COMEDY

ARTS “Old dad” Majumder looks to love for laughs

by Steve Newton

When Shaun Majumder answers the phone in the backyard at his L.A. home, he’s in the middle of something very important: putting together a trampoline for his two-year-old daughter, Mattis. Somewhere in the house, his second child, four-month-old Eslyn, sleeps soundly— maybe waiting for her dad to wake her up and make her laugh, which is something he’s proven good at over the years.

Majumder’s current state of domestic bliss will provide the bulk of the material for his upcoming comedy jaunt, e Love Tour, which includes a stop in New Westminster on May 13. ings are de nitely going to be a little di erent from the last time he was on the road, making the rounds with e Hate Tour.

“ e Hate Tour really came around when the world was experiencing something with social media and with the amount of vitriol that was going on, I mean 2015 to 2019, obviously 2020. It was talking about mostly news-driven stu , topical material, stu that was happening on Twitter and Facebook, people getting caught on video saying horrible things.

“So that tour was really focused on a lot of those outward things that people were experiencing,” he adds, “and this has gone inward now. I’m talking about things that are happening to me personally, on a deeper level, and it all is kind of focused on using parenting as kind of the theme that talks about love—all the good, the bad, and especially of being an old dad, starting late. I’m 50 now; I had my rst kid at 47.”

As well as developing a career as a touring standup comic, Majumder has made a name for himself through a wide variety of lm and TV work, including 14 years on the iconic CBC show is Hour Has 22 Minutes. He believes that part of what kick-started his fruitful career in comedy was simply growing up in the small Newfoundland town of Burlington.

“In places like Newfoundland, where I grew up, everybody’s got a story to tell,” he says, “and everybody has some kind of sparkly sense of humour—it’s just the way of the place. You’ve gotta have a sense of humour based on the weather and, you know, based on a lot of the economic situations. When you grow up in a small town where people are slinging one-liners from every age, you just kinda pick up the ability to banter; your brain develops in a way where you put together thoughts in a di erent way.

“So you catch the wave and you ride the wave and you be that,” he continues. “As a person, growing up, I always had a sense of humour, and I found that making people laugh helped me along the way, in many circumstances—whether it was when I was being bullied in school or if I was with a girl. Humour was a pretty good bit of currency, you know, to get you through.

“But more than that, for me, it wasn’t just comedy; it was also just being free in being creative. And acting was something that I loved to do from a very early age. Little did I know that there was a career in it, but there is. It’s not the most secure career, but it is de nitely driven by passion and that’s what matters the most to me.”

Early on, Majumder was inspired by the comedy stylings of Canadian acts like CODCO, Wonderful Grand Band, and SCTV. He recalls how when he was young, he and a cousin would pretend they were SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie and tape their own “Great White North” sketches on a little cassette recorder. Eventually, Majumder would create his own memorable characters, one of those being Raj Binder, the awkward and sweat-soaked reporter with the heavy Indian accent who came out of an experience Majumder once had at a tennis tournament.

“It was back when cigarettes sponsored tennis tournaments,” he recalls with a chuckle. “It was the DuMaurier Open—I’ll never forget it. I mean, what the fuck! Tennis athletes. Great. So I went to this tennis tournament, and it was one of those muggy Toronto days, like 40 degrees Celsius, and I was just sitting in the stands and my friend Chris and I were just ri n’ on the fact that it’s so hot. I started telling him, ‘Dude, what must this be like for sportscasters in places like India?’

“I just started ri ng and being an Indian guy doing this thing, and then that evolved into when I was doing sketch comedy with a group called e Bobroom,” Majumder explains further. “I started doing it as a voiceover in the back, like a radio broadcast, and then somebody went, ‘Dude, we gotta see that guy! I want to see what he looks like.’ And then I just kinda came up with Raj, the character. He was born and then he was on 22 Minutes and he was on Cedric the Entertainer Presents. Ya know, he was ringing in the New Year, he was at the Olympics, sneakin’ into hockey photos. Raj has just been everywhere.”

