peaceful. But on that chilly Tuesday, a fire (still of unknown origin) broke out, and riot police moved in. 97 students were arrested.
Most of the charges were dismissed, and after a crush of headlines, the media – and Canada – moved on.
But the key individuals involved in the Sir George Williams Affair (which include a former President of Dominica and a current member of the Canadian Senate) continue to feel its echo in their lives.
Now, Vancouver filmmaker Mina Shum invites Canadians to revisit this watershed moment from our nation’s past in Ninth Floor, her feature-length documentary debut about the Sir George Williams Affair.
Shum’s journey with Ninth Floor began in 2012, when she met with veteran National Film Board of Canada producer Selwyn Jacob (Mighty Jerome).
Shum – director of the critically acclaimed narrative feature Double Happiness – was intrigued by the tale Jacob related to her about institutional racism in 1960s Canada.
“[Jacob] said, ‘Six black students charged a white professor with racism in 1969. They were all under surveillance,’” says Shum in a phone interview shortly after Ninth Floor’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I immediately went, ‘Wow, it’s so hard to even bring up that someone might be generalizing or making a blanket statement about an entire culture in polite conversation today, and these guys charged racism.’ I went, ‘Who are they?”
This was not Jacob’s first time pitching a Sir George Williams Affair film to someone who was unfamiliar with the story.
“I pitched this story to a group of people [at the NFB], and the oldest was in their early 40s, and nobody had heard about this incident, and that was what gave me the spark,” says Jacob (who himself was newly arrived from Trinidad and attending university in Alberta when the Sir George Williams Affair took place).
And so Shum and Jacob began building Ninth Floor.
Through archival footage as well as interviews with individuals who participated in the Sir George Williams Affair, the film walks the line between historical documentary and narrative feature, particularly where it expands on the idea of surveillance (the student leaders had all been under constant surveillance).
Participants were interviewed via hidden surveillance cameras in industrial spaces in Montreal’s warehouse district.
“We had hidden cameras everywhere and I showed them where the hidden cameras were, so they were complicit in the entire creation,” says Shum. “But I would sit them down, and then I would be hidden.”
One individual who opted not to participate at all was Perry Anderson, the professor against whom the students had leveled charges of racism.
Shum says she tried to convince Anderson to appear in the film (“[Anderson] suffers a little from PTSD from this still”), but his son agreed to an interview, with his father’s blessing.
Ninth Floor’s interviews paint a vivid picture of what life has been like for the student protestors since those fateful days in the lab, says Jacob.
“It’s not like this incident happened in February 1969, and by 1970, they’d forgotten about it,” he says. “For a lot of them, it was the start of one part of their life, and it’s still unraveling all of the way now.”
Ninth Floor screens Sept. 26 and 29 as part of the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival. http://www.viff.org/festival/films/f15831-ninth-floor
MORE ABOUT NINTH FLOOR
Selwyn Jacob on how he waited for just the right moment to tell this story: “Over the years, as I started making films, I would run into a lot of people in Edmonton who had gone to Sir George and knew about the incident, and they knew I was in filmmaking, and they said to me, ‘Selwyn, you have to make a film on Sir George.’ When I started making films, I knew I couldn’t just jump into this story. I knew it was going to be a big story. So everything that I did, I thought would get me on a path where I would have felt that I had that experience and confidence to tell that story.”
Selwyn Jacob on Senator Anne C. Cools’ (who participated in the Sir George Williams Affair as a student) reaction to the Sir George Williams building, as well as to the final film: “She came to the place where we were interviewing her, and we wanted to take her just to the Sir George location, she said, ‘Selwyn, I will not enter that building, I have only been back to that building once ever since that incident.’ That was how strong the position was about it. And we accepted that, and in the Q&A [at TIFF], I said, ‘There were two people who refused to be in the film, and one is standing next to me right now,’ and she picked up the conversation and explained why she felt that way, and she said she made the decision to participate in the film because ‘I trusted Mina and Selwyn’… She became an ambassador for the film.”
Mina Shum on the lessons present in Ninth Floor: “I don’t think this film is about a particular colour. I think it’s about humanity. I didn’t set out to make a film so that we could dismiss one corner of our population. I think if you have any investment in making a better world, then please, come see the film. It’s beyond colour lines, and I really felt it was my responsibility to open it up that way. We could have made a low-budget community movie, and it’s not. I’m trying to make the community everybody.”
Mina Shum on making a documentary after focusing on narrative work for years: “I like to be super uncomfortable, and also just going outside of my genre. I made a couple of shorts just before [Ninth Floor]. I went back to trying to figure out short form. All I do all day long is write feature scripts. Feature, feature, feature. I try to get them made, and then I can direct them. That really has been the bulk of my focus. I’ve done a few art installations recently, so that may have informed me just wanting to dare to do something different. There are different types of filmmakers, different types of people in any career. Some like to just stay in their lane, and I trust the flow. If things are brought to me, I believe there’s a reason. It took a lot to get that to me, that art project, that story. I always come from this place of listening. What are the signs? What’s going on?”
