“One of my favourite things about the movie is how you are in the boots of a wrestler who is going on this tour for the first time,” says The Death Tour co-director Sonya Ballantyne. “You get to experience firsthand as a person who has maybe never gone to a reserve or encountered Indigenous people. You see firsthand what’s happening up there in your own backyards often enough.”
Ballantyne, speaking with The Death Tour director Stephan Peterson in an interview with POV, takes audiences on a wild ride through Canada’s north. The film chronicles the titular wrestling roadshow that tours northern communities and brings joy to audiences who are too often left behind. The tour gets its name for the gruelling physical and emotional hardship of going up north in the dead of winter when waters are frozen solidly enough to connect communities. Amid the frigid cold and extended darkness, moreover, communities deal with frequent suicides, often among young people. As the film shows, communities will literally shut down to grieve, which affords the wrestlers on the tour a reality check of the importance of the escapism that their bouts in the ring provide.
However, as the film shows, the wrestlers fight their own demons, too. The Death Tour zeroes in on four wrestlers—Sage Morin aka “The Matriarch” from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, who brings joy to Indigenous youths by letting them feel seen, but also copes with the loss of her son; Dez Loreen, aka “The Eskimofo,” an Inuk wrestler who knows the stakes the performances hold up north; Quebecois veterinarian Sara McNicholl, aka “McKenrose the Scottish Warrior,” who struggles with isolation on the tour due to language; and Sean Dunster, who, as “Massive Damage,” is the biggest name on the tour, but harbours his own struggles with addiction and recovery that hit hard as the tour rolls through dry communities. Peterson and Ballantyne also find a great character in The Death Tour’s longtime manager, legendary wrestling promoter Tony Condello. He’s a man of few words, but his weary eyes have seen it all as he displays a tough veneer that’s required when facing such extremes.
For Ballantyne, who hails from the Misipawistik Cree First Nation in Northern Manitoba, and Peterson, who cut his teeth as a filmmaker on doc series like Cold Water Cowboys and Ice Road Truckers, The Death Tour neither romanticizes nor sentimentalizes the tour. Despite the hardships that the communities and the athletes face, wrestling gives them hope. The doc, lensed by veteran cinematographer Van Royko, beautifully captures the grit and artistry of the tour with equal measure. It’s a crowd pleaser in its bones, sure to delight audiences just as much as the tour lights up the faces on kids across the circuit.
POV spoke with Sonya Ballantyne and Stephan Peterson via Zoom ahead of The Death Tour’s Canadian theatrical release.
POV: Pat Mullen
SB: Sonya Ballantyne
SP: Stephan Peterson
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: They call it The Death Tour for the physical and emotional challenge. Did you feel like you got your butt kicked by the end of this shoot?
SB: I think we came out stronger. It was a hard few days. It was 15 days we were on the road. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about what kind of artist I wanted to be. And I became closer with everybody we were filming with, especially Steph because this is our first feature documentary. I loved having that support through the hardship we faced on the trip.
SP: It was definitely a challenge. The hardest part was the six years it took to get it funded at the beginning and getting the support behind it from a financial standpoint. Once we were out there, it was gruelling. We were shooting 18 hours a day, sleeping for maybe three or four. By the last couple of days, we were totally running on fumes and the hard part was trying to keep the crew morale up. But it was one of the best experiences of my life. Every other wrestler who does the tour, I think, will agree it was a bucket list experience.
POV: Can you talk a bit more about the long road it took to actually get the film made?
SP: It was tough. I stumbled upon it [the tour] about eight years ago while up in Northern Canada filming another series. I was not a wrestling fan by any stretch of the imagination, but when I saw it I was like, “There’s definitely something here.” It took me a year or so to get the right producers on board who were Stacey [Tenenbaum] and Sergeo [Kirby]. They helped me figure out the macro approach to getting this done. I knew how I wanted to execute it in the field, but how to approach it from a producing standpoint, I had zero clue. It was hard to sell people that this is a universal story about a wrestling group. It took a lot of pitching.
We did a ton of the markets throughout COVID, so they were virtual, and then a little bit in person. Once we sat down in front of people and we got to pitch the story, I think the doors opened. We filmed it in three weeks and then edited it in six months, so once we finally got to roll cameras, it was very smooth.
POV: If you only have two weeks and you’re on tour and constantly moving, it’s not like you can go back and pick something up. How were you planning ahead and mapping out the story for what you were anticipating?
SB: We were planning ahead a lot of the time, but even when obstacles came up, it felt like it was meant to be. For example, when we found that semi [truck] in the road, that wasn’t planned. [During the tour, the group comes across a semi that’s slid off the highway and is blocking the road.] We were trying to head to Oxford House when that happened. I was freaking out. But it was really cool to have everybody working to solve all these problems. We had people in the city, we had people helping us out locally.
