Toronto Hidden Gem: ‘Village Keeper’ Examines the Challenges of Ending Cycles of Abuse
Director Karen Chapman tackles the horror of domestic violence in Village Keeper, but not from the perspective of an abused wife having to fight off or flee an insecure or jealous husband’s violent explosions.
Her narrative feature debut, which has its world premiere at TIFF on Sept. 11, has Beverly-Jean, an abused wife played by Olunike Adeliyi, making no calls to police or crisis centers, nor enduring a life of emotional or physical abuse in silence.
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If anything, Beverly-Jean’s oppressive husband appears only fleetingly in flashbacks and, Chapman adds, may well have suffered from inherited trauma himself.
“This is the complicated nature of loving someone who hurts you,” she says. “It’s not as black and white as, ‘He’s bad.’ He did something wrong, though something wrong probably happened to him too, which is why he treats people that way. So how do we stop that cycle?”
Despite displaying no physical bruises, Beverly-Jean has a face etched with trauma as her family grapples with dark secrets passed down from one generation to the next. The lesson is that the absence of physical violence does not mean the abuse is gone.
“It’s just facing [domestic violence] with honesty, as opposed to hiding it with shame,” Chapman says. Her slow-burn approach to abuse in Village Keeper springs in part from family violence remaining a taboo subject in the Black Canadian community in Toronto’s Scarborough neighborhood where the movie is set.
“Culturally, this is just not something we speak about out loud,” she explains. “It’s impolite. It makes people uncomfortable. And that just had me wanting to make this movie even more.”
Village Keeper
Chapman adds that she deliberately chose to show Beverly-Jean’s dark emotions and paranoia after escaping an abusive marriage, rather than the domestic violence itself.
“We all know what those things are, what it looks like,” she insists, adding that her focus was on the aftermath of generational emotional trauma in a family. “My instinct told me being a failure is familiar, that everyone knows what it’s like to not do what you’re supposed to do anymore, and to live in the shadow of that.”
But Village Keeper does ultimately spear the elephant in the room. Beverly-Jean, after seeing her daughter, Tamika (Zahra Bentham), endure panic attacks and her son, Tristin (Micah Mensah-Jatoe), be accused of striking a boy at school, scrambles to end the trauma her family faces.
“Seeing Tristin with rage scares her, because he’s such a sweet kid,” Chapman says. “She knows it’s not benign. She knows it has to be dealt with right away or else it will grow into a beast.”
Chapman, a graduate of Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Center, had her earlier short film Measure debut at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019 and win the International Hollywood Foreign Press and Residency Award at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards, which she attended. Her most recent film, the documentary Quiet Minds Silent Streets, had a world premiere at TIFF in 2022.
Chapman adds, however, that her world premiere in Toronto at the Scotiabank Theatre for Village Keeper will be tinged with sadness, as the film was inspired in part by her late mother.
Says Chapman: “I made the film because she had so much to say. ‘Make sure you make a film about me!’ She was very, very clear about that. So it will be a beautiful moment, but bittersweet.”
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