Looking back on his career, Majumder cites his time on is Hour Has 22 Minutes as being particularly ful lling. But he also has fond memories of his early role as Slime Master Shaun on the wacky YTV game show Uh-Oh!

“I would say they’re equally valuable,” he points out. “It’s funny, man, you do different gigs, especially when you’re starting out, and then what makes me laugh is what people recognize me for, ya know? ‘Cause as a Canadian celebrity, I’ve done everything: I’ve hosted stu ; I’ve done comedy; I’ve done drama; I’ve done all these random things, and people will spot me and be like, ‘Hey, I think I went to school with your sister.’ Or they go, ‘Wait, I know you. Are you that guy Jian Ghomeshi?’

“And then when they gure out it was Uh-Oh! or Brainwash or these old-school YTV things, then they freak out. So I’m not famous enough to be, like, ‘famous’. I’m just kinda well-known. Sorta. And I’m very proud of that.” g

Comedian and actor Shaun Majumder has a lot to be happy about these days, including being the father of two girls, ages two and four months, who are inspiration for his current Love Tour.

Shaun Majumder performs on The Love Tour at New Westminster’s Massey Theatre on May 13.

With Generous Support By:

Jane Irwin and Ross Hill The Poseley Family Rick Erickson and Donna Partridge

Additional Support from:

The S.M. Blair Family Foundation

Supporting Sponsor: AI Youth Programs Sponsor:

The Dr. Michael Smith Science Fair Endowment

Media Partners:

The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Bruce Grenville, Senior Curator and Glenn Entis, Guest Curator Scott Eaton, Entangled II, 2019, 4k video (still), Courtesy of the Artist

VANARTGALLERY.BC.CA

DOXA Sinixt defy government claim that they don’t exist

by Charlie Smith

Toronto lmmaker Ali Kazimi has told a story of a B.C. First Nation declared extinct in 1956. A few years later, the Canadian and U.S. governments signed a treaty leading to the ooding of a signi cant chunk of their traditional territory. But there’s a catch: the Sinixt people are actually still alive in the Arrow Lakes region of B.C. And in Kazimi’s new lm, Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence, they continue to demand recognition, only to be repeatedly denied by the state.

“I point out that this was ethnic cleansing by legislation,” Kazimi tells the Straight by phone. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

Kazimi began making the lm in 1995 a er being contacted by a friend, Vancouver lawyer Zool Suleman, who told him about a very unusual immigration case. A Sinixt man from his nation’s traditional territory in Washington state, Robert Watt, wanted to travel freely across the border into his First Nation’s traditional territory in the Arrow Lakes region. e Canadian government wanted to deport him.

So Kazimi took his camera on a trip to the Kootenays to learn more.

“Those four days that I spent there were truly life-changing,” Kazimi says. “I was privy to everything, I was privy to internal discussions. I was privy to debates. I was privy to the joy and the laughter and the incredible warmth of the elders. I felt so privileged.”

He wasn’t able to raise the necessary funds to complete this lm in the 1990s, but the stories remained with him. Kazimi was particularly impressed by Sinixt spokesperson Marilyn James and elder Eva Orr, who each spoke at length on camera about how their people had been erased from existence north of the U.S.-Canada border. In recent years, Kazimi returned to the area for more lming. And this, along with remarkable historical footage and video shot in the B.C. Interior by other lmmakers, shows a side of colonialism that few British Columbians are aware of.

In 1872, a U.S. presidential order forcibly amalgamated 12 tribes, including the Sinixt, into the “Colville Confederacy”. Its people live on in a U.S. reservation from the boundary that extends from the international border into central Washington state. Even though pit houses document the existence of Sinixt villages in the Arrow Lakes area, the people did not exist in Canada, according to the government. And that drives James’s activism to this day.

“Marilyn is one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, and she has been a source of inspiration for the lm from the time I talked to her,” Kazimi says. “I’m inspired by her sheer willpower that drives her. I have seen the enormous price she paid for it.

“She’s taking on the entire state of Canada and…she is being targeted by the state with all of its machinery, from the police to the legal system,” he continues. “But she maintains a kind of steadfast core and centre of who she is, where she belongs, andwhere her people come from. And what she’s ghting for. It’s very clear to her.”

Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence also exposes how the B.C. treaty process pits First Nations against one another. By necessity, Kazimi explains, they must make territorial claims that are larger than what they will receive. And that leads to inevitable conflicts when there are overlapping claims.

“ at’s built into the process,” Kazimi insists. “It’s completely baked in.”

To him, it’s all so familiar. When he was growing up in Delhi, India, students were taught in school how the British colonial power used to use divide-and-conquer methodology against the Indian independence movement. e e ect in B.C., he adds, is to weaken the collective response to the state’s e orts to subjugate First Nations.

“It is about pitting one group against another,” Kazimi says. “And then how do you engage in reconciliation when that parallel process is going on?”

He says that some First Nations are challenging this e ort to drive wedges between them. As an example, he notes that the Okanagan bands are forming alliances. But the problem, Kazimi adds, is that they were given such tiny reserves under the Indian Act, which he also reveals in his lm.

“It’s all about the land and it’s all about claims and a recognition of traditional territory,” he says. “For example, in the Sinixt, it’s reduced to a tiny dot of barely a few hundred acres of completely uncultivable land. at says something, visually.

“And also, over the years, I’ve realized that most Canadians are completely unaware of what the Indian Act does and how it operates—and how it’s such an instrument, as Indigenous scholars have pointed out, of forced assimilation.” g

Filmmaker Ali Kazimi says that he’s been inspired by Sinixt elder Marilyn James’s refusal to give into government claims that her people don’t exist north of the 49th parallel. Photo by Louis Bockner.

I point out that this was ethnic cleansing by legislation.

– Filmmaker Ali Kazimi

The DOXA Documentary Film Festival presents the world premiere of Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence at 2 p.m. on Saturday (May 7) at the Vancity Theatre and at 4 p.m. on Monday (May 9) at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema in the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU. The film is also available online through the DOXA website.

DOXA Territory director ambushes viewers with insights

The plight of the Amazon’s Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau inhabitants becomes darker as Alex Pritz’s film unfolds

by Martin Dunphy

Director Alex Pritz reveals the meat of his rst feature documentary, e Territory, through a series of small, skillfully introduced viewer epiphanies. e lm—about the existential crises a icting the remnants of a remote group of Indigenous people, the Uru-Eu-WauWau, in western Brazil—starts slowly, introducing watchers to the many threats closing in on the 180 or so inhabitants of six tiny villages in an o cial, “protected” Indigenous territory.

Land grabbers, farmers, illegal roads and trails, loggers, ranchers, and purposely set res are constantly eating away at the borders of the 7,000-square-mile territory they share with two other small goups of Indigenous inhabitants, most of whom hadn’t seen a white person before rst contact in the early 1980s.

Local o cials with the Indigenous Affairs agency, tasked with protecting the territory’s inhabitants and land, are heard on the phone, protesting that they can “do nothing” about the repeated illegal violations of sovereignty, even going so far as to claim that the stories are “made up”.

A brave and indefatigable environmental activist, Neidinha Bandeira, has worked with the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau for decades and considers herself almost a mother to some of their children who are now young adults, especially Bitaté, a personable and intelligent young man who has just been made leader by the villages’ elders.

For all that Neidinha tells the camera about regularly receiving death threats from within the nearby community where she lives with her daughter, it doesn’t hit home until we later see her receive such a call while on-camera. ough she bravely assumes that the hysterical female voice identifying herself as her daughter is a trick—despite her claims to have been kidnapped by men with guns—she panics and races home when a follow-up call to her daughter isn’t answered. e tension of that short, agonizing drive home conveys more than an hour of terrifying testimony could impart. And a subsequent, sorrowful discovery along one of the roads used to patrol Uru-Eu-WauWau territory for “invaders” drives home the reality of the black dread now starting to inch up viewers’ spines.

