“Question the Framework”: Toronto-Based Actor and Filmmaker Aisha Evelyna’s Film ALEX Challenges Systems of Oppression with Realism
Toronto-based actor and filmmaker (among other honoured titles) Aisha Evelyna is committed to her inaugural vision, bringing the reality of issues and complexities surrounding underrepresented communities to a screen. Evelyna is committed to challenging how we see things by using filmmaking to project how we see the world versus how the world sees us. Evelyna’s project shows her promising foothold in making her community feel heard, seen and graciously praised.
Evelyna’s 2022 short film, ALEX, a Vimeo Staff Pick, premiered at HollyShorts and screened at Austin Film Festival. Evelyna wrote, starred in and directed the film with the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Cayle Chernin Award for Media Arts. ALEX is about a Black woman accused of shoplifting while shopping with her white friend.
Watch ALEX and read the Q&A with Evelyna below.
Dorcas Marfo: Tell me––what went into this film? Capturing the complexities of racial profiling, humiliation and shallow inclusivity is hard to put in words let alone motions; tell me more about what personal experiences went into this film.
Aisha Evelyna: The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been around since Trayvon Martin, but everything came to a head in 2020. We were having all kinds of conversations about what systemic racism looks like. Many people of colour knew, but maybe the rest of the world wasn't aware.
In 2018, I had been banking with a specific bank since I was 15 years old. Coincidentally, I had booked a commercial with that same bank and got a cheque for $2,200. I went to this Bay and Bloor branch and didn't look like everybody else there. Since I'd been banking with that bank and had a good history for 15 years, the bank didn’t hold my cheques. So when I deposited a cheque, if it was more than $1,000, the first $1,000 would be released to me, and the rest of it would be released to me in three days.
I try depositing the cheque, and the bank teller tells me there will be a hold. I clarified that there shouldn't be because I have this thing set up. He said there was nothing he could do about it. I told him that was not true, and he said he had seen it on his side but couldn't override it. He called a manager to speak with me, who came out of their office and waved me over. It was awkward and weird, and I felt like I was in trouble.
I was the only person that looked like me in the bank, and everybody else was in a suit. I walk over and sit in her office. Keep in mind, I have a nice amount of money in my bank account because I had been working as an actor; it was probably the most money I had been making as an actor because I just got off of doing this play, and I had booked a couple of film and TV roles prior to this commercial spot. I had a track record of depositing these cheques from my agent. I was a prime banking candidate. The manager then told me she would call my agent to verify the validity of the cheque. I told her, “No, don't do that,” because it's not only embarrassing, but you don't have to. I have a history of cashing cheques from these same people because they were my agent for months. I pointed out the memo to her at the bottom of the cheque. It said the name of the spot and the name of the bank. I pulled up the commercial on my phone and pointed out that it was me. I asked why they were holding the cheque, and she repeated that they needed to confirm the validity or that I couldn’t cash it. I left. I thought long and hard about that. I had tens of thousands of dollars in my bank account. I told the story to other friends, and they'd be like, “No one would ever hassle me over $2,200.” I was hassled over $2,200. It wasn't like I had an overdraft. I told myself something was amiss here.
What sealed this for me was when I went to a boutique in the junction with a friend who is a white woman. I like jewelry––they had this nice little jewelry table set out, and I was looking at the rings and stuff. My friend was walking around the store like she owned the place, and she had a coat on as she was trying things on and running amok. It was obvious that I wasn't interested in shopping and I was just there to support my friend. The woman just kept paying attention to me, and then it clicked. I was like, Oh, she's worried that I'm gonna take one of the rings and pocket it. I can understand that being a real concern. But at one point, I just stepped away from the rings and stood while my friend ran around. The store clerk kept paying attention to me while talking to my friend, still keeping tabs on me.
I feel like a lot of organizations went Black Lives Matter, went “we stand with the marginalized,” not realizing that it's not just saying things; it's looking at the practices within your business and in your heart personally and looking at where those fears come from. I know that I was being treated differently because I'm Black. You can fight me on it because I know that happened.
DM: Performative allyship was something we commonly witnessed within the last three years; as you mentioned, many businesses didn’t back their pledges with actions. Can you speak more on the scene where the customer rep is trying to validate their inclusivity by making it seem like all that’s required is to feature diverse artists on their Instagram but not have them in-store to purchase? How does that speak to today’s performative actions by businesses, brands, people outside the BIPOC space and more?
