Amar Wala Talks Debut Feature 'Shook,' Real-World Influences, & State of Toronto Film

One Canadian titles at TIFF 2024 that created a fair amount of ‘buzz’ was Shook’, a dramedy set in Scarborough, Toronto’s easternmost borough. Scarborough has a weird relationship with the rest of the city that it was annexed into, and a weirder one in the world of cinema. The region has commonly been used as a stand-in for non-descript urban areas in American productions, ranging from blockbusters like X-Men and The Incredible Hulk, comedies like Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, or even TV series like The Handmaid’s Tale or Gen V. A much-welcomed new trend at the TIFF festivals of this young decade is the emergence of feature films coming from the Scarborough region. Between 2021’s Scarborough, and 2022’s Brother, these moving, important stories rooted in this region dealt with overcoming hardships and trauma. Along comes Shook, which, for lack-of a better pun, shakes up the narrative, coming in with a more authentic, comedic approach.

The film follows Ashish (Saamer Usmani), a struggling writer who struggles with finding his own peace of mind amidst familial rifts. He seeks a sense of solace, retreating to coffee shops downtown in hopes of creative inspiration, operating under the ‘order name’ of ‘Ash’. This code-switching facade he puts up as ‘Ash’ is challenged by the bravado of a barista named Claire (Amy Forsyth), who calls B.S and asks for his real name. Sparks fly between the two, with Ashish’s future looking more in-line with what he’d want it to be, until his estranged father Vijay (Bernard White) remerges in his life, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Along the way, Ash contemplates his future amidst the turbulence, with many laughs and touching moments during the journey. The film represents something new in Toronto cinema, an already fledgling category which while not without its merits, is a largely homogenous space in terms of on-screen and tonal diversity. Though Shook is the debut feature for documentary veteran Amar Wala, it never feels shaky (pun intended). Amar spoke with FilmSpeak about creating Shook, his creative process, relationship to Scarborough, and his feelings on the state of Canadian cinema at large.

FS: This film was adapted from the your short film of the same name, and to an extent, your life-experiences. In the final feature film, there are a lot of different elements in the narrative, all of which coalesce really well into this theme of Ash finding his own identity. I’m wondering, with all of the very different elements in this film, how did you find the film’s core identity? 

AW: I think it was really just the process of writing, and putting it on the page first. Obviously it touches on a lot of personal elements, like, I kind of reached back to that time in my life, in my mid-twenties, and I think it’s something that a lot of people go through, especially now, with how hard it is to sort of go through life in Toronto, because of how expensive everything is. That moment where school is kind of in the rear-view, you’re supposed to be an adult now and figure out these next steps, but, especially if you’re supposed to be an artist, it’s difficult to really know what your day-to-day is supposed to be like, what movies you’re supposed to make. The Ash character is sort of stuck in that place, and so a lot of other things that happen in that point in life were really simple, but also really cinematic themes that we could populate the movie with, romance, family-issues, and doing it all through the specific lens of my background, doing it from a South Asian perspective. Even though it sounds really simple, making a film about family, and romance, and hanging out with your boys, all that stuff, these are the kinds of things that South Asian filmmakers in Canada, and in the West in general don’t get to do really often. It’s not a film about race, or immigration, or diaspora elements, it’s just a film about life, and you’d really be surprised about how hard that is for people in our community.

FS: There’s so many regionally specific experiences in this film, such as the Blue Night Bus, or the late great SRT (the region’s now-defunct light rail train that connected to the larger Toronto subway line), but I feel as if you were to watch this film from am outsider’s perspective, someone who’s not from Scarborough, would probably be able to watch the film and get the gist of it. How did you go about making these specific examples universally accessible in the film?

AW: I think they just are universal. I didn’t think about it too much that way, to be honest with you. I just did something that was specific to my life, living on the outskirts of this city, and I felt like if I did it in an honest way, it would definitely translate. It would mean something to the people of Toronto, but it would translate outside of Toronto, and it kind of has, because every city, every major city is kind of like this now. Immigrant communities in major cities kind of live on the outskirts, come in, do their work, and head back out. That’s the reality of places like New York, LA, London, all of that stuff. So that little part in the movie where Ash has that speech about being in the east part of a major city, that’s true, and I feel like it resonates with everybody. After TIFF, I got a really beautiful long e-mail from a South Asian actor based in London, and he said that it reminded him of running to get back home on a train on the east side of London. With these things, I feel like being specific makes them feel special, and then that special nature of them translates all over the world. 

FS: You touched on this a little bit earlier, but Shook isn’t the kind of Canadian film we often see. Especially as you said, with South-Asian Canadians, there’s a lot of diaspora stories, or stories rooted in trauma, and this film has South-Asian characters who are part of the diaspora, but it’s not a diaspora story. Did you have any hurdles when you pitched this new kind of film to people? 


