N.B. filmmaker showcases personal story about family secrets at Fredericton film fest

A Nashwaaksis-born filmmaker is showing his first feature film at the Silver Wave Film Festival — and the story is personal. 

Drive Back Home follows a man from Stanley, a small community about 43 kilometres north of Fredericton, who has to bail his gay, estranged brother out of jail in Toronto.

While the events and names in the film are fictionalized, director Michael Clowater said the story itself is based on his grandfather's experience.

"I wanted to have something concrete that I could hang on to personally as I write it, to give it authenticity," he said. "And the best way for me to write that was to write what I know."

Clowater said his grandfather died when he was only two years old, so he didn't really know him. But he always heard stories growing up about his grandfather and great-uncle's interesting dynamic. 

That was what inspired him to do some digging for the film. 

The real story, as Clowater knows it, was that his grandfather, who was from New Brunswick and had never left, got a call that his brother was arrested in Montreal for having sex with a man in a park.

He was always curious how his grandfather was able to go and bring his brother home, despite the fact that he had committed a crime. He said what he learned through making the film was that, at the time — around 1970 — this was sometimes seen as a "somewhat victimless" crime, in larger police departments, but still worthy of a type of punishment. 

"They thought it was perverted, and so what the workaround was that if a family member or a spouse or an employer would come and vouch for them, they would drop all the charges and release them," said Clowater.

"The way I interpreted that was that, you know, the people in charge actually didn't think anyone was being hurt, but they wanted to punish them. And to me, that felt ... sort of personal."

And while the film explores this loophole and the personal humiliation of outing someone to their family as punishment, Clowater said he didn't set out to make a queer film.

Instead, he wanted to make a film about family — a love story between two brothers who didn't like each other.

The film features multi-award-winning stage and screen Scottish actor Alan Cumming, British actor Charlie Creed-Miles and Clare Coulter, a Canadian.

Making the film really specific to a certain place helps people connect to it, said Clowater.

For example, Cumming is from a rural part of Scotland and, after reading the script, he told Clowater it reminded him of home.

"You don't need to know where Stanley is to know that it's a small town,and that it's a bit of a nosy town, you know, like all small towns are," said Clowater.

And just as the actors felt connected to the story when they were given the script, he thinks viewers might also feel a connection.

He said during his research for the film, he learned that many people in his family didn't know a lot about the story.

"I think these kinds of stories are secret stories within a lot of families — I don't think that this story within my family is an unusual one," said Clowater.

"Everybody's got some version of this and I think, you know, how you deal with trauma, how you deal with adversity, I think [it] says a lot about what kind of family that you want to be."

Drive Back Home plays Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Silver Wave Film Festival, part of the opening gala in Tilley Hall, on the UNB Fredericton campus.

It will also be screened at Cineplex theatres across Canada on Dec. 6.