AE: It's interesting because I was writing capitalism in the background of everything of the character motivations in this little micro world I created. Everybody wants to be Black and cool, but they don't want to be Black, so this is shown when the storekeeper says they feature a POC artist; this is virtue signalling for the sake of a dollar. If you do not have any of the items in the store, the only people that profit here are you because people who are not questioning will look at this ad and say, “Oh, cool. They're the kinds of people that support BLM. I want to align myself with companies that support BLM because their Instagram features all these cool artists.” You go to the store, you shop, not thinking about where the items come from, and not a single Black person has made anything in there, and you're going to buy it. It's almost like commercial blackface, like using a person's Black face to help support. It's not mis-intentioned, but it's misinformed. Everything is motivated by the pursuit of a dollar and how capitalism ruins us. Racial politics are a disguise for people to keep money and for capitalism to continue to thrive. The first character, Madi, is complaining about her job. She needs her job to survive.
She's being harassed by a man at her job, but this is just what women go through. She'll continue because she needs a job. Alex, the storekeeper trying to move up the social ladder, has been promoted and needs to find somebody to take over her job. Madi is complaining about the fact that she hates her job. This is perfect because Alex is thinking, I can have the job that I want, which is being a manager/keyholder, if I can get someone below me, and then I can move up on the ladder. And Madi’s game is that she doesn’t want to be harassed at her job and make money, which is fair. The only reason Alex is so worried about Sydney stealing is because she's worried that she will lose her job, so it goes back to money again.
In some ways, our pursuit of money and things is the underlying issue that continues to divide us. Going back to your point about performative allyship and the store saying, “We support POC artists. We feature one on our Instagram page every month,” it's now bad for business if you don't seem inclusive, so they're going to make themselves seem inclusive because it's good for business. They might not care about these kinds of issues. They care about making money, and how to make money is to align with your customer base. And if your customer base is aligned with BLM, then they will try and align with it to seem more appealing to their customer base. It's money.
DM: There's a moment when humiliation is very visible, when the store rep rummages through her bag, violating every ounce of Sydney’s privacy and identity, and the shock of “Is this really happening?” It felt like more than just bag-searching. What did that symbolize?
AE: It's a power thing. In this scenario, as a Black woman, when we think about the socioeconomic runs of society, white women are above Black women in this societal structure. Black women, cis and trans, are at the bottom. When Alex is searching Sydney's bag, there's an element of humiliation to it, but it's “I shouldn't have to prove; no one here has given me the benefit of the doubt.” That's the biggest thing. It's humiliating not only because her items are being searched but because she's so low on this rung of the ladder. She's just trying to be present and deal with what's coming at her. It's only after when she realizes, and that's the most hurtful thing.
The good, alternative version of this film, where no one would have watched it because it's how life should be, is Alex coming out asking, “Hey, where's that bra?” and Sydney responds, “Oh, I don't know. Maybe I left it in the changeroom. Can you help me look?” Then they're all looking for the bra and find it beneath the curtain of the changeroom. That’s the end of the story. That's the way it should have gone, but neither her friend nor the storekeeper gave her the benefit of the doubt. It is technically illegal to search somebody's belongings in a store. However, not many people know that, and when in a space of duress, you just comply. So in that scenario, it's two people against one. Even though her friend eventually says, “This is messed up. We're leaving,” because it's gone way too far, they're both kind of ignorant to the power dynamics at play where this Black woman is beneath them based on what we've been indoctrinated with. Since Sydney is beneath them and is used to being beneath them, she will comply because that's how you get through the world and how she'd been taught to get through the world. It was not only humiliation but also being aligned with bad action just because of the way you look. Your looks are the biggest thing that goes into that search.
DM: Capitalism, racial profiling, power dynamics and more. You touch on many themes within a short time but manage to do it perfectly where we understand the theme and also give space to let viewers unpack those emotions. Ultimately, setting up the platform to do so, was this difficult to do? How did you balance that?
AE: You just write something honest. I was just trying to be true to not only my own experience. A lot of times, we go to film festivals, and people will say those two women are awful. I'm like, “No, leave my characters alone.” I love them. I love Alex and Madi. They're ignorant white women, but they are lovely. I could see either of those two women going to a BLM protest, sitting on the ground and fighting for the cause but also not realizing how they act in the world helps to uphold a structure of oppression. So I tried to do two things when I thought about how to get so much packed in that bit. First, I tried to be true to an experience that I’ve lived. Then trying to be true to the mindset of those two women. It's very easy to villainize them. If you villainize the characters, they must have some element of humanity; otherwise, we are disengaged. Alex and Madi, it's not that they were bad people; they were just scared. But if we are a product of all the things we absorb in the world, including where our fears come from, are we actually surprised? I always think about this as an example: the white woman in Central Park who called the police on a Black man after he told her she couldn’t have her dog in this area because he was a bird watcher, and dogs typically scare the birds away. Somewhere along the line, that woman learned that Black people are scared of the cops. Or take Johnny in Wyoming. He's never interacted with anybody other than white folks, and he's watching the show Cops, and it's only white men chasing and battering Black bodies. Where do you think this fear comes from? Because it didn't happen by accident.
