Few filmmakers are higher placed than Alexandre Trudeau to discuss artists addressing political issues after the Berlin Film Festival no-politics backlash, as each his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and brother Justin Trudeau each served as Canadian prime ministers.
“Coming from politics in my family, politics are all over the place. There’s at all times politics. They’re in every thing,” Trudeau told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of his latest movie, the survivalist thriller Hair of the Bear that he co-directed with James McLellan and stars The Baby-Sitters Club actress Malia Baker and Roy Dupuis.
Early in his filmmaking profession as a documentary maker, Trudeau toured political hot spots, including Baghdad in 2003, where he shot Embedded in Iraq in the course of the U.S.-led invasion. A 12 months later, he directed The Fence, a movie about two families on either side of the Israel-Palestine conflict within the West Bank.
He also did a doc on civil unrest in Liberia and Sierra Leone and one other that chronicled the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. “I actually have a really radical humanism ultimately, and at a younger age, I at all times thought making these movies would help heal the world. It was ambitious and it’s a crazy thought now as a wiser, older man,” Trudeau insisted as he looks back on his young artistic idealism.
While he was making documentaries, McLellan taught highschool in Winnipeg, where the classroom anxiety he saw amongst his young students inspired Hair of the Bear as Trudeau’s first scripted feature. The approaching-of-age tale centers on Baker playing Tori, an anxiety-ridden 16-year-old girl in a cat-and-mouse battle with bad guys in Canada’s frozen wilderness.
“Simply because it’s scripted, doesn’t mean there’s no politics in there,” Trudeau says of his pivot to fiction. “Which means it’s hiding, perhaps. Which is why I really like scripted. This can be a film about our country, in a political sense. It’s this younger, smaller, weaker realizing sometimes you could have to fight. You gotta fight.”
For Tori, fighting means surviving Canada’s extreme winters and its harsh wilderness dangers. “It’s a rustic that may kill you. My little brother knows,” Trudeau says as he recalled 23-year-old Michel Trudeau, the youngest member in his storied political family. In 1998, while skiing within the backwoods of British Columbia, he was tragically swept into the icy waters of Kokanee Lake by an avalanche and drowned. His body was never found.
“It’s a dramatic device within the sense on this country, within the winter and out within the boonies, doing nothing can get you killed. You will have to be, in a way, fighting to your life as a baseline,” he added.
Within the film, Tori’s grandfather tells her, after she self-harms and refuses to go to highschool, “Who can say which moments will shape you into who you’ll turn into?” She is distributed to his distant cable to learn hunting and survival skills along a frozen lake near the U.S. border. In a crisis, Tori puts those life-saving skills to make use of, transforming from a frightened and threatened young woman right into a fierce warrior. Here the hidden dangers of Canada’s vast natural landscapes — including the country’s wintry cold, snow and ice — allow Trudeau to underline how embracing the outside can bring personal renewal for Tori in Hair of the Bear, and for young people all over the place grappling with the demands of contemporary life.
“It’s where the Canadian soul lives. It’s where every troubled teenager should find some strategy to communicate with nature, to seek out we’re survivors as humans,” he argues. Tori’s survival odyssey belongs as well to Canada as a now embattled country amid U.S. president Donald Trump’s tariffs war and 51st state taunts.
“That is one our moments, yes. In one other way, the signs have at all times been there. We are likely to think one person is the issue. No, there’s a structural, profound problem here, and one person shouldn’t be the reason behind it, only a symptom,” Trudeau argues.
“And when that person goes away, the issue is not going to be solved. I see this with a bigger lens, that we’re fighting for liberal democracy. The world is, this country specifically, because I actually feel we’re the last man standing on this game, and if we go down, then there might be nothing left,” he adds.
Hair of the Bear, which was shot in northeast Manitoba on the frozen shoreline of the Winnipeg River, will hit Canadian theaters starting on March 5.