TORONTO, ONTARIO — It started as a peaceful protest. It could have stayed peaceful. It didn’t even have to be a protest.
In February 1969, hundreds of students at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University barricaded themselves inside the computer room, located on the ninth floor of the school, to protest the lack of responsiveness from the university about a racially-charged complaint. Ten months earlier, black students had accused a biology professor, Perry Anderson, of racial discrimination. The students wanted a hearing; the hearing never happened. Frustrated with the inaction of the institution, students held a peaceful protest in the computer lab.
But two weeks into the sit-in, the riot police — who had never previously been called into Montreal for this purpose — showed up. Students were beaten; nearly one hundred were arrested, and some were deported. A fire was set, though no one has ever confirmed who was responsible. (The students, considering they were trapped inside the building, seem unlikely to have been the culprits; it would have been tantamount to suicide.) Some of the protesters who were arrested included future Canadian Senator Anne Cools and Roosevelt Douglas, who would go on to serve as Prime Minister of Dominica.
Ninth Floor is a documentary written and directed by Mina Shum; it’s her first feature-length documentary and her fifth time at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Ninth Floor is enjoying its world premiere. Her film combines archival footage with interviews with several of the surviving protesters, some of their children, and Professor Anderson’s son. Though she’s lived in Canada almost all her life, it was only recently that she even became aware of the Sir George Williams Affair. In an effort to promote multiculturalism, she said, her nation has neglected to look hard in its history at some of its uglier acts. “Canadians are racist,” Bukka Rennie, one of the former student protesters, in his interview. “But they want to apologize.”
With her hair and makeup done in anticipation of a red carpet premiere that evening (“I feel like I’m in drag”), Shum sat down with ThinkProgress to talk about civil disobedience, racism in Canada, and the possibility of redemption.
How does it feel to be bringing this film, about a very tense moment in Canadian history, to a Canadian film festival?
I was nervous for the cast; they hadn’t seen it yet. So I was nervous, particularly about Perry Anderson’s son, how would he respond? And Robert, the Jewish protester, he didn’t know that I had footage of him when he was young. All of that, I knew was going to be very emotional for them. I phoned my executive producer here and said, I’m really nervous! Even though I know people like it already. I try to be calm, but it’s the work of making sure all the participants feel that they’re in a safe space when they screen something like that. And I was surprised at how emotional the audience got. People would come and shake my hand and be crying. I was stopped in the street, yesterday, twice! I can’t believe they remember what the director looks like. It’s a hard subject. Really, really hard. Emotional. People are shocked. It brings up a lot of baggage for different people in different areas of their life. So absolutely essential, I think, that — I wanted it to premiere here, because this is my home festival. I’m from Vancouver, but I’ve had world premieres for all my features here. And it was great that TIFF said, this Canadian subject is worth the world looking at. And that is, in its own way, redemption for those poor students who went through what they did.
As an American, I hadn’t heard about this event until I saw your film. Does the average Canadian have a strong memory about this?
I didn’t know about it, and I grew up in Canada. In what was post-multiculturalism, in the 1970s, our official policy was this mosaic. Even though there’s racism in the playground, in my father’s workplace, racism will never go away, that’s fine. We can meet it as it comes. But the fact that it had not been told in history, in our journey towards a multiculturalism state, was shocking.
Why do you think this is one that people don’t talk about?
Canada prides itself on being better at most things! We do strive towards humanitarianism. The film is to say: Look, we still have more work to do. We can get lazy. That’s where my heart is coming from. I’m not saying, “We’re so shitty,” because we’re better than most. We have clean water, we have health care, we take care of our elderly. We’re at least pointing our ship towards an inclusive culture. But it’s hard to admit we did wrong, because we like to pride ourselves on being good. And my personal belief is, if you’re going to evolve as a human and a society, we must admit our faults. When I talk about this case, I talk about “we.” We did this. We as humans. This is part of who we are, and we have to accept and allow that and then move forward from that. Until we all put this story on the table, we’re spending a lot of energy trying to look perfect.
Did law enforcement ever come back to say, “We set that fire”? Have you heard from that community at all?
I know the school has seen the film. The president. They were also very cooperative in terms of giving us all that archival footage and complete access to their archives. And they did try to protect the professor, at one point. Even with me, they didn’t want to give me his phone number. We had to get to him a different way.
How did you find him?
It’s hard to admit we did wrong, because we like to pride ourselves on being good.
