Hardwood

TAKE ONE, March-June, 2005 by Tom McSorley

2004 29m prod Hardwood Pictures, NFB, p Erin Faith Young, Peter Starr, d/sc/ed Hubert Davis, ph David Tennant, mus Fraser MacDougall, Dave Palmer; with Mel Davis.

Absent fathers abound in Canadian cinema. Hubert Davis's impressive and deeply personal documentary, Hardwood, however, is a Canadian film about a father both absent and present. It is also a film about the peculiar relationship between absence and presence that the cinema itself in some way embodies. The son of former Harlem Globetrotter, Mel Davis, Hubert Davis chronicles his father's life as a basketball player, and as the father of himself and his half-brother in Chicago, where the elder Davis was married to a black woman before returning years later to Vancouver to be with Hubert's white mother. Deepening the historical layers of this theme of absentee fathers, we learn that Mel Davis himself was raised in Chicago by a single mother. Exploring ideas of fatherhood, multiracial relationships and the politics of the family, Hardwood is an unflinching, thoughtful and compassionate journey through the Davis family album. While overly earnest in places, the film is neither cloying nor excessively sentimental. It is elegantly photographed by David Tennant and intelligently organized into three distinct but overlapping chapters: "Love," "Recollection" and "Redemption." Using archival footage and home movies, Davis also cleverly insinuates how the cinema, perhaps like individual memory, is a set of powerful but ultimately tenuous lines between what is inside the frame and what is outside the frame. Already a winner of several prestigious festival awards, Hardwood was also nominated for an Oscar[R] in the Short Documentary category, and Davis is the first African Canadian ever to be nominated.

Tom McSorley is Take One's associate editor and a member of its editorial board.