Similarly, it isn’t until well into the lm, when we are shown a map graphic of the Indigenous territory like “an island of rainforest surrounded by farms”, clearcut deserts, and a growing network of roads and illegal property borders that the scale of the looming destruction becomes clear.

e 2022 lm had its debut at Sundance earlier this year, and it grabbed people’s attention, winning both the audience award for world cinema (documentary) and the special jury award for documentary cra . en Pritz nabbed the Golden Space Needle Award at the recent Seattle International Film Festival, where it was also nominated for the grand jury prize. (Vancouverites will get a chance to see it soon at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.) e international coproduction (Brazil, U.S., Denmark) has a bushel of producers attached to its coattails, none more prominent than lmmaker Darren Aronofsky. Besides directing, Pritz co-edited and helped shoot the three-year project, which also saw a major technical contribution from its main subjects, the Uru-Eu-WauWau themselves, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to close their Indigenous Territory’s borders a er they quickly lost about ve percent of their population. eir quick adoption and use of drones, video cameras, cell phones, GPS devices, and motorcycles to increase surveillance patrols and to document proof of the invasions (villagers “arrested” those they found with chainsaws and pestcides and turned them over to authorities) not only helped amass incontrovertible evidence to bolster their claims but also provided invaluable footage for Pritz via Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau videographer Tangãi, who received cinematography co-credit with the director.

That all of this—including the local establishment of a regional association of would-be farmers illegally staking out enough Indigenous land “for 1,000 families”—is unreeling against a backdrop of populist authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro’s ultimately successful drive to become president of Brazil in 2018 makes optimistic thoughts a challenge.

But if the intent of the lmmakers was to help stir international support for both the increasingly threatened Amazon rainforest and its besieged Indigenous inhabitants, consider it mission accomplished, despite the documentary’s unsettled and somewhat foreboding ending.

Neidinha’s brave statement near the close of the lm, however, provides a measure of hope in its sheer de ance: “ ere’s lots I still want to do,” the activist, 57, says over a gorgeous shot of her dri ing on her back in a stream through a green cathedral during a rain shower, “and I know I don’t have much time le .

“But in the time I have, I will mess with a lot of people. Poor them. If I live another 20 years, it’ll be 20 years spent bothering anyone who destroys the Amazon.” g

Bitaté—who became leader of his people when he was only 19 years old—frequently heads out on patrol with traditional bow and arrows to search for invaders in Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory.

The DOXA Documentary Film Festival will screen The Territory at 8:45 p.m. on Saturday (May 7) at the Vancity Theatre and 12:45 p.m. on May 15 at the Cinematheque. The film is also available online through the festival's website.

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DOXA Director’s young self in Doug and the Slugs doc

by Steve Newton

When you think about the music of Doug and the Slugs, what comes to mind rst are most likely the band’s upbeat early ’80s radio hits, “Too Bad” and “Making It Work”. Or maybe it’s the catchy, singalong vibe of the whimsical “Day By Day”. But for Teresa Alfeld, director of the new documentary Doug and the Slugs and Me, none of those tracks are her number one.

“My personal favourite, undoubtedly, is one of the most non–Doug and the Slugs songs,” she says by phone from her home near Vancouver City Hall in the Fairview neighbourhood. “It’s one that I spotlight at the beginning of the lm as well as the end. It’s called ‘Partly From Pressure’, and it’s a deep cut from their second record, Wrap It!, which I think is their best record. It’s this bittersweet midtempo ballad—unlike the more popular Doug and the Slugs tracks—that I think really showcases Doug [Bennett]’s complexity and talent as a songwriter, as well as the band’s arrangement capabilities. e rst time I heard it, it got in my head and it got in my heart, and I’ve been really attached.”

Alfeld’s original bond to Doug and the Slugs goes way back to when she was a child and living next door to the Bennett family in East Van. Shea Bennett, one of Doug and wife Nancy’s three daughters, was Teresa’s best friend, but—as friends and neighbours o en do—they grew apart. e reconnection to the Bennetts started a er Alfeld licensed a number of Doug and the Slugs songs for her rst feature documentary, e Rankin File: Legacy of a Radical, about the life of local lawyer, city councillor, and socialist icon Harry Rankin, which was released in 2018.

