User:Madd Russian/sandbox



By David Topping

The Real Toronto‘s hook is relatively simple. Filmed in the summer of 2005 by a now-24-year-old Russian immigrant nicknamed Madd Russian, it aims to show that “Toronto, known to most as a world class city has another side to it. This movie shows the reality of living in housing projects and some of the most run down areas in the city. This footage includes interviews with gang members, drug dealers and some of the realest street rappers in Toronto. From Scarborough to Etobicoke this movie will take you through hoods in 9 different locations to show you.” Unsurprisingly, discussion about the film exploded when it was released on DVD a year and a half ago. The Star, Globe and Mail, City TV, CBC, and many other media outlets covered it––Torontoist, too, had a quick mention––but attention and outrage both disappeared after a few weeks. In the months since, the video has slowly spread online, and can now be found in clips on YouTube or in its entirety on Google Video and some BitTorrent file-sharing sites. While The Real Toronto may have faded as a source of interest, its subjects––crime, poverty, gangs, and drugs––continue to see an unparalleled amount of attention from the media, from politicians, and from the public. While Toronto is an overwhelmingly safe city, progress towards making it even safer has been glacial, and problems persist two years after the media-appointed “Summer of the Gun” during which The Real Toronto was filmed. Precisely because of all of this, The Real Toronto warrants more attention, more consideration, and more scrutiny than it originally received.

Structurally, the film is simple: each location featured (like Jane and Finch, Scarborough, and Parkdale, to name a few) has residents who serve as The Real Toronto‘s tour guides. Some of those residents are rappers, some are gangsters, and some are just residents. There’s no narration or other commentary provided anywhere by Madd Russian; for the duration of the film he’s invisible and almost entirely inaudible, preferring to let his stars do all the talking. As the film goes from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, it stays around just long enough to give some sense of the people and places in each location, before the whole thing quickly wraps up after sixty-something minutes. The film’s ethics get messy immediately. While the opening shot is a disclaimer that “This DVD is not meant to glamorize violence, its purpose is to bring awareness to some of the issues that people in certain areas of Toronto have to deal with every day” (a statement that echoes what Russian has said to the media since the film’s release), the very next shot is of a masked man holding a huge assault rifle. Russian continues this technique throughout the film as a kind of editing style, cutting from something completely un-gun-related to shots of people brandishing guns, then back again. And then there’s the matter of the DVD’s cover––a lone bullet on cement that seems to completely contradict the film’s disclaimer. The idea that the film serves as a genuine account of life in Toronto is also troubled by the endless showmanship on the part of its subjects. Everything in The Real Toronto is always for the camera: people talk to the camera, show off for the camera, freestyle for the camera, hide from the camera. The second that the camera shows up, whatever is going on in front of it becomes mediated by it. When the guns do come out, they’re always being shown off; it’s never casual, it’s always an event, troubling and surreal as it is. Amazingly, few documentaries do a better job of presenting the biggest problem with the genre: if a camera is there, how can what is being filmed be really real? The complete lack of diversity of The Real Toronto‘s subjects also becomes clearer and clearer as the film goes on. Those on-screen in the film are overwhelmingly black and male. Though other groups are talked about (one guy boasts about a fight his friends had with “the Sri Lankans”), we never see them. Women are even rarer: the only ones we ever see, with two exceptions, are hookers.

The film’s biggest strength and the reason why it is worth watching, however, is that it does something that is extremely uncommon in Toronto when it comes to high-crime areas: it lets people speak for themselves. To Madd Russian’s credit, he lets the camera record endlessly as people talk, and keeps entire speeches in, often long enough to catch speakers dropping their guard. Aside from the overwhelming importance of community that exists in any poor neighbourhood (“there’s no ‘I’ over here,” says one man), there is one message that is repeated over and over and over again, from a number of different guides in a number of different neighbourhoods. “If you ain’t a drug dealer, you a baller; if you ain’t a baller, you a rapper,” one guy at Jane and Finch says, his friend adding, “niggas don’t make money out here.” At a different location, another says, “niggas ain’t got nothing to do.” Another one tells the camera that a lot of people are just “try[ing] to get the fuck out of here. Most don’t, some do.” In one of The Real Toronto‘s strangest and most eye-opening moments, a group of guys in Black Creek––the same guys who, two minutes before, were brandishing guns and joking about a superintendent who was pushed off the roof of their building––take Madd Russian to a government-owned community centre that has been shut down and abandoned for the past two years. As they point out the lock and chain keeping them out (pictured below), one demands, pissed off, “Someone tell us what the fuck we’re supposed to do.” His friend adds, “we trespassing, and we live here.” Towards the end of the segment in Black Creek, another masked kid from a different group of guys brags about how he’s a “gunner” and how he’s destined for fame, while his friend explains, very matter-of-factly, “we got kids to feed, and we got dreams.”

