Equation to an Unknown: In Conversation with Kalil Haddad
The Toronto-based experimental filmmaker sits down with Bleeding Edge to discuss the first retrospective screening of his work on Monday, October 28th.
Having showcased Kalil Haddad’s work throughout Bleeding Edge’s history (Vampires Drink Blood…I Drink Sorrow in August 2022, His Smell before the Toronto premiere of The All Golden and The Taking of Jordan at our first New York event), we’re proud to present the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in the city. On Monday, October 28th, Bleeding Edge will be returning to Innis Town Hall to screen eight of his shorts, culminating in the world premiere of his newest work, Victim of Circumstance.
One of the most important new voices in both queer and avant-garde cinema, Haddad’s work can alternate between languid and truly abrasive rhythms, often inhabiting a POV that feels truly dangerous in a filmmaking landscape for young directors so encouraging of “niceness”. Bleeding Edge sat down with Haddad to discuss his practice and body of work before Monday screening, which BTW, you can get tickets for here.
Bleeding Edge: So my first question is what do your parents think of your work? No, I'm joking. My actual first question, can you talk about the first exposure to images you had and when you felt the impulse initially to become a filmmaker?
Kalil Haddad: That's so funny. I actually think it was the summer that I was nine years old. My cousins were visiting and they had just gotten this toy camcorder and so we would film ourselves playing around basically, making up little skits. It was right after we had gone to the theatre to see Michael Bay's Transformers.
BE: So you owe a lot to Michael Bay?
KH: I actually owe a lot to Michael Bay.
BE: What was some of the first queer representation you'd noticed as a kid? Maybe it was more subliminal?
KH: That's a good question. I feel like probably the first gay film I ever saw was The Birdcage with Robin Williams. So I think especially growing up, that was my idea of what gay people were based on that movie. Probably that and The Simpsons. And then when I was a bit older, I think fourteen, in the same weekend, I watched both Mysterious Skin and Bad Education. And those two films really showed me the kinds of stories gay films could portray and what they can do on screen, as well that queerness doesn't have to be represented as something light or comedic. It can be treated seriously and it can get into these much more complex issues of identity. Seeing those two back to back really set me off in terms of wanting to explore more transgressive films.
BE: Has queer respectability politics ever been an issue you've run into? Meaning, have you ever gotten kind of negative feedback over maybe not showing more positive images per se?
KH: I have, but for me, and I guess that's the thing that I try and fight against in my work, that queerness always has to be represented in a positive or soft way. Like I'm so over stories like Love, Simon that are just these safe coming out narratives, right? Films that aren't really dealing with the ideas of social identity or really sexuality in any kind of complex way. Queer film historically has been challenging. It should remain challenging. I think queerness becoming more mainstream in and of itself is a great thing, but we shouldn't also lose track of who we are beyond acceptance narratives and lose the ideas that are important to us interpersonally and politically, ideas that we should be tackling and addressing, because being gay, it doesn't start and stop with coming out, it's a lot more complex than that. So for me when I see a film like Love, Simon, it feels like it's just telling the sanitised version or the prologue to the real story of this person's life.
BE: I feel like through a lot of the films you’ve made, there's almost a historical responsibility in some ways, in how the stories you're choosing to showcase present the reality for a lot of people of a certain age of a certain sexuality at a certain time?
KH: That's the thing. And I feel like a lot of queer media that I grew up consuming as a teenager, and wanting to explore, were these films like Flesh or Querelle or Tennesse Williams plays, that deal more with the darkness of the queer experience. That's why I think as it does become more mainstream, not to lose track of the history that we're built upon. Because yeah, talking about the historical aspects in my work, these aren't stories that took place that long ago. Like we're talking about forty years ago, just one generation, maybe two generations removed, and to not lose sight of the actual struggles and challenges of being what society doesn't want you to be, and the kind of isolation and pain that’s created historically.
And I think that's an important expression too, like queer pain, queer rage, that it can't all be sunshine and rainbows and treating the experiences of gay people as a punchline. Even if I think The Birdcage is fun, it's a very one dimensional version of what that is, and it's very much like a palatable version of that too. That's why I think it's interesting, for these historical works to take what we think of queer people in the 80s or 90s and kind of subvert that in terms of what the actual reality of what that experience was. Even that movie [The Birdcage], it's scenario is all played as a joke. We have to pretend we're straight or whatever, right? But it's like, okay, what's the actual pain inherent to these societal limitations and having to form your identity around other people's expectations of you? And that's also why with my work, I don't want to feed into expectations of what a gay movie is, what it should be like. It's like, no, I think queerness has always been confrontational, it should remain that way and should speak to those real issues.