An article came out in the Montreal Gazette about us filming. At that point, our researcher thought he was dead, and we said that in the story. And then his son called and said, “actually, he’s not dead.” So we asked him if he would be in the movie and talk about it, and he said yes. He has been living with the burden of this story — imagine, being accused of racism publicly. Whether you’re racist or not. Just being accused of that, how do you fight it? I have empathy for his family. He never got tried either. The whole thing was handled badly. Nobody won. I’m not here to pass judgment. I’m here to say, look, when you don’t talk about something, this is how it can affect multiple generations. I think just airing out the story is a huge factor in healing everybody.
Seeing how these students were treated, it’s really like racism on racism: In addition to being black, they’re foreigners.
They weren’t from here, in the eyes of the community. They’re not Canadian; they’re from Trinidad, the Caribbean. That’s right. Like, “they’re Black Panthers.” It’s like they wanted to dismiss it because everybody was uncomfortable, so it got dismissed. It’s even amazing looking at the newspaper clippings from then, it’s really bent that the black kids were bad kids. When, as you see in the film, they were exercising their right to be heard.
What’s so surreal to watch is how many opportunities the school did have to completely avoid a crisis. We’re talking about, these are teenagers, and they went through the formal process. They want a hearing; what kind of rebels want a hearing? They could have had a hearing and decided he wasn’t racist and moved on with their lives. That resistance is such a huge part of what escalates what is already a not-great situation.
There was no mechanism for complaints at that point. And it was the late ’60s: Everybody was complaining about everything! Seriously. One of the characters, it didn’t end up in the film, said, “there’s a protest every day. You walk down the concourse and they’re reenacting the Vietnam War, where there’s dead soldiers on the ground with fake blood.” So I think they just were hoping the students would go away. It’s different from now. We have progressed. A voice is a voice. Then, it was, “you’re the students and we’re the teachers, so you listen to us.” And I think that attitude, that power dynamic, ultimately bit them in the butt. Instead of just, the whole thing could have been handled. It takes a lot of nerve, but they should have had the nerve. They’re an institution. People are paying tuition.
Do you need to have, in your own mind, what you think is the definitive version of what happened and who is responsible for what to organize the film? Or do you have to the opposite and say, everybody gets to make their case?
I knew what kind of film I wanted to make, which was humanitarian. I didn’t want to retry the case. I’m less interested in the facts than in the characters and the emotions and what happened to them. For me, the film is about making a vow to do better, right now.
For me, the film is about making a vow to do better, right now.
For me, it’s one person wanting power over another, it has to be examined. In any arena. Because why do we need power over each other? Is that capitalism seeping into our core? Why can’t we share the space? I knew that was my heart in the film. So everybody I met with, I was a listener, as opposed to a judge. And that means everybody told me their versions. I would accept that. I wouldn’t say anything.
It does seem like a person would walk away from this film with the belief that the students would have had to have been suicidal to have set the fire themselves.
Yeah.
How did coming at the film from that place influence the structure of the interviews? People are in what look like interrogation rooms. It’s very sparse, they look completely alone, on a folding chair. Why there and not in, say, their houses or on campus?
One of the first things I found out was that they were under surveillance. At the bottom of that power struggle, it’s really making a flash judgment based on the way someone looks. So in the film, I seduce us into a ’60s spy movie. And in the end, they look at us. So it’s very deliberate to flip the tables, and I want people to be uncomfortable with it and think about it. On a very personal level, I want people to go, “how do I see? And why do I see in the way I see? What’s informed that for me?” There’s a slight commentary on representation, how black people are represented. Even the white students: Once you demonize someone, you look at them from a different lens. Even Robert, the Jewish protester, you look at him differently knowing he’s on that side of the argument and not on this side.
What was it like to speak with Perry’s son?
I couldn’t believe we were going to get him. And then I was very nervous. I knew he was a good guy and the reason he came to this was, not to make right by his dad — we didn’t even get into that — he just wanted to share his story that his father suffered as well. Which I think is really important in terms of the elevating the humanitarian perspective of the film. It’s not making any definitive answers in terms of “he set the fire.” I really am letting the audience into the environment that the students were in. But out of all the characters, everybody is really strong in the film, and he was very vulnerable in the interviews with me. No one else was that vulnerable.
How much time did you spend with him?
Even the worst people think they’re doing good.