That, in the end, is the film’s biggest dose of reality: there is an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and victimhood on behalf of all of the speakers, even when they or their friends are brandishing guns (or rapping about them). They aren’t asking for pity, by any means, but that’s the emotion that a lot of them end up drawing out. Of course, the circumstances that The Real Toronto‘s subjects are in serve as no excuse for crime, but the film does complicate the idea that any one possible solution (be it gun control from the left or harsher prison sentences from the right) will really do much to fix what’s wrong when the problem is societal. There must be a middle ground our city can find between apathy––those who think that gang members should just kill each other off––and sympathy––those who think that it’s not the gang members’ faults, but that of our society. There must be a way we can start to chip away at the culture that is moulding good people into criminals. After the DVD was released, Paul Nguyen of Jane-Finch.com described the film’s importance better than most members of the media:

As a person who isn’t involved with the gang life, but who lives in a poor neighborhood and sees things, these DVD’s don’t shock me. It’s actually about time that these videos came out. It’s a wakeup call to the media and politicians, to show them that a bigger problem exists in their backyards. Not that there are BAD people among the streets of Toronto, but that there are places in the city where people are left to defend for themselves. These so-called thugs live in really bad conditions, where education, money and security are not things taken for granted. We don’t have dog walkers. We don’t have parents that can buy us cars or send us to college. The guys, AND girls, in these videos are just expressing themselves. Some of them have busy parents working 2-3 jobs, so the TV and internet raises us. We’re just copying the States. Instead of branding these people as public enemy no. 1 to the city of Toronto, the politicians who REALLY want to help should see the bigger picture, and that’s of a picture of a people in need. The politicians need to stop talking and start walking. These politicians should start by coming to the ‘hood and taking a look around before they can start thinking of what needs to be done.

Though it may not intend to be, a “picture of a people in need” is precisely what The Real Toronto is. In the end, the film is an important text, one of the few of its kind, and the speakers ought to be listened to––not necessarily followed, just listened to––because they reveal the absence of any kind of dialogue in Toronto between richer and poorer residents. Whether the film’s portrayal of neighbourhoods is accurate or not is up for debate, but what is unquestionable––what is really real––is that we, as a city, still have a lot of work to do. All images are stills from The Real Toronto.

The summer of 2005 in Toronto was named ‘The Summer of the Gun’ by the news media. By mid August there had been 30 gun related murders, out of the 44 homicides in the city – including two shootings at Canada’s busiest intersection, Yonge St. and Dundas; one in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon and another on a Saturday night during Carribanna.

By the end of the summer Michael Thompson, a black Toronto city councilor had proposed legislation allowing Toronto police to randomly stop black men and search them.

The most shocking victim of the gun violence was Shaquan Cadougan, who was struck by four bullets - one bullet for each year of his life – from a drive by shooting in early August. He was outside his mother’s home in Toronto’s Jane and Finch area when it happened. Shaquon has since turned five, and is in and out of the hospital due to complications from his bullet wounds.

This is the climate that an underground DVD called The Real Toronto, filmed during the summer of the gun, was released in.

At press time, Toronto had been shaken by it’s most brazen gun-related homicide yet. An 18 year old black teenager who was also a father, was shot and killed while attending his best friend’s funeral, a 17 year old black teenager, also a father, who had been shot and killed less than two weeks earlier.

People fed up with the violence needed somebody to blame, if only to release unresolved frustration, and the black and brown youth of neighborhoods like Parkdale, Chalkfarm, Teesdale, and Toronto’s infamous Jane and Finch provided easy targets.

The real Toronto shows Toronto youth wearing bandanas covering their faces, showing off their guns, identifying themselves as rappers, and ‘money makers’. Too many of them seem isolated by poverty and delusional about the severity and consequences of their thuglife.