SP: We knew what the structure was going to be going into it: it was a road trip, so we knew what the beginning was going to look like. We knew where we were going to place all these character packages and backstory elements. We’d shot all those ahead of time. We’d shot all master interviews ahead of time. We’d committed to the four main characters ahead of time. At that point, it was just a matter of figuring out how to roll with the punches and track story as it unfolds, which is why I love doing doc: we’re following these real life stories as they unfold. We were just six people on the crew. We filmed two terabytes a day, we filmed a lot and we did a lot of data wrangling at night. Maybe that was the TV reflex in me: shoot a lot and then have a lot to choose from in post.
POV: How did the partnership between the two of you come about?
SB: The producers reached out to me. They were realizing very quickly how there was a whole other story besides the wrestling going on up north, especially when Steph did his initial tech scout up. I remember getting an email about it and I wasn’t a hundred percent behind it because I wanted to focus on writing. I had just gotten into TV writing at that time, so I said “no” initially, but then Steph reached out to me personally. I was charmed by his enthusiasm for the story. When you are a woman working in such a male dominated field, you tend to have your armor up at all time, not wanting to be taken advantage of.
It takes a lot of guff to know that you are not the right person to tell a specific part of the story and need assistance with that. I was really overwhelmed by that, and so I’m like, “I think he’s a good guy. I think I will take it on.” I came on right before 2021, and I was excited to see where the story was going and focusing on the Indigenous communities. Wrestling too is such a male dominated field, so I was worried that it was going to be a very “us versus them” mentality in regards to gender. It was never like that.
POV: How did you choose to hone in on Sage, Des, Sara, and Sean as the four key characters? Were you surprised how much they opened up?
SB: I was surprised by Sean. There was a time when we started filming with him in Edmonton. I was interviewing him and I didn’t really know that much about Sean until we started talking. I got him going on his training and what had led him to becoming a wrestler. We ended up becoming very good friends because I knew who he was talking about, like Leo Burke was one of his trainers and I was impressed and freaking out about it. Once he found out I had a true respect for his history and the business in general, I think he softened a lot because we were never treating wrestling like this thing that we put under a microscope.
I remember telling Steph that if I came on the movie, we had to treat wrestling like the art form it was. No matter what, always treat it with the utmost respect because it’s so important to the people we’re filming. There was a lot of initial hesitancy to break down that wall and get into that vulnerable space because the way your character is presented [in wrestling] is how you present yourself at all times. Once we got to know them, they all had tragic backgrounds or had something happen in their past that was a catalyst for why they became wrestlers.
It was something that I was always hoping to ask Tony about because I always was curious about his past. You could infer a few things about his past because he grew up during World War II in Italy, so you could figure things out, but he would never really open up. I think it was so cool to talk to him about his stories too, but I really wanted to know his “why.” I think if we did a Death Tour 2, we’d probably be able to crack him.
POV: He seems like such a character. Every time Tony’s on screen, I’m like: “What’s your story?”
SP: Tony was challenging and finding the right line to show the real him, which is this gruff guy who sometimes misses the cue here or there, but is also a sweetheart grandpa who has helped so many people and communities, was a challenge. We didn’t want to sugarcoat him, but we didn’t want to also portray him too negatively, so it was definitely a dance. We actually shot a whole interview with Tony, but didn’t end up using much of it. He’s a tough interview. His actions ended up speaking far more than his interview did.
POV: There’s a great dynamic to the wrestling scenes themselves. You get up close and we get to see the intensity and the element of performance in wrestling. What was your approach to shooting the matches?
SB: I think that came from how we had a lot of access to the wrestlers we were filming and with Van, specifically. Having all those cameras and all those lights made the audience a lot more crazy. All of a sudden, it was more of a WWE event because there’s cameras, there’s lights, there’s people getting up on the stage, there’s cameras in the faces of the audience. It seemed a lot more of a performance, a lot more of a spectacle. Initially, I thought it was going to be us running and gunning with no extra accoutrements, but having Van take the time to light the ring properly and make sure they knew where they were going to be made it look so much cooler.
SP: We wanted it to look like a ballet. Wrestling, for me, felt less appealing and kind of goofy, but when you got up close, you saw it was beautiful. It’s choreographed, but also improvised. It’s very technical and they’ve got great facial expressions and amazing costumes. Sonya is a huge wrestling fan, and I was totally an outsider, but I think together we both wanted to put it over and, like Sonya said, like the art that it is.
