Few filmmakers are better placed than Alexandre Trudeau to talk about artists taking on political issues after the backlash at the Berlin Film Festival, where both his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and brother, Justin Trudeau, served as Canadian prime minister.
“I come from politics in my family. Politics is everywhere. There is always politics. It is in everything,” Trudeau said. Hollywood Reporter Before his last film, a survival thriller Bear hair Which he co-directed with James MacLellan and stars Babysitters Club Actresses Malia Baker and Roy Dupuy.
Early in his filmmaking career as a documentary filmmaker, Trudeau toured political hotspots, including Baghdad in 2003, where he filmed a documentary. Planted In Iraq during the US-led invasion. After a year, he left The fenceA film about two families on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank.
He also prepared a document on civil unrest in Liberia and Sierra Leone and another chronicling the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. “I have a very radical humanism at the end of the day, and at a younger age, I always believed that making these films would help heal the world. It was an ambition and it’s a crazy idea now as a wiser, older man,” Trudeau insisted, looking back at his youthful artistic idealism.
While he was making documentaries, MacLellan taught high school in Winnipeg, where he inspired the anxiety he saw in the classroom among his young students Bear hair as Trudeau’s first written feature. The coming-of-age story centers around Baker, who plays Tori An anxiety-ridden 16-year-old girl engages in a cat-and-mouse battle with bad guys in the frozen wilderness of Canada.
“Just because it’s written doesn’t mean there’s no politics in it,” Trudeau says of his focus on fiction. “It means he’s hiding, maybe. That’s why I love writing screenplays. This is a film about our country, in the political sense. It’s a younger, younger, weaker one who realizes that sometimes you have to fight. You have to fight.”
For Tori, fighting means surviving Canada’s harsh winters and the dangers of the harsh wilderness. “It’s a country that can kill you. My little brother knows that,” Trudeau says as he remembers 23-year-old Michel Trudeau, the youngest member of his famous political family. In 1998, while skiing in the backwoods of British Columbia, he was tragically swept into the icy waters of Kokanee Lake by an avalanche and drowned. His body was never found.
He added: “It’s quite a dramatic device, in this country, in the winter and outside, to not do anything that could get you killed. You have to, in a way, fight for your life as a baseline.”
In the film, Tori’s grandfather says to her, after she self-harms and refuses to go to school, “Who can say which moments will shape you into who you become?” She is sent to his remote cable car to learn hunting and survival skills along a frozen lake near the US border. In a crisis, Tori uses those life-saving skills, transforming from a frightened and threatened young woman into a fierce warrior. Here, the hidden dangers of Canada’s vast landscape — including the country’s winter cold, snow and ice — allow Trudeau to underscore how embracing the outdoors can bring personal renewal to Tory in… Bear hairAnd for young people everywhere grappling with the demands of modern life.
“It’s where the Canadian spirit lives,” he says. “It’s where every troubled teenager has to find some way to connect with nature, to discover that we are survivors as humans.” Tory’s survival odyssey also belongs to Canada as a country currently caught in the middle of US President Donald Trump’s tariff war and the taunts of the 51st state.
“This is one of our moments, yes,” Trudeau says. “In another way, the signs have always been there. We tend to think that one person is the problem. No, there is a deep, structural problem here, and one person is not the cause of it, just a symptom.”
He adds: “And when that person is gone, the problem is not solved. I see this through a bigger lens, that we are fighting for liberal democracy. The world, and this country specifically, because I really feel like we are the last man standing in this game, and if we fall, there will be nothing left.”
bear hair, Filmed in northeastern Manitoba on the frozen shore of the Winnipeg River, it will be released in Canadian theaters starting March 5.
