“I’m not going to lie to you — Fire Song is a tough sell,” filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones explains on his latest project’s fundraising page. “It’s hard to convince people that audiences are interested in seeing a story about gay aboriginal teenagers who don’t turn into wolves and aren’t feuding with vampires.”
Luckily for Jones, about halfway through the campaign, supporters have shown otherwise.
The writer and director is raising funds for his first feature film project, Fire Song, the story of a young, gay aboriginal man who returns home after his younger sister commits suicide. The protagonist, Shane, struggles with his dream of pursuing freedom and an education in the city or staying in a community that he loves.
“Because the central conflict in this story is really about a young person saying, ‘Should I stay in this place that I love or should I go and follow my dreams?’ I really wanted to make that answer as complicated as possible and show somebody who does love his community and needs to be there just as badly as he needs to leave,” Jones says in the project’s pitch video, featured on Urban Native Magazine’s website.
As well as being a project by an established filmmaker who has done some incredible work, Fire Song is also notable because it will feature a cast made up primarily of aboriginal youth and will be shot in Northern Ontario, which is where the story takes place.
The Fire Song fundraising campaign, which is all-or-nothing and has already received more than half its $15,000 goal, is an opportunity to support a project that tells the type of story that so often goes unheard or ignored in Canada.
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