BE: In terms of your filmmaking process, how beneficial has the film school process such as York University been to your films?
KH: Yeah, I'll say even when I was an undergraduate student, York didn’t really have, with the exception of John Greyson, any openly gay film professors working. In that time too, when I was making my film Farm Boy, which was my fourth year thesis film, I got a lot of pushback. And I think that there's something to being able to make films within this kind of context and to learn from these professors, but I also think that for me film school is about being able to learn enough to know when you should follow your own vision.
When I was working with one professor, he was constantly trying to get me to [go against my instincts]. I had shot Farm Boy in a way where I knew exactly what my vision was and the kind of film I wanted to make, full of long takes and ambience, and he wanted me to re-edit it into a much more narratively driven, direct kind of work, much more of a love story than the film is intended to be. The film is about the pain of wanting someone that you can't have and the burden of regret. Especially life regrets for older gay men. And he wanted me to make it a lot sunnier, a lot more romantic, and I fought against that, and made what I had set out to make. I feel very proud of that film. I think, ultimately, film school should be about teaching you when to trust in and follow your own instincts.
BE: With this event we're showcasing your new film, Victim of Circumstance. Can you talk about the origins of this film?
KH: The genesis of this film came right after I made The Taking of Jordan. I wanted to explore making more of these found footage, almost horror adjacent works. I was doing research and looking through all of these gay porn magazines from the 70s and 80s. What struck me initially were that these pages were the entire gay experience condensed into one little package. One of the only forms of representation gay people had of themselves at that time was through porn, whether on screen or on the page. And it made me think, how does that shape your sense of self when this is your only portrayal, this overly sexualized image of yourself, not a humanised version in any way. And then going through these pages and seeing the scope of what they truly represent, they weren’t just porn. There's political articles in them, personal ads, there's advertisements for very specific things, like completely non-sexual things, but very specifically for a gay audience. And so approaching this material as an entire history synthesised on the page, I wanted to find a way to bring that to the screen. How do I turn the gay experience as represented within this magazine into one grand statement on what this world was during this time and place. So initially it started off as really just the magazine pages being used to tell the story. And through editing, implying these different kinds of experiential meanings. What does it mean to cut from personal ads looking for love to an ad for poppers? And then as it went on, it became much more of a visual collage, much more sprawling in its scope, where it was no longer just magazine pages, it was about how to bring these pages to life, how to represent these experiences through additional footage and other historical material.
BE: Something very noticeable about your films, and especially in this one is sound. In making your films, are you conceiving of the sound alongside the images, or is it something that comes to you later in the process?
KH: No, I’m definitely conceiving them alongside the images. For me, the sound design is an integral part of forming the film and discovering the tone that I'm really trying to hit. Because that's the thing, the magazine pages in and of themselves are simply magazine pages, right? I can just open up a magazine and I can see them. So how do we really portray these still images, as it were, on screen in an emotive way? So as I'm editing the scenes, I'm constantly going back and forth with the sound and visuals, and they're being formed in tandem to find the true experience of what they really represent.
BE: What do you envision as your artistic journey of sorts? Because I think that's part of the point of doing this screening is to show a progression of your films. What do you think in a way you've been building up to, artistically speaking?
KH: I think my work has always been concerned with gay themes and ideas of masculinity, but I think especially in my earlier works, they were addressed much softer. We look at a film like Muscle Monsters, which was shot in 2017 along with Honeypot and The Boys of Summer, and they're very much about gender and sexuality, but in a way that's more about heterosexual masculinity. Or the queer relationship to heterosexuality, really. Even one of my earliest films As I Sat In His Car, though explicitly queer, is a much more tender kind of work. I’d say my journey has been about speaking on these ideas and experiences in a much more direct way, with all their inherent beauty and ugliness. I think the way that I'm addressing queer issues now is much more blunt and unapologetic. And I think that's what great films, queer or otherwise, should be. Films should be challenging, they should be uncompromising and uncomfortable to an extent, especially queer films. We live in a world now where most people see the issues faced by queer people as issues of the past. I’m here to address what people would rather ignore, or worse, what they’d like to forget.