POV: The wresting scenes also show the impact the tour has, especially with the kids in the audience. With The Death Tour, there’s a lot of heavy subject matter that comes in as you’re going through communities that are, in some cases, shut down for mourning. How do you prepare for that aspect of the tour knowing that there is a suicide epidemic?
SB: I grew up in the Indigenous community, so it had always been something that happens almost every winter. There is a state of emergency declared by reserves up there because people are dying. It was very difficult initially when we were told by Tony that there wasn’t going to be a show. Each time you were told, you knew it was because somebody had passed away. That was initially very difficult for me, especially in the places where we got to know a few more people and find out more information about what had happened. Even though Gods River and Oxford House are so far away from each other, a lot of the people were still very close to each other. Oxford House was a close community with Gods River because the ice roads connect them, so families moved back and forth.
It was hard because of a lot of the people who passed away in those situations tended to be younger. There was still a lot of pain regarding access to ceremonies and Indigenous knowledge. It was weird for me to see because when I was four years old, I was told that sweat lodges were devil worship, and my community has now embraced sweat lodges and sun dances, so I thought that every community had embraced them now. To realize the privilege I had because I had more access and seeing how there were very few resources to combat the pain that these kids and adults were in was hard. I was hoping that things could change once there was more light shone on this topic.
POV: What role does The Death Tour play in raising awareness of the larger dynamics that contribute to what these communities are facing?
SB: The experience that these people had up there is not unique to Manitoba. It’s northern communities everywhere. It was eye-opening to a lot of them. For people like me and Wavell [Starr, another wrestler on the tour] and Sage and Des, it wasn’t something we were unaware of. We would talk about our own experiences regarding the impacts in our communities.
Now we have Sage and Sean setting up The Life Tour, which is going to be an add-on to The Death Tour next year where they go back to the communities, show films, and discuss issues that may be facing the community such as mental health and such. The talks that Tony organized in schools were something that all the kids seemed to enjoy. It was really cool to see, especially how they responded to Sage. Sage was from a similar background, so hearing her speak had a lot more weight than maybe somebody like Sean who was cool, but he’s not Indigenous. Having somebody who is Indigenous speak about her own experiences and the hardships they face was a little bit more impactful for the kids.
POV: You mentioned doing the Cannes Market earlier and that was when I first heard of this film when it was one of four Canadian films in the Docs in Progress corner, so I was wondering how The Death Tour has been received in Canada versus abroad? You also did Slamdance.
SP: We’ve only shown it to an American audience so far. This Friday will be the first Canadian audience in Toronto at Imagine Carlton. We went for Slamdance and there were no more Canadian festivals—we made it very close to some of the big ones, but we premiered in Slamdance, so that was the reason we got for not getting into anything here, which was a shame. We are very looking forward to bringing this to a Canadian audience this week, finally. I can only speak to the American audience, but the American audience has been great.
SB: I remember how big of a response we got in Cannes for some of the clips. It’s been such an impactful movie, specifically for me, because I was so ashamed of being a wrestling fan when I was young, because it was made fun of. I was ashamed of being Indigenous because of the racism I faced, so to have us go to Cannes with that scene of Sage smudging and singing her song was something that I never thought possible. I’m really glad that people are embracing the parts of this film that seem to have the most of Steph and I in them. It’s cool to finally get to hear from people who are fans of wrestling and know about Indigenous communities.
POV: Do you mind me asking: with this being the Canadian premiere and Slamdance being used as an excuse not to program it, this seems like a film that, for most festivals in Canada, would a no-brainer to select. How do you feel about that?
SB: As an Indigenous woman, I’ve always felt that there has been an unfairness in regards to programming. If you have one person who’s Indigenous [in the line-up], then they feel that they don’t have to include more. I’ve always been a proponent of making sure that there is a section devoted to Canadian film, to Indigenous film, etc. I feel that the film is going where it needs to, and I really enjoy that, but I think a lot of festivals in Canada tend to want to be Hollywood light. I wish we could develop the art of our own country rather than being like, “Let’s get Pedro Pescal to come to Canada!” [Laughs.] But I learned a long time ago that success to me doesn’t automatically mean film festival screenings. It means more to have people see the film and see where it goes and the life it takes on. Work I’ve done six or seven years ago is still being shown in universities and art galleries. I hope that Death Tour has that sort of life.
SP: This film took its sweet time getting made. I got a feeling it’s going to be the same way the every step of the way. It’s just going to slowly find its audience. It would’ve been fun to get into some of the bigger festivals, especially coming out of Cannes. But we’re looking forward to where it goes in Canada and abroad: we’re still getting festival acceptance letters. This film is going to find its audience organically.
