How She Move - down another route

It's likely you've seen ads around for How She Move, the latest Rocky-type hip-hop step-dancing movie, in wide release today. You might not have noticed two details about it: 1) It's a Canadian movie (not a runaway production), and 2) those ads are turning up on U.S. stations maybe more than Canadian stations - and most of all on BET. I think that makes it a first.

The basic story is that Ian Iqbal Rashid (former resident of Toronto's Flemingdon Park and director of the gay romantic comedy Touch of Pink) got together with Annmarie Morais (a writer and producer on "Da Kink in My Hair" and maker of a short doc on steppers at York University) and made this film in Toronto and Hamilton pretty much like Canadian filmmakers do all the time - sweat-of-the-brow, grants-in-hand, facing the gaping maw of indifference that is the English Canadian domestic audience. Once done, they did what plenty of their peers do to try to avoid said gaping maw and took the film to Sundance.

That's when their typical Canadian path veered off.

Not only did they get a big-shot distributor in Paramount Vantage, they also got the support of MTV Films (not exactly the guys at the Masonic Temple but the MTV) and Black Entertainment Television.

It's that last entity I find interesting because BET is a very important part of a media machine that has been instrumental in helping foster black/urban cultural industries which have become a major force in the last ten years in the United States. With filmmaker Tyler Perry at the forefront, big money is being made in movies and theatre made by blacks for blacks (being white, I feel odd using the term "black" all the time here, but that's the term that keeps being used, so I'll go with it). In a strange way, it reminds me of Quebec - their own media, their own shows, their own stars, telling their own stories.

So the latest BET hype has been around this story of a girl trying to escape a hard life in Jane-Finch...or is it Queens? There's been some talk about some of the Canadian-ness being drained from the movie for its American distributors, but in the many reviews (mostly positive) I've read in U.S. papers today, the vast majority of critics have identified the main setting as Toronto. So while it's not bleeding maple syrup, I don't think its nationality is being too aggressively hidden. But to the audience Paramount Vantage is aiming for, the nationality probably doesn't matter - it's the dancing, the music, and the struggle.

We'll see, then, if that audience will embrace How She Move like no other U.S. audience has embraced a Canadian movie, and what that could mean to cultural industries here who have never seen such a media machine. Sigh - I'm a sucker for a happy ending.