Few filmmakers are better placed than Alexandre Trudeau to talk about artists addressing political issues after the Berlin Film Festival no-politics backlash, as both his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and brother Justin Trudeau both served as Canadian prime ministers.
“Coming from politics in my family, politics are everywhere. There’s always politics. They’re in everything,” 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 career as a documentary maker, Trudeau toured political hot spots, including Baghdad in 2003, where he shot Embedded in Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion. A year later, he directed The Fence, a film about two families on either side of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the West Bank.
He also did a doc on civil unrest in Liberia and Sierra Leone and another that chronicled the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. “I have a very radical humanism ultimately, and at a younger age, I always thought making these films 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 high school in Winnipeg, where the classroom anxiety he saw among his young students inspired Hair of the Bear as Trudeau’s first scripted feature. The coming-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.
“Just because it’s scripted, doesn’t mean there’s no politics in there,” Trudeau says of his pivot to fiction. “That means it’s hiding, perhaps. Which is why I love scripted. This is a film about our country, in a political sense. It’s this younger, smaller, weaker (country) realizing sometimes you have to fight. You gotta fight.”
For Tori, fighting means surviving Canada’s extreme winters and its harsh wilderness dangers. “It’s a country that can 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 in 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 in the sense in this country, in the winter and out in the boonies, doing nothing can get you killed. You have to be, in a way, fighting for your life as a baseline,” he added.
In the film, Tori’s grandfather tells her, after she self-harms and refuses to go to school, “Who can say which moments will shape you into who you will become?” She is then sent to his remote 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 use, transforming from a frightened and threatened young woman 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 outdoors can bring personal renewal for Tori in Hair of the Bear, and for young people everywhere grappling with the demands of modern life.
“It’s where the Canadian soul lives. It’s where every troubled teenager should find some way to communicate with nature, to find 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.
“This is one our moments, yes. In another way, the signs have always been there. We tend to think one person is the problem. No, there’s a structural, profound problem here, and one person is not the cause of it, just a symptom,” Trudeau argues.
“And when that person goes away, the problem will not be solved. I see this with a larger lens, that we’re fighting for liberal democracy. The world is, this country specifically, because I really feel we’re the last man standing in this game, and if we go down, then there will 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.
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