According to Madd Russian, the 22- year old Russian-born director of The Real Toronto DVD, Isolation is the root cause of the problems which the youth in his film face.

“The main problem in my opinion is isolation and segregation. The root cause is not the guns, guns are just an accessory. I think the root cause is segregation and it’s growing. People have totally different idols and totally different goals.”

Around the same time that Pound interviewed Madd Russian, a sociologist from Princeton University named Douglas Massey was giving a lecture at the University of Toronto about isolation in urban centres. Madd Russian and Massey had similar viewpoints. Massey has been researching segregation for over 20 years, and warned that Toronto is becoming dangerously more segregated along racial and economic lines. Using demographic data on Toronto dating back to 1981, he argued that blacks and other minorities are increasingly becoming isolated in poor neighborhoods producing a “geographic concentration of poverty”.

“Now is the time to act” said Massey “to make sure that conditions we observe in a place like Detroit or Newark don’t happen in Toronto and other Canadian cities.”

Mad Russian, who developed his appreciation for hip-hop when he moved to Canada. He wanted to tell the stories of the people who made the songs and lived in the communities. He was brave enough to do so and started a mini cataclysm in Toronto with the release of The Real Toronto DVD.

“The media put my DVD out in a certain way. They cut out scenes [in their reports] and they put all the guns scenes and nothing else. This is a very small part of the DVD. They should have looked at all sides because there are people [in the DVD] who are showing why this is happening… They just proved that they do everything for ratings, if they can put in a few pictures with guns, they’ll do it for ratings.”

Since then the Russian has chosen to lay low because of all the criticism and confusion about his efforts to give ghetto youth in Toronto a voice. With criticism against the DVD ranges from its lack of content, to glorifying gun violence, to failing to contextualize the problems in Toronto’s ghettos in any constructive way.

“I think anybody that’s seen my DVD and seen the amount of gun scenes and how little a part they take up in it will know that I’m not promoting [guns]. They’ll know that I’m just putting them out as part of the whole picture, as part of the whole reality,” said Madd Russian.

The Real Toronto DVD is a low budget documentary style film set in nine different Toronto neighborhoods. Russian, takes the minimal approach and sticks to one question ‘What’s it like growing up here?’ for all of his subjects during each chapter of the film.

“I never told anybody to do anything [specific],” said Madd Russian. “The way they presented it was up to the people. I asked a few basic questions but I had no guidelines in this. I thought I’d be boxing people in by asking questions. I’d rather just let the people talk and say what they want.”

His approach to capturing the reality of what’s going on in Toronto’s most dangerous neighborhoods, however noble in it’s intention, produced an unbalanced ratio of street knowledge to street nonsense.

While a tangible desperation has developed in Toronto to address and solve the problems that are causing so many youth to kill each other, but most of the insightful commentary in this DVD is suffocated by kids talking shit.

In one of the chapters of the DVD filmed in Scarborough, Toronto Rapper and entrepreneur Califate breaks down how the residents of his housing project were able to get a basketball court constructed, and explains his clothing line hustle. During another Scarborough chapter of the DVD, in a neighborhood called Cataraqui, a raspy voiced rapper named Chinky theorizes how his housing projects were systematically designed to keep the poor people sectioned off.

“They set up areas in squares. If you take a good look around the block it’s a square on this side and a square on that side. In Free Masonry, they say ‘the square is fair’. The government, that’s how they control us, they box us in,” he says.

Earlier in the Cataraqui chapter of the DVD, a group of black youths brag about a corner store that has long been abandoned because it’s been robbed so many times. “I used to jack this shit on my little BMX” says one member of the crew half-laughing. What they don’t realize is that each abandoned corner store in their hood, further cuts off their community from economic progress.

For his part, the Madd Russian doesn’t consider himself a journalist, but acknowledges his film was done with an objective journalistic approach. “I wanted show the other reality that people don’t see. To the certain people, in those neighborhoods, that’s part of the real Toronto to them. I went out there with a camera and the people represented their neighborhoods the way they wanted to,” said Russian.

If only he was a journalist, or a member of one of the communities he filmed in, he might have realized how to keep a firmer grip on his slippery subject matter. Instead, the potential quality material seems slip through his fingers and is buried under a mess. Too many of the people in front of the camera in The Real Toronto DVD are young, inarticulate, and do a poor job of expressing the hardships of their communities. Asking some direct questions could have stimulated a focused dialog, and maybe some possible solutions to the community problems.

