Welcome to the neighbourhood
A guerrilla documentary featuring 'gang members, drug dealers and some of the realest rappers in Toronto' says it's showing a side of the city few people know. Is this truly the real Toronto? JOE FRIESEN reports
By JOE FRIESEN
Saturday, October 15, 2005 Page M3
Two young men stand in a dingy apartment hallway speaking directly to the camera.
"We're so real, we take you right to the snitch's door," says one, referring to an unnamed resident who has co-operated with a police investigation.
"He knows he's watched. If you look carefully, he can't leave his door."
The camera tilts down to a bag of trash slumped on the hall floor, leaning against the alleged snitch's door. The occupant is too afraid to take the three or four steps across the hallway to throw his garbage down the chute, they explain.
"We check his house every hour on the hour to make sure that nigga stays there," says the second man.
After a summer of gunfire that brought the number of shooting deaths this year to 41, a new underground documentary offers a glimpse of a violent subculture that celebrates brutality and has a menacing array of weaponry at its disposal.
The DVD, The Real Toronto, is a dystopian urban travelogue that moves through some of the city's most notorious neighbourhoods. Released last week and sold in a handful of local record and clothing stores in downtown Toronto, its nine chapters treat areas such as Jane and Finch, Black Creek, Chalkfarm and Parkdale as little-known tourist destinations. The packaging boasts of interviews with "gang members, drug dealers and some of the realest street rappers in Toronto," and it's this cast of characters that acts as tour guide, introducing the viewer to groups of young men eager to describe a life of drug dealing and gang banging. They brandish pistols, shotguns and Uzis and pose for the camera with their faces hidden behind bandanas.
The shaky, hand-held digital video production was made over the summer by a 22-year-old white hip-hop enthusiast who goes by the name of Madd Russian. He says although he expects some outcry from critics, the film is not meant to glorify violence.
"I just put the reality out there for people to judge for themselves," he says. "I just wanted to show the struggle . . . for people to see that there are people in Toronto actually struggling. And just like the disclaimer [on the video] says, it's a world-class city but we do have our own fair share of problems that have been swept under the rug."
His film belongs to a genre that has grown in popularity in recent years, most notably with Hood 2 Hood: The Blockumentary, a video tour of infamous neighbourhoods in the U.S. The no-budget films are sold through the Internet, or through independent music stores. The Russian says The Real Toronto has already sold 200 copies at a price of $10 each.
The Russian, who grew up in Nyzhny Novgorod in southern Russia, says he came to Canada 10 years ago and fell in love with hip hop while learning to speak English. He's careful to emphasize that he doesn't know anyone who appears in the film -- these are people to whom he was introduced through connections in the local hip-hop scene.
The only thing that surprised him while filming The Real Toronto was the extent of the firepower he was shown. In one scene, shot at a Jane and Finch area apartment block, a group of teenagers pull .40 calibre and 9 mm pistols from their waistbands before an Uzi submachine gun is flashed for the camera. In other scenes, pistols and shotguns are fired at random into the night.
The Russian says he made a deliberate effort to keep these scenes brief, but he felt they needed to be included. "I wasn't trying to make this as a movie for people to watch just for guns," he said. "But it's important for Toronto to know that there's a lot of guns out there and that in order to get the guns off [the streets] you need to stop people at a younger age."
The DVD is generating some underground buzz in the city. One local record store owner, whose shop carries the DVD, says he's fielded several calls a day since its release.
"Whoever made this film did a great job of street marketing," said the owner, who didn't want to be identified. "I just know it's very popular. I'd say we've only sold about a dozen copies so far, but the calls just keep coming in."
Scarborough City Councillor Michael Thompson said he hasn't seen the video but has heard of similar productions. He hopes the video doesn't promote violence, but says he's not surprised such a video exists.
"It would validate the issue that we're working on, which is that there's a lot of people in the city of Toronto with guns," Mr. Thompson said.
Two senior officers contacted in Scarborough and the Jane and Finch area said they also haven't seen The Real Toronto, but were concerned that it might glorify gangsterism. They note that although the number of people involved in this world is small, they do present a significant threat to public safety.
"It's the gangster lifestyle that comes out of Los Angeles, California," said Superintendent Gary Ellis. "It's a fantasy lifestyle that has stark and dire consequences."
Referring to the scene where the alleged snitch is too intimidated to step outside his apartment, the Russian says he doesn't advocate the kind of violent retribution depicted in the Stop Snitching video that has become popular in the U.S. The video, which features images of gunshot victims and threats against suspected informants, gained notoriety because it featured a cameo by NBA star Carmelo Anthony. Now T-shirts with the slogan have become big sellers in New York.
A couple of themes percolate through The Real Toronto. One, repeated across several neighbourhoods, is the lack of recreational outlets for youths. In one scene, a group complains that their local community centre has been locked up and left to rot. In others, young men talk about how the community worked for years to get basketball hoops installed, often contributing their own money, and while some courts flourish, others are broken down and empty.
"No rec [centre], no playground for the kids, no b-ball court. All we do is smoke and drink and sell drugs all . . . day," says one tour guide in Black Creek.
Elsewhere, on a hot summer night outside the Chalkfarm apartments north of Jane Street and Wilson Avenue, a rapper named J-Staxxx holds court with a small group of friends. A member of the entourage describes his limited options in life: "If you ain't a drug dealer, you're a baller. And if you ain't a baller, you're a rapper. That's how it is down here."
J-Staxxx agrees. "That's how it is. That's how people see it. Quiet niggaz don't make money."
Making money is another central theme -- in particular, mimicking American hip-hop artists who, over the past 15 years, have created a marketable brand identity that often banks on the notoriety of their communities. In The Real Toronto, the men wear an assortment of neighbourhood-specific clothing; T-shirts with the name of their housing complex, a Scartown logo for Scarborough residents, or a photograph of the Jane and Finch intersection. Some are even shown selling the clothing from a shopping cart.
And what they're doing, as they say repeatedly, is representing their neighbourhood. The desire to be scarier than the rest even goes as far as this unusual boast: "We're the second-most drug-infested area in Etobicoke, and that's a proven fact."
Mark DeZilva, who runs a martial-arts school in the Jane and Finch area and who works with local community leaders, says the big talk is typical of teens seeking notoriety.
"When you ask a kid something with a video camera in front of him, then they'll say anything if they think it makes them famous," he said. "And then an outsider looks at it and says, 'Oh, that's Jane and Finch, that's what I thought it was like.' Realistically, it's not how they all talk . . . Unfortunately, the bad things get on TV and make money."
The Russian says the response to the film has been overwhelmingly positive so far, noting that many of the subjects have seen it. He doesn't feel that his film is exploitative. But he's not offering to share his profits, he says, because he hasn't made any. He says he has considered working on The Real Toronto: Volume 2, but he's more interested in bigger projects, something to help the communities that helped him make his film.
