In the Sundance Film Festival hit Four Sheets to the Wind, Tamara Podemski plays Miri, a young woman who leaves her native family in rural Oklahoma for a very different life in Tulsa. (First Look Pictures)
No one looks like Tamara Podemski. Her face is crazy — crazy beautiful, yes, but crazy nonetheless, with an ear-reaching smile and wide-set eyes and a staring intensity cut by a flurry of freckles. That face is courtesy of an Israeli father and a Saulteaux mother, and for 15 years (almost half of her life), it’s been useful to her as she’s performed in films like Dance Me Outside, TV shows like The Rez and on Broadway in Rent. Things went pretty well — she also released some albums and toured nationally as a dancer — and Podemski had quietly resigned herself to an almost-famous career in her hometown of Toronto as someone who usually lands, as she says, “the occasional native role.” But at the Sundance Film Festival this January, things changed.
In a no-budget American black comedy called Four Sheets to the Wind, Podemski plays the small but pivotal part of Miri, an imploding young woman who leaves her native family in rural Oklahoma for a party-girl downward spiral in Tulsa. Podemski won a Special Jury Prize for Acting, a festival first for either a Canadian or a native person. Soon after, at the bidding of several studios and agents, Podemski moved to Los Angeles. She recently starred in the Lasse Halstrom-directed pilot for New Amsterdam, a FOX-TV cop drama, and these days she’s hanging out with her fellow Canadians on the L.A. audition circuit. Four Sheets to the Wind is the opening-night film of Toronto’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, a five-day long event (Oct. 17-21) that showcases indigenous people’s work in the arts. During an interview with CBCNews.ca in the lobby of the CBC building, Podemski talked about the complexities of ethnic casting, how to sing in Ojibway and what a picture of a feather on a DVD cover really means.
Q: The film is mostly a sweet coming-of-age story about your character’s brother, Cufe. Then Miri blows in, and she’s this dark, destructive person. On paper, Miri might have looked like the disturbing cliché of the “drunk native.” How do you approach that stereotype?
A: I really scrutinize any native role I get. There are things that I’m very sensitive about, and some portrayals I prefer over others. Yeah, if you looked at it quickly, [Miri] is the stereotypical woman who has just let life take her over and is powerless and is a victim. But I love the challenge of showing that in fact, that’s not the story. All of us have those judgmental eyes and the only way to release our judgment is to feel the compassion, to know that there’s something else going on there. Pain can make us all do things that can appear ugly or hurtful. I just approached her with that respect.
The death of his father causes Cufe (Cody Lightning) to search for a more fulfilling life in Four Sheets to the Wind. (First Look Pictures)
Q: You’ve said that your mother struggled with alcohol abuse in the past. Did you draw on that?
A: Yeah, maybe that’s why I might have a little more compassion than most people. My life has been blessed with addicts. I always wondered why that was. I think I had the best preparation for life because I grew up in an alcoholic home. My mother has since recovered and is 20 years sober and she’s a great story of that success and that plight. My heart breaks for [alcoholics], but I’ve witnessed too many people get out of it and too many people survive and succeed. I believe in potential. I believe in the ultimate will to get better. I’ve seen it. So yeah, Miri was really… I had to be really careful with her, because we have to have hope and believe in these people even though they’re giving us reason after reason why we should just let them go.
Q: How has the positive response to the film changed you?
A: It renewed my faith. It was encouragement when I felt very little encouragement from the industry. I wasn’t working a lot. The award was an empowering thing to make me open my eyes and make me dream a little bigger than I had. I had kind of accepted that I was a supporting player. I was good enough to be a part of an ensemble cast, good enough to sustain myself with work every once in a while, but I never thought of L.A. I never thought of leads in feature films even though I secretly believed I could do it.
I won the award and the next day, L.A. was calling. I’ve never dreamed of the fame and fortune, but I want to work. I want to sustain myself as an artist and get my creative rocks off, tell a story that might possibly change the way people see something.
(First Look Pictures)
Q: The imagineNATIVE Festival is obviously this great opportunity to highlight creative output from aboriginal communities. But is there a danger that it could ghettoize native film, keep it out of the mainstream? Will the Toronto International Film Festival, for instance, say, “We won’t show this film because it can be in the native festival”?
A: I think that’s in the hands of the programmers at TIFF. I don’t know why we didn’t get into TIFF. It’s baffling to me. But at the same time, I’m so grateful imagineNATIVE is there, this other place to celebrate these kinds of films.
You know, the funny thing is, it’s not a really native film. People have said we didn’t get a [theatrical] distribution deal because it wasn’t native enough. At Sundance, everyone loved the film, we had all the big distributors and studios saying, “We love it, but we would get robbed, we would lose so much money because what do you do with it? How do you market it?” And it’s crazy, because when the DVD comes out, there’s this feather on the front of the package, and when you see the film you know a feather has nothing to do with it at all. It’s just a bizarre cover. They’re selling it now as a love story, because a family story isn’t that attractive, I guess. You can’t get too concerned with the marketing, because it has nothing to do with the art, with the matter of what it is, but still… [Sighs.]Q: One thing that struck me watching Four Sheets is how radical it is to see young native people just living their lives, drinking coffee and going to parties on film. This isn’t Dances With Wolves. Why is it taking so long for movies to break away from those antiquated depictions?
A: I believe audiences are being underestimated. We’re the humans that are living and breathing these experiences that are not shown on the screen. I don’t know what studios think they’re protecting us from. I think it requires them to get some balls and take some chances, because we’re smarter than they think we are.
Q: You’ve recorded songs in both Hebrew and Ojibway. What’s harder?
A: I’m not fluent in either but Ojibway is maybe a little harder. It’s easy to pronounce, but there are so many vowels that your tone and the quality of your voice has to be right there. They’re really long words with long vowels, so sustaining a note is a little more difficult than saying many words in one line. You can’t hide!
Q: Do you worry about being pigeonholed in L.A. as “the native actress?”
A: I think I’m more than that, and it’s going to be a very short career if they can’t see beyond my squinty eyes and my pronounced cheekbones. Yet my skin is light, so that’s going to confuse them. Unless there’s a reason a character has to be a certain ethnicity, why not open your eyes? Why can’t I play a lawyer? I’m more than just my ethnicity. If they can’t get over that, I'm going to have to start singing on the street.The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival runs Oct. 17 to 21 in Toronto.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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