Filmmaker M.H. Murray shows us why Toronto is the loneliest place in Canada

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Toronto can be a cold and isolating place. That's the feeling M.H. Murray captures in his harrowing feature debut I Don't Know Who You Are. The film stars Murray's regular collaborator Mark Clennon, who's also a musician and co-writer on the project. He plays a sexual assault survivor desperately trying to come up with the money for HIV preventive medication. As he scrambles for a solution, the film scours the narrow alleys, disparate corners and tiny condo bubbles that leave people feeling helpless and alienated in Toronto's concrete jungle, where no one passing by could possibly know what he's going through. 

"I don't think it's specifically Toronto that's cold," says Murray on a Zoom call. "I think the way a city functions when you're an individual in a crisis feels cold. It could have been a summer day and I think it would have still felt cold."

Still, if Toronto had a mood board, it would feature sterile glass towers, cringe Tinder profiles and the broken connection that is Eglinton, a once bustling avenue turned into a decades-long construction project that scares people away. These are just some of the reasons Toronto is repeatedly called out for being the loneliest place in Canada. 

That makes I Don't Know Who You Are's compelling purview not just a reality check for so many who put the so-called 6ix on a pedestal, but also an interesting alternate to the various portraits of Toronto we've seen on film — from the nightmarish sci-fi visions of Cronenberg to the honeyed rom-com lens of movies like Take This Waltz and The F Word. Murray's particular view is even more fascinating since it comes from someone who has so much affection for Toronto and speaks so warmly about the communities in the city he's part of, whether that's the film scene, the queer scene or the intersection between the two.

"Toronto is one of the main girls," says Murray, describing the city as a cultured, world-class destination, right next to New York, Tokyo and the like. It's the kind of place, he says, that would take several years to truly know, which can be daunting for newcomers finding their bearings.

"When you come to a new city, you feel like you're floating in between all these different worlds," says Murray, who grew up in Mississauga's Port Credit and forged his connection to the city through those aforementioned cultural spaces, travelling down for either the Toronto International Film Festival or the Church-Wellesley Village. "I wanted to go to the cinema or be with the gays," he says. "There's so much community, but the city can also be super isolating when you're still not sure who you are — no pun intended — or what you're doing."

Murray describes taking trips on the GO train to TIFF with his mom and making a whole day out of the journey that would include going to a restaurant like Hey Lucy before heading over to the Roy Thomson Hall or Princess of Wales Theatre for a red carpet. Having his own feature debut premiere at TIFF, with his mom in attendance, ended up being a full circle moment, announcing his arrival in the Toronto film scene. "That's why I was so gaggy. Makes me emotional thinking about it." 

Like so many teens, Murray picked up on Quentin Tarantino's nods to Godard and the French New Wave, and was taken by their methods of making low-budget films with a semi-doc aesthetic, resistant to the established norms. I can't help but relate that to how Murray started making a name for himself a decade ago with a web series, playing outside the boundaries of industry conventions in a format that required a younger and hipper visual vocabulary.

He co-created Teenagers with Sara Tamosauskas, often shooting the web series inside his parents' Mississauga home. "The web series was bubbling," says Murray about the format's nascent stage, when a star like Issa Rae was then just making a name for herself on YouTube with Awkward Black Girl. "That was my way from the outside trying to get credibility." 

The series, featuring Degrassi: The Next Generation's alum Chloe Rose and Raymond Ablack, was about teens navigating sex and relationships. Some episodes would garner millions in views as the format gained more legitimacy, with festivals in L.A., Vancouver and Seoul featuring web formats. Eventually, Teenagers actor Emmanuel Kabongo was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award. 

Murray's latest film, too, has a semi-doc aesthetic, while also leaning heavily on his favourite film, Three Colors: Blue, which is about a grieving woman alienating herself from society.  I Don't Know Who You Are is actually based on his own personal experience with a sexual assault and the desperate search for the money to pay for HIV preventive medication not covered by OHIP. Benjamin, the character played by Clennon, and moulded from both the actor and director, is reeling from the trauma as he knocks on different doors around town, asking for help. He retreats further and further inside himself at just the moment when he needs to open up and embrace support.

Murray and Clennon wrote the film during the pandemic. And though the film isn't set during the pandemic, the anxiety of the time over what felt like never-ending quarantine and a broken health-care system bleeds into it.

"This is just my experience," says Murray. He isn't trying to position the film as an indictment on the health-care system. He points out that the resources are there to support individuals in his situation. But in a bureaucracy, where communication is broken and the left hand doesn't speak to the right, nobody knows about them. "You can go to the doctor in one of the biggest cities in the world, where there's tons of queer people who have HIV, and these [doctors] will not know what you're talking about when it comes to these drugs. It's like, 'What? Shouldn't you know? If you don't know, how am I supposed to know?'"

We start getting into countless examples from personal experience, all those moments where a rigid system can't budge, where a staffer is helpless to make some amendment or give a hand that could make all the difference. A devastating scene in I Don't Know Who You Are, which features a standoff between Benjamin and a pharmacist who simply can't let him have the medication he needs, captures that frustration. 

"It just takes one person to say, 'OK, I get it,'" says Murray. "You're just waiting for that one person to have kindness."

Murray talks about filmmaking as catharsis, as a form of "expensive therapy." I asked him if it worked, if making I Don't Know Who You Are helped him heal. He brings up all the people who connected with him sharing similar stories. "I'm not that special," he says, "which is comforting weirdly." 

"My experience is unique to myself, but it's an experience that we all share. Making this film, it became so much more communal than I expected."