AW: Yes, a lot. You’d be surprised as to how much, because, to be honest with you, our finding system, and generally the film industry in Canada and the West at large doesn’t know what to do with films about people of colour that aren’t about those subjects. That’s a lane that’s been carved out for us, to talk about racism, inequity, pain, migration, and all of that stuff, but if you want to do something in another lane, there isn’t really much room for you. So it takes a lot of pushing, pulling, and really kind of setting new trends. I feel like Shook is such a simple film. It's a funny film about things that we all go through, but, despite that simplicity, getting it made, in many ways, was more complicated than some of my more serious work, which is about more socio-political issues, and more directly so. Especially in my documentary work, I deal with big themes a lot, and so, on purpose, because of that, I wanted to make a film that was much more intricate, much more personal, much more small, and have it be specific to me and my experiences, my community’s experiences.

Wala further discussed his experience fighting to shoot Shook in Scarborough and to authentically depict the soul of the story through the region.

AW: A lot of the places that I had in mind originally were the places that we ended up shooting. It’s just tricky shooting in Scarborough, because there really isn’t a lot of shooting infrastructure in Scarborough. When the American shows come up here, they mostly shoot in Downtown Toronto, right? Or they shoot in the studios. The industry just isn’t prepared to shoot in Scarborough, so location managers don’t have as many relationships there, you’ve gotta take your equipment all the way there, lug it back every day, all that kind of stuff. There was a lot of talk about people asking, “Can we shoot it in the West End, can we shoot it downtown?”. I was like, no, we have to shoot in the actual place where it’s set, because people will know right away if we don’t. Scarborough people will know, Toronto people will know right away. It was just a challenge to push the industry along and say, that yeah, we’re gonna do it this way, differently than the way you normally do things. You know, you have to build relationships with restaurants, you have to build relationships with businesses, and, the industry already has those relationships in downtown Toronto. The other thing is that the American productions set the prices for shooting in restaurants, in Toronto, and as a Canadian film, we don’t have that kind of budget. So you’re always kind of negotiating down with them, and they’ll say something like, “Oh, Reacher shot here, pay me the same as what Reacher paid me!”. Truth is, we don’t have Reacher money. 

FS: I feel like the scenes in this film, where Ash and his friends are eating at the Hakka restaurant, are such apt microcosms of what this film is trying to do, representing a sort of fusion of tastes, worlds, diversity of experience, and the conversations that are had there are microcosms of how the film grapples with ideological discourse and such. How did you shape these kind of scenes in the film?

Part of it is a ‘hanging out with the boys movie’. We wanted to do our version of that. We referenced Good Will Hunting a lot. Obviously the premise is very different, Ash is not a math genius, but the idea of hanging out with your boys is there, and in Good Will Hunting, they’re in the south of Boston, and he’s got to go to Harvard and see all of these brilliant people, I think Ash is doing something similar, maybe more down to Earth. We wanted to show that his life in Scarborough is actually very lively, very fun, very easy, and very, I’d say comfortable for him. Even though he’s yearning to be downtown and to be a part of the scenes down there, like the energy down there, life in Scarborough doesn’t suck. It’s just different. What’s our version of a hanging out with the boys scene? Well, Saturday morning, when we were hungover, we would go to get Hakka (a East & South Asian fusion cuisine prominent in the Greater Toronto Area). 

FS: This film paints Scarborough in a different light that we’ve not really seen before in cinema. Either Scarborough is standing in for some non-descript American location, or is home to a specific kind of diaspora story, or traumatic story. In Shook, it’s generally a more authentic look, capturing the liveliness of the place. Was it just second nature to shoot Scarborough this way? 

AW: I think it was second nature, just because I see Scarborough as this beautiful, vibrant, fun place. Obviously I had my own time where I was trying to get out of my parents’ house, be downtown and everything, all that stuff. My love for Scarborough grew more once I kind of left, I started seeing it differently once I was living downtown. Getting to see the relationship the rest of the city has with Scarborough kind of put a chip on my shoulder, that’s why I named my company Scarborough Pictures, and that’s why I shot it the way I see it. Being honest with you, I think some of the on-screen depictions of Scarborough, and I won’t name any names, represent the way the industry sees these stories. They go out of their way sometimes to make Scarborough look like a gritty, desolate place, and it has those parts of it, but every city has those parts of it. I’ve been saying this for a while, you have to go out of your way to make Scarborough look like a bad place. It’s a good looking place, it’s a beautiful place. 

shook’ opens in canadian cinemas on august 8th.