DM: You had several roles in the film. What were they, and how did they inform your perspective throughout the film? I can imagine being a filmmaker makes you see the film in a different light than an actor.
AE: I had a close friend, Rachel Cairns, and she's a very talented actor, writer and filmmaker. I asked her to be my assistant director because it was a small one-day shoot. As far as an actor, I already worked out the beats of my performance when it comes to the arcs in each chunk. I told Rachel, “Can you just make sure that I do that? and if you catch that I'm not doing that, tell me I’m missing the mark on that, so I can fix it.” That was directing myself because it's just directing a performance. But then there were moments, specifically when Alex asked for Sydney's bag. I initially just handed it over to her because of my character beat that I was thinking about. When we finished and did the take, Rachel came up to me and said, “I get where your head is as an actor, but from a filmmaking standpoint, watching this interaction, it's not reading as true; it's too easy.” I thanked her for that. It was less about directing my performance and more about catching something from a director's standpoint. It’s building a team of people around you where there's no ego because it’s so much more than what happens on the day that goes into directing a film. There's the prep of it, which is the rehearsals—which I wasn't a part of but we did have—and post-production. I had to direct that and produce it. As a writer, I'm not very glued to words. I'm glued to behaviour. So reiterating that these are just a guideline, it's not a play, so they can do whatever the heck they want; I just want to follow this script. As an actor, I had my beats that I had to hit. As a director, I know what I want to see. When I expressed my thoughts and suggested things to try, they listened to me. I didn’t have to direct the actors that much.
DM: When I watched the film a couple of times, I noticed that the signs of racial profiling were subtle before it escalated and became very “loud.” Was that intentional? Did you want viewers to notice? Was that the approach or something else that strung the events together to make it what it was?
AE: This is going back to the direction. I storyboarded the entire film. Then, I gave it to my director of photography (DP) and producer, J Stevens. It was intentional, quintessentially how to build tension and have things escalate as you start wide and then get closer and closer and closer. The build is there because it's very subtle, but we did two things. We stayed quite wide in the beginning shots to allow the conversational, laissez-faire, easy feeling to happen. Then we also use this Glimmerglass––a lens on the camera that gives everything a soft feeling, less hard, and real. This is the direction J Stevens said they wanted––for that arc to be pretty women in a pretty area, pretty pretty, femme femme, and it should degrade to something ugly.
A lens swap is done at the movie's midpoint after Sydney comes out of the change room, and now we're not very wide; we're very close to see. Also, the camera movement was very static and then, as time progressed, we got more and more jiggly with the camera to help promote a place of calm to tension with our choices of lensing and camera movements. Anybody who says you can't act and direct yourself, fight me because so much more goes into just telling an actor what to do. It's understanding film language the same way a painter has watercolour, acrylic or oil paintings; all produce a different effect on the canvas. Direction is like diplomacy––knowing how to deal with stuff thrown at you, being calm about it, and knowing how to use the language and tools. Even though I was in it, we tried to lean on those tools to build tension.
DM: There’s a moment in the dressing room where Sydney looks down, and her hands are white. What’s the meaning behind that?
AE: That was a last-minute addition. I am into magic realism. I like to world-break just a little bit. I'm a dreamy kind of gal. I don't deep daydream, but I’m a Virgo, so how I present is quite practical, but how I look at and make art is very dreamy and fluid. That was me wanting to do something dreamy because I'm selfish. With both personal stories I told you about––the bank and going to that store––I often have this experience where I think, If I were white, would I be experiencing this? I tried to plant two moments where Sydney was thinking, What's going on here? But this character doesn't entirely know that she's being treated differently. I'd say this is the day Sydney learns she will be treated differently by the rest of the world. She thinks, This Alex person has been weird to me while I was looking at these rings. Then, in the change room, there's a moment of, If I were white, would she have treated me like that and behaved like that around me? and imagining what she would look like in this bra as a white woman.
