Portraits from a Fire (2021)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) There’s a good chance you will have problems making it through Portraits from a Fire. No, it’s not a dire film—but in being executed on what feels like an ultra-low-budget, its presentation and execution are rough. Entirely taking place on a Canadian First Nation Reserve, the film has its heart in the right place, especially for viewers fascinated by the craft of filmmaking—it presents a teenage protagonist obsessed with making movies, using even the barest means at his disposal to film fantasies taking him beyond his quotidian existence. There’s some kinship here with other, more gentrified portraits of how middle-class white filmmakers become fascinated by their heart, but writer-director Trevor Mack doesn’t stop there in exploring the legacy of trauma in ways that go beyond mimetic realism. In conceptual terms, there’s a lot to like in Portraits from a Fire—it’s the execution that’s abrasive. The limits of the film can be seen at several levels, many of them intentional. The dialogue is often unsophisticated, the plot twists brought forward bluntly, the cinematography often amateurish (by design?) in showcasing many sequences from a customer-grade digital camera. Many of the roles are played by non-professionals, and while much of the visual design of the film comes from opposing the natural splendour of the reserves with the less-than-impressive human occupancy of that space, the result is still not quite as slick as it could have been. A lot of these choices are artistic, and do work in presenting an endearing DIY aesthetic that reinforces the themes of the film. But they don’t make it any easier to watch the film from a base audience perspective—the use of TV-like glitches at plot-important moments, for instance, takes viewers outside the reality of the film into the real, while a more consciously showy glitch style would have paradoxically worked better within the logic of the film. So; while there’s a lot to like here, the presentation appears self-limiting in reaching the potential of the concept. Portraits from a Fire is still a lovely film with strong underdog likability—but it could have been quite a bit better.