Charles Wilkinson hates karaoke.
“It’s like drunk people singing out of key, ripping off somebody else who’s famous, just horrible,” the resident of Deep Cove said. “I’ve been a musician all my life and it’s just like fingernails on the blackboard for me.”
But as Wilkinson relaxed in the back of a karaoke bar in a northern oil sands town during a film tour, he noticed something interesting.
“Both from a musical point of view, but also from a socio-economic point of view,” he said. “Everybody was getting along and yet the people in the bar were so different… One guy got up and sang [Culture Club’s] ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ in this high falsetto voice. I thought dude, you’re going to get killed up here. You just don’t do that in an oil patch bar with a bunch of guys sitting around with tats and shaved heads, and yet they were cheering him.”
In his documentary Oil Sands Karaoke, which screens at Vancity Theatre Jan. 17 to 21, Wilkinson follows five folks akin to Jennifer Beals’ character in Flashdance. They’re truck drivers and scaffolders by day, singers and performers by night.
There’s Brandy Willier who is trying to reconcile her love of the wilderness with the love of her job — operating the largest haul truck in the world, Massey Whiteknife, who has been out as gay in Fort McMurray for 15 years and escapes a horrendously abusive past by performing in drag as Iceis Rain, and former farm boy Dan Debrabandere who recorded a six-song CD in Nashville before family obligations halted his musical career.
Among stunning vast panoramas of stripped and pitted land near Fort McMurray, Oil Sands Karaoke unearths the pasts, motivations and dreams of each of its subjects and the loneliness they feel.
With the wide vistas, Wilkinson wanted audiences to see the scale of the oil sands. “And the magnitude of our impact on our natural world so we can keep driving cars,” he said.
With so many people concerned about the oil sands, Wilkinson wanted to explore why Canadians aren’t doing more to stop their expansion and make sure they will be reclaimed to their natural setting once the work there is done.
“And the answer that comes pretty clearly in Oil Sands Karaoke is because we all have a karaoke contest to win,” Wilkinson said. “We’re all so busy with our own stuff.”
Oil Sands Karaoke is the second documentary of a trilogy. The first was Peace Out, which explores the pros and cons of four major energy projects on the Peace River. Peace Out won the award for Most Popular Canadian Documentary at the 2011 Vancouver International Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize for best Canadian Documentary at Hot Docs International Documentary Festival in Toronto.
Wilkinson and his co-producer Tina Schliessler are focusing on Haida Gwaii in their next film.
The Knowledge Network commissioned Oil Sands Karaoke. Wilkinson’s work includes dramatic features (Max, A Breach of Trust), a TV movie (Heart of the Storm) and episodic series TV (The Highlander). He was also a child entertainer on a variety TV show in Calgary.
Wilkinson hopes, like in the karaoke bar, Oil Sands Karaoke connects people with all sorts of views to share respectful conversations.
“People feel very, very strongly about this and we really hoped that by injecting an element of humanity into the question, that it would cause people on both sides to stop and think,” Wilkinson said.
For more information, see viff.org.