There’s also something to be said about nude. Even the box of crayons, for a very long time, had flesh as the peach colour, which excludes so many people and only includes one kind of person. The bra not matching her skin tone is a mismatch. It would be nice if she matched. Lamenting that she doesn't match her surroundings, she sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s also something about the cost, where she looked at the price tag and thinks, This is expensive, which is another relation back to money, and it keeps the have-nots out. It was those three things, but also, I'm just selfish, and I wanted to break the narrative because I thought that'd be interesting.
DM: Why is the film named ALEX?
AE: This film isn't about Sydney; it’s about Alex. Sydney is the lens through which we watch this story play out. Sydney's experience is the emotional centre of this film, but it’s about Alex. With all these racism conversations, it's less about looking at the other and more about looking at the oppressor––but also calling all of us to look into how we uphold these systems of oppression by working within them. I don’t think Alex is a bad person. I think Alex is unaware of how she's upholding a system of oppression. I don't think Alex wants to oppress people. I think Alex is sweet, and she was trying to keep her job and let her fears get the best of her, which I'm not condoning. It's a question of asking how are we all, in some ways, embodying traits of Alex? Marginalized people can say, “No, I already know these things,” but I'm also considering ways that if you're an able-bodied Black person, how are you inclusive or exclusionary toward the disabled?
DM: In the last scene, where Alex apologizes, but the damage is already done by calling the police, what themes are touched on there? How does it play into the pieces we have to put together? The onus of responsibility is now on us to put ourselves back together and move on. How did that scene portray that?
AE: I think it goes back to the reality of being a Black woman or marginalized. The idea was that if I cried every time something like this happened to me, I wouldn't be able to go on with my day. So when Alex says, “I'm so sorry; I didn't realize,” Sydney reacts along the lines of “Shouldn’t have been a dick,” and now she's going to put herself together.
I was wearing a purple dress the other day and walking up Bathurst to get home. It was 3:15 p.m., bumper-to-bumper traffic, and people were all around. These dudes kept cat-calling me. I told myself to ignore it as they got worse and worse and followed me to my door. They didn't get out of the car, but they stopped and looked. That's f***ing gross, I thought. It was 3:15 p.m., and I had a meeting at 3:30 p.m. I hadn't eaten lunch. I was like, “Okay, go time.” I ate my food quickly and then hopped into the meeting. That's what it is, unfortunately. So when you say Black women having to put themselves together and just go on, it’s exactly that. I was trying to speak to the reality of a situation where Alex will probably cry about this in therapy later, and Sydney might tell a friend or she might keep going.
DM: What does having your film be a Vimeo Staff Pick as a Black Canadian filmmaker mean to you?
AE: This film wasn't even supposed to happen. My buddy J Stevens, a white, non-binary DP director, reached out to me and said they loved watching ShoeGazer, another film I made. They said they wanted to work with me and asked how they could help fight the good fight when it comes to being a good ally, aligning themselves with people they think are great and doing what they can to support. I had never dreamed of it. We dreamed together and talked about what we wanted to see. It was a very organic process. It was unexpected for the Vimeo Staff Pick because I did my best with this film, put it out into the world, and hoped people liked or resonated with it. It does feel really good because I've been working at this filmmaking thing for quite some time. It felt good to be recognized for the efforts of everybody that worked toward making this film. I'm still like, “Wow, you guys liked the thing that I made?”
DM: What do you hope the audience leaves with after watching this film?
AE: I hope they leave questioning how they see the world. It's very easy to take it for face value, to take things because things have always been that way and that’s what they've been told. For example, police have always caught bad guys. When we lean in and look, we ask, “What are they really doing?” Police fight crime, but there are ways to fix crime before police involvement. I hope to have audiences question this framework we've adopted as the best way to do it. There are things that are probably working. For example, government works. I like government, and I like voting and diplomacy, but certain things within a diplomatic system need to be looked at. So my question for audiences is, ask yourself: how am I complicit in upholding oppression structures? But also, what structures of oppression have we just adopted into our lives like “it is what it is”?
DM: What's next for you? Any projects that you have in the pipeline that we should watch out for?
AE: I have a series called The Drop. It's Toronto Narcity's first scripted series which premiered on May 5th, which is so cool. The Drop stars all kinds of great Canadian comics. It's about two women who are professional line waiters who wait in line for luxury items on the day they drop for people who are too rich or lazy to do so themselves. Everything from iPhones, Supreme, and new Jordans. I’m also working on a feature that we're shooting. I got a Telefilm Talent to Watch feature film production grant for the project Seahorse. We're packaging it now, and it will be shot next summer.
This interview has been edited for clarity.