After 15 years away, I made a film about the place where I grew up — and learned that change is inevitable

Cutaways is a personal essay series by filmmakers, asking them to tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs edition by director Tess Girard focuses on her film Shelter, which finds the filmmaker returning to the region she grew up in to explore our basic human need for a place to call home.

After fifteen years without returning home, I was compelled recently to revisit my roots. I grew up in the north end of the Headwaters region, just over an hour north of Toronto. My parents left shortly after I moved out, and I'd since lost most of my connections to the area. At the time that I'd started thinking about my former home, I was going through some personal hardship, and I had a lot of questions — including whether I wanted to continue making films at all. 

Though I barely knew Bruce, he and his wife, Jean, instantly welcomed me like a family member, first into their home and eventually their shelter. I went on multiple tours of the facility. Ark Two is a nuclear fallout shelter intended to reconstruct the community after a nuclear war. It is built out of 42 school buses encased in concrete and buried 14 feet underground. 

As we slowly descended the long hallway into the darkness of the shelter, I began to feel a sense of what exists beneath the surface of the world as we know it. Inside the shelter, its endless hallways are filled with stockpiles of expired preserves, buckets of dried food and relics of the Cold War. Collection upon collection — the goods stored all around had become time capsules and vestiges of eras past. Today, the shelter itself is decaying. The structure that is supposed to save us from our annihilation is itself impermanent, like everything that exists in the world above it.

When I came back to the surface, I couldn't see reality the same again. Ark Two sits in a farmer's field behind the historic village of Horning's Mills and next to a cliff carved out by centuries of erosion. At the bottom of the cliff are the remains of one of the original mills of the village. Knowing the area and its rich history, I could see all the layers of time, all the periods that have come before us. And I understood that our era, too, would come to an end.

Two doors over from Bruce and Jean are my childhood friends, Jocelyn and Jim. They live in one of the village's original mills, which is also Jocelyn's childhood home. After her father passed away and the building was left unoccupied for some time, she and Jimmy restored it, and today call it their home. It's a container for the collective memories of the village as well as Jocelyn's personal memories and a representation of their future dreams, too. Similar to Bruce's project, their home contains an assortment of antiques and other collections, but these objects are perfectly displayed and curated — the couple's way of preserving eras past while also repurposing them in a new context for the future. If Jocelyn and Jim's house is a container of time and preservation, their subterranean neighbour, Ark Two, is the shadow image of this idea. At some point, I realized that these concepts were connected, and accidentally, I was making a film after all.

Splitting my time between the two households, I began collecting personal stories about the area over a five-year period. It helped me understand the concept of home and how a region shapes one's perspective from a young age. I spent many visits connecting with these four people, who could each help me better understand the nuances and depth of time. 

When I started filming, Jean was 90. Though she looked like a frail woman, she had a frank way of speaking that showed her strength. I fell in love with her instantly. As a descendant of some of the original settlers of the village, she contained a wealth of knowledge about the history of each house as well as the stories of the community. But even as I was filming, her memory was fading, taking with it the rich oral history she possessed. Jean is an irretrievable connection to a fading past. 

Jimmy's roots in Horning's Mills are long as well. His family are among the original settlers of the village. At the time, he was the local gravedigger and he's related to half the people in the cemetery. As he digs beneath the surface on camera, he reveals the layers of time and place. His work is a vivid reminder that the past, the present and the future all exist simultaneously. 

Over many visits with Bruce and Jean, and Jimmy and Jocelyn, I began to understand and admit the hardship I was experiencing, and I started to weave those stories, too, into the film. Coming up from the underground darkness of Shelter, I emerged changed. It forced me to look at everything I know in a completely different light — one that accepts impermanence and the inevitability of change.

Shelter is screening both in-person at virtually at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Get tickets here.