“We actually used Doug and the Slugs songs exclusively in that lm,” Alfeld says, “and to my absolute pleasure, we witnessed such a positive response to the music. People were talking about it; [band member] Simon Kendall came to one of the screenings, and when we introduced him, there was a huge outpouring of love in the audience. So [ e Rankin File producer] John Bolton and I turned to one another and said, ‘Oh, well, this is an obvious t. Let’s do a lm!’ Because they have the built-in fanbase, and it’s a great story, and these are great characters.” To tell the story of Doug and the Slugs, Alfeld enlisted the group’s original members—keyboardist Kendall, guitarists John Burton and Richard Baker, bassist Steve Bosley, and drummer John “Wally” Watson—to o er reminiscences on Bennett, who died at age 52 while the band was touring in Alberta. (He died in a Calgary hospital on October 16, 2004, a week a er falling into a coma, with his cause of death reported as “a long-standing illness”.)

Alfeld also o ers on-camera interviews with various music-biz celebrities, including Boomtown Rats singer and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof, who was music editor at the Georgia Straight in the ’70s, when Bennett worked there brie y as art director. At one point in the lm, Geldof notes that Doug and the Slugs made fun music but that “there was an overarching intelligence that sublimates fun into something other.”

“I was so happy that Sir Bob made that comment,” Alfeld says, “because it’s so true. Doug and the Slugs are really known for their big hits, of course, ‘Making It Work’ and ‘Too Bad’, and those are wonderful, extremely well-cra ed pop songs. But at the same time, when you get into some of the other songs that Doug and the Slugs wrote—and especially some of the lyrics—that really profound curiosity that Doug Bennett had about the world really comes through. It’s my hope that the full catalogue of Doug and the Slugs music gets a second look, and I’m so glad that people like Sir Bob Geldof are heeding that call.”

Another route the director took to get to the core of what Bennett was all about came via a collection of his journals. e band members had told Alfeld about the notebooks, and some had taken peeks at them, but no one had fully studied them before.

“My rst reaction when I got the journals was, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve struck gold!’” she says, “and I didn’t even know what was in them. And so that rst step was just sitting down and reading all 39 books front to cover, and then doing it a second time. It was fascinating because I had already started to research and interview the Slugs themselves before I got the journals, and so I had sort of constructed my version of who these characters were and what the story was. And then suddenly I was given Doug’s voice and Doug’s perspective, and it occurred to me—as uncomfortable as it could be—that allowing my characters to actually have a conversation with Doug, by reading his perspective on certain events, would really enrich the story.”

Some of the most memorable sequences in Doug and the Slugs and Me come when Bennett’s band and family members read passages from his journals, for the rst time, aloud on camera. But perhaps the most striking moment in the lm comes during a segment shot on an old camcorder at a bowling alley. It features home-video footage captured when Alfeld herself, as a child, was out with the Bennett family, and at one point she’s actually lming her friend Shea throwing a ball—with daddy Doug overseeing the action.

“At one point in my research journey, Nancy handed over this white document box of home-movie tapes,” Alfeld says, “and I just started watching. And I couldn’t have prepared myself for it, because it wasn’t just watching the Bennetts—it was watching myself, and my own childhood, re ected back to me in a way I hadn’t seen. It was like suddenly it was back at the Bennetts’ house—literally, there I am, or over at the bowling alley. e moment where Doug gets Stella to hand me the camera, I had no memory of that ever happening; I was too young. So when I discovered that clip by myself one night, I was just getting goosebumps, going, ‘Wow, our stories are more intertwined than I could ever imagine.’” g

Teresa Alfeld (second from right) sits with Doug Bennett’s three daughters as they peruse his journals, which played an important part in Alfeld’s doc about the late Vancouver rocker’s band.

Doug Bennett (third from left) and the Slugs, goofing around during an ’80s promo shoot.

My first reaction when I got the journals was, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve struck gold!’

– Teresa Alfeld

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Doug and the Slugs and Me screens at Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema in the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU Woodward’s on May 14 (evening) and 15 (matinee), and at Vancity Theatre on May 15 (evening) as part of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.