One particularly telling exchange that highlights the combined naivety (or ignorance…) of the director and his subject occurs in the Black Creek section of the DVD. Hosted by a baby-faced Toronto rapper named Nem-s-iss who points out the local recreation centre which has been padlocked and closed down for the past two years.

“It’s been locked up for who knows how long. What are we supposed to do? We slang drugs, drink liquor, smoke weed, … We come to the rec-centre and we can’t even get in. Someone tell us what we’re supposed to do… No rec [centre], no basketball court for the kids. All we do is smoke, and drink and sell drugs all fucking day,” says

Nem-s-iss.

Rather than inserting insightful commentary, the scene shifts and the opportunity to make the youths realize their own potential for constructive pro-activity in their communities, which could lead to them getting their rec-centre re-opened on their own, is lost.

It’s an observation that’s been made in the mainstream media as well,Adam Radwanski, who featured the Real Toronto in National Post felt that the DVD was “boring and depressing”, commenting that, “If the film’s 22-year old director wasn’t so obviously in awe of his subjects, and was prepared to actually interview them, we might be on to something.”

Another featured emcee, Daetona, also feels Madd Russian’s approach lacked focus. “The DVD isn’t about shit,” said Daetona. “There’s no format to it what so ever. If [Madd] Russian really wanted to tell a story, then he would have had some kind of objective or a least some structured questions to ask. He was just more excited to see guns rather than find out how urban life out in the projects really is. He was real quiet the whole time, no notepads, no theme, ‘just take me to the thugs’ approach.”

Out of all the neighborhoods Madd Russian visited, and all the people who speak into his camera, many of them claim to make money, but none of them claim to have actual jobs. The most infamous scene from the DVD takes place in a hallway where a group of masked youngsters show of their pistols and a machine gun, yet no one in the DVD claims to have been shot. These absences could suggest that Madd Russian did in fact have an agenda when making his film. Or that the reality he wanted to show was manipulated.

Yet some residents of the highlighted neighborhoods like Jane and Finch native Mark Simms, applaud the Madd Russian’s efforts. Simms, the executive producer of Jane-Finch.com, a news media website focused on the Jane and Finch community, was asked about the merit of The Real Toronto DVD during an interview on CBC Television. He commented that “it’s a good thing that it came out. It brings awareness to the problems that we have in the GTA… It’s something that’s going on in our communities, so we need to see this stuff in order to solve the problem.”

Datona disagrees with Simms. In his portion of the DVD he stresses how family is a crucial aspect of growing up in housing projects and that his contribution to his community is hip-hop music. He feels the DVD as a whole puts out all the wrong messages. “The DVD is influential but for all the wrong reasons. Overall the DVD was a complete slap in the face, a bullshit disgrace, and I made a stupid mistake being a part of it. I’m not justifying nothing. I can take responsibility for my own, but as a whole the DVD is violent and it’s horrible shit for kids to see. If I was a kid and I was watching the DVD, I would take from it that I should get the biggest gun I could find and represent my block, which is retarded.”

When Toronto police chief Bill Blair was questioned about The Real Toronto DVD on Flow 93.5, Toronto’s premier urban radio station. He felt the DVD at first glance is an exaggeration. “That’s not the real Toronto. That’s not the youth of the city. It does a tremendous disservice to thousands of people in this city,” said the chief.

Despite the criticisms, Madd Russian remains retrospectively neutral about the messages in his DVD and how deeply they have affected people. “I don’t think it’s doing anything positive or anything negative. I’m just putting it out there and people can come to their own conclusions… All I did was have an idea, grab a camera, go out and film [my idea]. If people don’t like it, go out and do your own.”

The Madd Russian’s views on pro-active story telling and turning an idea into a real piece of work are commendable and undeniable. Grabbing a camera, or any electronic recording device, like a microphone, is how hip-hop was started and how awareness about communities all over the world is spread. Madd Russian’s first film experiment, however misguided and arguably irresponsible, was in accordance with a powerful core philosophy of independence and communication.

“More people should do it but they’ve got to be careful, They’ve got to keep in mind that the media is going to turn everything around. I never knew that this DVD was going get so big, I never planned it to be so big. I think people are going to tell their stories, I think it’s going to start a whole movement.”