I interviewed him for five hours. I spent a day with him. And I’d spoken to him three or four times on the phone at length. At first I was trying to get his dad to come. But thank goodness he showed up, because I felt without representation from his side — because there’s a trick in the film, we never see Perry Anderson talk for himself until the end of the film. He’s talked about, he’s accused at. The students talk about him. But it’s only near the end that we see him speak about his own depression. So I’m playing with, now you’ve made a bunch of assumptions about Perry Anderson. You’ve demonized him as an audience member. And I flip that as well, because we’re never just one thing, and that’s where we have the opportunity for connection. Even the worst people think they’re doing good. I really always think it’s fear manifesting itself, when people are evil, when they’re acting out, and not kind.
Was there any specific part of this series of events that was most shocking or upsetting to you?
I still think, if you were a student, and you were trapped in that fire, and you heard, “burn nigger burn!” and you’re not a violent person, you’re just calling people on something, and now they want you to die. I’ve not had that in my life. I don’t know how you get over that PTSD. I think it’s quite traumatic. It makes me really sad. These are things we can avoid. It’s not an earthquake. This is not a meteor landing here. This is one-on-one kindness; you can choose how to be. It makes me really sad for humanity. That attitude permeates generations. It’s so gross. I cried and cried over this. This is the saddest film I’ve ever made. It’s so upsetting. Because they could have avoided it.
It was striking to see how many of the students really never recovered from that experience. It wasn’t that long a period of time in their lives, but a lot of them can’t get past it.
It wasn’t like they went to jail for 30 years or something. But it’s partly that they immigrated to Canada. These students were the proud progenies of their families. I know as an immigrant, you’re expected to do really well. You’re expected not to rock the boat. You’re expected to excel in this new land, where your parents couldn’t. So it wasn’t just protesters who got arrested, it was, they let down and smeared their families and the ancestry. When you’re othered, and when you’re looked at as “the black person,” you carry the reputation of that entire culture with you. And I think that’s what they felt. For Rodney John, that’s why he’s still so upset and says this is still slavery. He goes right back.
Were these all people who had been talking about this for a long time?
Some people had refused to talk about it. Others had talked about it, but not in a deep way. The History Channel did a one-hour thing, mostly from the administration’s perspective. They knew that I wanted to listen to their side of the story. The unheard. That was really important to me.
I’m trying to get a real sense of the symbolism of being in the computer lab. Just, how valuable that technology was and what it meant to be barricaded in there.
So it was a $2 million computer. One computer. The computer is the room, literally. And they were restricting access to the computer center for students in general, because they valued this machinery so much. So they knew that if they targeted it, everyone would pay attention. A riot is the language of the powerless, right? So, no one was listening to them for ten months. They knew they had to up the game. So they went and shut themselves in.
Did you have any moments, in the interviews or in the archival footage, where something happened and you felt like: This is it, this is my movie?
My first conversation with Rodney John, the original complainant. He’s a PhD, he’s a mediator, and very intelligent. Within ten minutes, we started talking about Carl Jung and his theory that, if we suppress something, it manifests itself physically. He talked about fear being a reverberation. He talked about watched and watching, and how when you don’t know what they’re looking for, how much does that affect you at your core? I ran to my producer and I said, “This is it.” Because I was trying to find — I never want to make a film that doesn’t come completely with all of my intention — and when we started talking, I knew I had a movie. It was him that made me go, all my theories are not for naught. He just confirmed everything.
What’s your immigration story?
I came here from Hong Kong when I was one, in 1967, with my family. I still speak Chinese. My parents are traditional working-class immigrants.
Were you surprised when you learned about this event? Or did it jive with your understanding of race and racism in Canada, based on how you grew up?
I was shocked. Because we’re not violent. My direct connection to this story is that, when I was in film school, my parents moved homes and ended up next to a racist neighbor. Every time my dad drove home, they would get called names and be yelled at through the window. And my mom was afraid and asked me to talk to someone for them — their English isn’t very good — so I said okay, and I looked in the White Pages, our government listings, and there was a race relations group you could talk to. I made an appointment, they took notes. It was enough for me to have a place to tell them. They weren’t going to kill each other, at least. But that race relations group would not have happened if these students had not complained, had not set up a human rights tribunal in the university, and really influenced multiculturalism. That’s where I felt indebted, because I couldn’t believe we had a race relations complaint group in the government! That wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think, had this event not happened. I have no proof of that. But before that, there was no place to make a human rights complaint.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.