Coyote asks what it means to raise a child, as an immigrant, in a splintered society

Cutaways is a personal essay series where filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2022 edition by Katherine Jerkovic focuses on her film Coyote, which follows a family's journey to reconnect after a widower's estranged daughter reappears with a grandson he didn't know about.

Time. 

As a writer-director, I take several years to write. Every film is a long journey for me. When I finish writing a script, I'm not quite the same person I was when I started. And when the film is finished, I feel very far away from that initial person. 

People who've never worked in a feature-length film tend to think that five, eight, ten years is a long time, and that maybe there is something wrong with things lingering. But for me, life must infuse and suffuse the work. Life nourishes art and art nourishes life. This back-and-forth dialogue is what makes the work mature and relevant. I don't believe in things done quickly; only time can bring depth and wisdom.

Birth. 

I drafted the first synopsis for Coyote about 10 years ago. It was the story of a man who felt he'd been a negligent father and found himself given a second chance to be one: a grandfather. It was also about the plans we make and how pointless they are when life is so unpredictable. I was pregnant at the time. And so, inevitably, the script became a meditation on parenting and our responsibility toward children. What does it mean to raise a child today, in our society of nuclear families, of immigrants without relatives, and of countless lonely people? 

I was the child of a political refugee living in a foreign country with no family. Like thousands of young Latin American people in the late 70s, who first thought they could change the world and then had to flee cruel dictatorships, solidarity was essential to our survival. I grew up with the feeling that children were everyone's responsibility. And now it was my turn to raise a child away from my family. 

Coyote became — amongst other things — a contemporary version of the proverb "it takes a village to raise a child." It's a village made of people from all walks of life and different cultures who, nonetheless, all care about that crucial and fragile phase of life that is childhood. Toward the end of the writing process, I realized I had written a film where individuals, who are all quite different, find themselves connected through the child's character — forming an indispensable web around him. 

Fragments. 

The characters in Coyote are different facets of myself; they are fragments of my life. It's the opposite of an alter ego — which I explored in my first feature film, Roads in February (2018). Through Coyote, my fragmented life and world are both embodied by different characters and storylines and everything becomes coherent — whole. As if this film was a way to make sense of a life shaped by multiple migrations and multiple belongings. Writing is rewriting. 

I've been increasingly exasperated by how Latino people are depicted in film and television in Quebec. Most of the time, they are shown as hardworking immigrants whose primary ambitions are to feed their families or to obtain a legal status. Mexicans, in particular, seem to only live in this social imaginary as submissive, destitute, almost illiterate seasonal workers.

This stereotype doesn't reflect the contribution of Latin American immigrants to our culture. Worse, it shows us an immigrant whose ambitions and desires are elementary and devoid of intricacy. Camilo, the main character in Coyote, carries a story that can speak to everyone on a level that is universal and unrelated to his immigration. 

New beginnings. 

Camilo is not young. His life isn't easy. But he's not giving up. More and more, we are seeing middle-aged and even older lead characters in films and on TV. Our culture's obsession with youth seems to be giving way. This is particularly significant because youth occurs during a small part of our lives and it has been insistently presented as the decisive moment when we "be-come" (we come to be). As if identity was something that crystallized once and for all, and as if everything that happened after youth was a continuous and repetitive path.

Yet the wonderful thing about life is that it can start over many times as we learn, change, and reinvent ourselves. Camilo dreams of a new beginning at an age when you no longer expect it — and he's not alone in this.

This year's Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8–18. Find showtimes for Coyote here.