Alex Mallari Jr. and Fefe Dobson in Morningside.Supplied
It is such a Scarborough story – how singer-songwriter Fefe Dobson first met aspiring filmmaker Ron Dias, close to two decades ago, well before Morningside, their first feature film project together, was even a glimmer of an idea.
The memory is hazy for Dobson, who thinks they met at a club in the early 2000s. They were two Scarborough kids who had made it out of what was then considered a troubled part of the city and were working their way through the entertainment industry.
“We met and instantly, we just gelled,” she said in an interview.
It actually happened at a Toronto International Film Festival afterparty, Dias clarified in a separate Zoom interview, for which he showed up wearing a red sweatshirt emblazoned with the word Scarborough. At the party, Dobson and Dias had been hanging out, figuring out their shared Scarborough connection, and “had a couple of drinks too many,” when they thought they saw James Franco and tried talking to the lookalike, says Dias.
“And he kept telling us that he wasn’t James Franco, but we just thought he was playing it cool. Like going undercover. The next day, Fefe and I were texting back and forth. Because it wasn’t James Franco; he was in New York … and we’ve just had a bond ever since then,” he says.
So when Dias called up Dobson six years ago, with an idea for a feature film set in Scarborough, Dobson was all in. She plays the role of a nurse in the film, which looks at the intersecting lives of seven characters who connect through a fictional community centre in Morningside Heights, the neighbourhood Dobson grew up in.
Prior to her fame as a pop/rock artist in the 2000s, Dobson attended Wexford Collegiate Schools for the Arts, and lived at the Wilcox Creek Co-op. She was one of four children growing up with their single mother, and life was tough, she says.
“Music was a saving grace, to be honest. It was a way for me to disappear and make my own world.” It took her an hour on transit to get to school, a trip she’d endure by putting on her headphones. “Music was my gift, to get out and survive, really.”
After her success in Canada, as a multiplatinum recording artist, Dobson dabbled in acting, appearing in Sudz Sutherland’s Home Again (2012). Dobson eventually moved to Nashville in 2014, and took a hiatus from her own music career to focus on writing for other artists such as Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez.
Prior to Morningside, Dobson and Dias had worked together on a few YouTube videos and captured personal moments on film at, for example, concerts they attended together. Dias, who started out in his career as an intern at FLOW 93.5, a radio station that mainly played hip-hop and R&B in the 2000s, had always wanted to tell a Scarborough story.
“This is long before Scarborough or Brother,” says Dias, referring to books by authors Catherine Hernandez and David Chariandy respectively, that were adapted into films and garnered critical acclaim after their premieres at TIFF. However, no one was willing to take a chance on a first-time feature filmmaker with a big idea – even though Dias had found success as a YouTuber and with his Friends With Benefits web series.
While he finetuned his idea to represent Scarborough on the big screen with co-writer Joanne Jansen, he made his first feature film, Bite of a Mango (2022), a smaller scale project about four friends trying to navigate life through a lockdown and the Black Lives Matter movement. When Bite of a Mango successfully sold to a streamer, he was able to secure some funding to realize his vision.
“It really came from watching movies when I was a kid, like Boyz n the Hood and Do the Right Thing, and studying films in college,” says Dias. “They were so central to Compton … but they had these universal themes that everybody could relate to.”
Growing up all over Scarborough, Dias thought the suburb could similarly be a character in a movie. Multiple experiences with gun violence was another important throughline, to show how innocent lives have been taken away because of pointless violence. But there was also the beauty of many different cultures abutting each other in the sprawling suburb.
He would hang out with his friends from West Indian and Tamil cultures at their homes, learning the particulars of each tradition. “Because whether you like it or not, their parents goin’ to sit you down and tell you what’s what. So that really is my upbringing in Scarborough. I just loved it there. Still do.”
For Dobson, Morningside was a chance to return to a place that was formative to her experiences as an artist. And in some ways, it can still inspire. The shooting for a pivotal scene for the movie, for example, took place right down the street from her former home at Wilcox Creek.
“I hadn’t seen that area since I moved out, when I was 16, and made my first record. That was powerful for me. I just felt, like, instant energy,” she says. She doesn’t get to hang out in Scarborough as much, since most of her family has moved farther east to Oshawa. But she’s looking forward to attending the premiere of Morningside at an old childhood hangout.
“I used to go shopping at Scarborough Town Centre all the time. That was my jam. To go back, that will be interesting for me. There’s a lot of emotions that come with seeing your childhood environment, which is familiar – but also not.”
Morningside opens in select theatres Feb. 21
Special to The Globe and Mail