Reelworld Film Festival honour for emerging screenwriter/director
November 20, 2020
lindsey addawoo is still over the moon with her first creative prize.
The emerging screenwriter/director collaborated with Alison Duke to write ‘Promise Me’ that won the Standout Short Film Writers Award at last month’s virtual 20th Reelworld Film Festival.
It was her first ever award.
“In school, I got a Participation Award and a Gold Star on the wall,” addawoo said. “That was about it. This is a whole other thing and it’s for something creative that I have done. It is really an honour to be in a space where Black, Indigenous and people of colour stories are finally getting some recognition and this is happening in the midst of a pandemic and social injustices.”
‘Promise Me’ was inspired by events that transpired while Duke was filming a documentary, ‘The Woman I Have Become’, that tells the story of eight Black women living with HIV/AIDS in Toronto and trying to build awareness about their struggles in the Canadian health care system.
Child Welfare apprehended the children of one of the mothers because she was too sick to care for them. The mother died a week later.
addawoo and Duke met for the first time in 2016 during the inaugural Black Women Film! Leadership Program (BWFLP).
“Alison was a mentor and she was amazing,” recalled addawoo who enjoys water sports. “But we really didn’t get to connect too much during the program. We created a creative rapport that morphed from like being her assistant to us gelling and creating ideas together which is such a beautiful thing. When she decided she wanted to honour the story with scripted content, we got together to think about ways we could humanize and normalize these people on camera.”
Founded by Ella Cooper, the BWFLP offers emerging and mid-career Black women filmmakers and media artists from the African diaspora the opportunity to advance their careers in film and media arts through intensive industry workshops and mentorship with Black women industry leaders from the film, television and media arts sectors.
“The most valuable thing I brought away from that program is the importance of building connections with like-minded people,” she said. “It gave me the confidence to know I could approach people if I had an idea or project which is exactly what happened.”
addawoo’s first short film, ‘Queen of Hearts’ won the 2017 Inside Out Film Festival BravoFACT Pitch competition.
“It’s is because I had expressed that I want to do supernatural genre stuff that created the window of opportunity for someone who also had that interest to work with me on that film,” she pointed out.
Set in a reimagined Victorian era, the 16-minute film tells the story of a young, Black and complex Queen who struggles to navigate her supernatural abilities when tragedy strikes. Released in 2018, it has screened at Inside Out, Caribbean Tales and Regent Park film festivals.
As a young girl, addawoo enjoyed reading fantasy novels, including ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’.
“I think I used books as a sort of escapism from mundane every day life,” she noted. “Reading was the most important thing for me, whether it was a comic book or whatever. I think that inspired me to tell stories.”
Noticing she had an interest in reading, addawoo’s parents encouraged her to pursue Journalism at Ryerson University.
“After graduation, I realized I would rather tell my own stories than someone’s else,” said the 2014 Radio & Television Arts School of Media graduate.
addawoo’s sci-fi drama pilot, ‘Diagnosis’ was selected for the Bahamas International Film Festival Screenwriters Residency program in 2015.
“Participating in that program was like the first significant step for me in the world of film and television,” she said. “I learnt then I was on the right path and that my work is valid. That was my first residency ever and I wanted to go there and learn and observe everything I could and make lasting connections.”
The Father Michael Goetz Secondary School graduate co-wrote and co-produced ‘No Church In The Wild’ that’s a mini-documentary series chronicling the life of Jonestown survivor Leslie Wagner-Wilson who, at age 13 with her mother and sister, found the People’s Temple during their search for a drug rehabilitation centre in San Francisco, California.
When a story broke in 1977 about abuse at the temple, cult leader Jim Jones packed up and took his followers to Guyana’s interior.
A total of 918 members died in a mass suicide-murder on November 18, 1978.
Just hours before the massacre, Wagner-Wilson -- who was 21 years old at the time -- and nine other members escaped the rural community, trekking 37 miles through the jungle with a 40-pound care package strapped to her back with a sheet and her three-year son who was the youngest survivor.
She lost her husband, mother, brother, sister, niece and nephew in the carnage.
Wagner-Wilson recounted the harrowing ordeal in a book, ‘Slavery of Faith’, that addawoo’s co-writer – Richmond Obeng – read a few years ago.
Connecting with the survivor who resides in Phoenix, Arizona, the cinematic director optioned the rights for the book with the intention of developing it into a feature film.
“When Richmond asked if I would be interested in this project, I didn’t hesitate because the massacre took place in my mom’s birth country,” addawoo, who was a script co-ordinator for CBC’s ‘Street Legal’ in 2017-18 pointed out. “We have been working on different ways to tell the story. Because of budget, time and wanting to put something out there, Richmond flew out to Arizona last year and spent about four hours with Leslie shooting something to have as proof of content for a larger project. Over the years, there have been a lot of documentaries with Jim Jones, his leaders and the People’s Temple as the focal point. There hasn’t been much focus on the survivors and, more importantly, getting a Black perspective.”
addawoo and Obeng have compiled a YouTube mini-documentary series split into eight parts of about 10 minutes each.
“Our goal is to use that to get funding for a larger project,” she said.
addawoo, whose bucket list includes writing a fantasy book, has had a few brief phone conversations with Wagner-Wilson.
“She’s gracious, spicy, smart, charismatic, compelling, animated and someone with a very calming voice,” she said.
Presently, addawoo is co-directing ‘Shades’ that’s a stylized documentary exploring colourism in the Black community through dance and personal stories.
“Ghanaian-Canadian dance choreographer Esie Mensah put together her own team that we followed for about three years,” she said. “We have been sitting on this project for quite a while because of COVID and life changes in general. We are putting a rough cut together. I am very excited about this project.”
Having the support of parents was important to addawoo’s development as a creative artist even though it took a while for them to grasp the complexities of her career path.
Victor and Sally Addawoo are immigrants from Ghana and Guyana respectively.
“I remember when I told them I want to be a writer, they thought the only logical path was journalism,” the middle of three siblings, who is a story co-ordinator for the third season of CBC’s ‘Coroner’, said. “It wasn’t until I was a script co-ordinator on my first show that they were like, ‘Oh, so this is an actual reality that can happen for you’.”
