Film

Trenton Filmmaker Sean Scally By Peter Paylor

Trenton filmmaker Sean Scally was born in a tiny mining town. “I was pretty much raised by my grandmother,” he says, “and her biggest fear was that I would stay right there.” An impulse to create and a small scholarship to the Ontario College of Art looked like a way out; when that didn’t pan out, he joined the military instead. He’d just turned eighteen. It not only got him out of his home town, it allowed him to see the whole world up close. It also set him up for a good job when he got out and a chance to retire at the ripe old age of fifty-two.

“I knew that if I was going to compromise just to avoid criticism, I wouldn’t be making the film I wanted to make.”

He found that the creative impulse was still there. “It was just postponed,” he says. Photography led to slide shows which led, naturally, to video. “A project fell into my lap,” he says, of his first foray into documentary filmmaking, a short film about community-supported agriculture. That led to Max’s Greenwheels, a film about Belleville urban farmer Max Valyear, Scally’s first entry into Belleville’s Downtown DocFest in 2016. Scally recalls an important lesson he learned making that film. There is a brief scene that he contemplated editing out for fear of making the subject look less than perfect. He anticipated criticism if he left it in. “But we’re all imperfect,” he says.

“I wanted to show that what Max was doing, anyone could do. I left it in. I knew that if I was going to compromise just to avoid criticism, I wouldn’t be making the film I wanted to make.”

“I love storytelling.”

“I love history,” says Scally with more enthusiasm than one might expect those words to muster. “I read historical stuff all the time, I always have.” When the opportunity came to produce three short films for the Cramhae Historical Society, Scally jumped at the chance. One of those films, a profile of Charles Smith Rutherford VC, brought Scally the Best Local Film Award at DocFest in 2017. “There’s something about the research and the process,” he says. “It leads to getting to know the person, or to think you’re getting to know the person. It’s storytelling. I love storytelling.”

His latest film, Playing with Fire, is storytelling at its finest. It’s a riveting look at the 1918 explosion and fire at the British Chemical Company in Trenton. “The films I make are meant to teach people about history, but people don’t want to know that they’re being taught anything, especially young people. I always look for a fresh approach. Something new.” In the case of Playing with Fire that “something new” is the addition of live action animation alongside more traditional documentary techniques. It works. Playing with Fire garnered Scally his second DocFest Award this year, this time for Best Documentary Feature.

Scally is currently putting the finishing touches on Lumberbaron, a film about the Gilmour Lumber Company in Trenton. He also has three new documentaries in the works along with his fifth fiction film, The Osprey’s Nest, a collaboration with first-time screenwriter Orland French. At seventy-five, French seems to be taking a lesson from Scally who says: “It’s never too late to follow your calling.”

Archival photograph of Trenton, Ontario