By Firdaus Ali
Give an adventurous storyteller a camera in a mega city like Toronto, and the results can be sheer magic on celluloid.
That’s what it feels like when you watch Canadian director V.T. Nayani’s feature debut, This Place, a queer love story about two young women — one Iranian and Kanienʼkehá꞉ka, the other Tamil — living in Toronto grappling with their sexuality and complex family legacies.
The film, a coming-of-adulthood story, is about two women falling in love for the first time. As they grow closer, each is forced to confront their families in unexpected ways. Through multiple legacies complicated by love and loss, this film gives viewers a peak into those living in between cultures.
This Place had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month and was one of eight Canadian features part of the festival’s ‘Discovery Series.’ Gushing over the response the film received, Nayani says, “It was absolutely surreal to watch my debut film alongside 400 cinema lovers. A moment to truly treasure and savour forever.”
Starring Devery Jacobs (lead actor Reservation Dogs), and Priya Guns, This Place is a queer love story at the centre of rich and muti-layered interplay and understanding of the Iranian, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), and Tamil communities. The film explores what love looks like amidst complexity and tribulations. “The film talks about the polarized experiences of love. The grief and the joy that it brings us,” adds the debutante director.
With This Place, Nayani became the first Tamil-Canadian filmmaker to be featured at TIFF. But what’s remarkable about her Toronto-set love story is that it feels like a community-made film. “It totally feels that way, because the film was written by me alongside Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs and Golshan Abdmoulaie, who all bring their own stories to the screen.”
Nayani, a graduate of journalism and broadcasting, explored several opportunities including documentaries, music videos, combining her love for storytelling along with powerful visuals, as she journeyed in film and television before finding her own voice. “The journalism training brought with it the love for words. My parents are Tamil and their experiences and stories of “back home” helped shape the way I see things,” adds Nayani.
With no formal training in filmmaking or any lineage to films, Nayani spent her time honing her skills and building relationships so that she could give flight to her cinematic dreams. “There aren’t many diverse stories of BIPOC (black, Indigenous and People of Colour) and its important to tell those stories,” says Nayani.
The film set in Toronto, tells the story of two young women falling in love for the first time and jointly challenged by their family history, which bear the legacies of loss, migration, and displacement. “The city is a melting pot of cultures and specific intersections, and conversations are special to Toronto. These don’t happen anywhere else. The city was where our thoughts and stories collided, so it had to be set here,” Nayani rightly points out.
Nine years ago, Nayani had the idea for her film and four years later she secured funding for the project. Canadian filmmakers can spend years on journeys as fraught with drama and risk as the ones they’re telling on screen, trying to navigate the world of Canadian film financing as first-time feature directors and producers.
For a young, racialized filmmaker, navigating a white and male dominated industry, can be difficult, “You’ve got to trust your expertise and keep building the relationships that can help you live your dream. its important for her to create films that resonate with audiences, which strike a chord with people, and they see something of themselves in my work. That’s important to me as a filmmaker,” says the young director.
Through both young women and their unlikely love story, This Place, filmed sensuously with extreme sensitivity, intimately explores the liminal space between cultures, displaced both at home and abroad.
The film revolves around lovers grappling with their own identities and a past that they thought they had put behind them. Jacobs stars as Kawenniióhstha, a Mohawk woman searching Toronto for her Iranian immigrant father. Priya Guns plays Malai, a Tamil-Canadian woman who is working through her feelings about her own alcoholic father. A flirtatious glance shared between them at the laundromat becomes a romantic relationship weighted with shared history and trauma.
Kawenniióhstha and Malai, both daughters of refugees, find one another in a Toronto laundromat. With a spark and a missing notebook, their love story begins. However, big life events involving their respective fathers threaten to keep them apart. Nayani’s parents met at a laundromat, and she gives them a befitting tribute by placing her film characters finding love in this special place as well.
With dialogue in Mohawk, Persian, Tamil, French, and English, This Place is a unique love story with universal elements that will resonate beyond language and communities. Produced by Stephanie Sonny Hooker for Hometeam Films and Mutuals Pictures, the film was made possible with the financial participation of Telefilm Canada, CBC Films, CFC/Netflix Calling Card Accelerator, Inside Out, station 369 and Aspeth Inc.
And, over the course of her career, Nayani has been championed as a storyteller and artist by platforms including Telefilm Canada, The Gotham, CBC, Netflix, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Indigenous Screen Office, RBC and L’Oréal Paris. Her work has also been supported by festivals including TIFF Next Wave, Women of the World, Women Deliver, Inside Out Film & Video Festival, Zanzibar International Film Festival and Regent Park Film Festival.
Since 2018, she has proudly served on the Board of Breakthroughs Film Festival – the only festival in Canada dedicated to showcasing short work by women and gender-diverse filmmakers.
Nayani is also recipient of the UN Women Yvonne M Hebert Award for filmmakers and photographers. And the end of 2021, she completed her residency in the directors’ lab of the 2021 Norman Jewison Film Program at the Canadian Film Centre as well as her work as commissioning editor for Reel International Film Festival’s 25th anniversary anthology – (Re)Rites of Passage: Asian Canada in Motion.
Not one to rest on past laurels, Nayani is moving onto newer and doing what she does best. Telling stories of our times that are intimate, complex, and truly stimulating!