Doug Ford’s plan for Ontario Place has people in an uproar.
Toronto’s waterfront jewel, established in 1971, used to be a beacon of natural beauty, fun for the kids while offering hot music for adults at the spectacular venue known as The Forum. But thanks to both Conservative and Liberal governments, it died of wanton neglect in 2012. Now Premier Doug Ford wants to kill its spirit by steamrollering it, cutting down a swath of trees, and partnering with a mega-spa company in a blatant attempt to monetize the property.
When Ali Weinstein (Mermaids, #Blessed) began to imagine a documentary about the mammoth park, it was in a state of limbo that fascinated her. Her new, gently compelling film Your Tomorrow is not a cinematic cheer for the community activism that’s arisen to oppose Ford’s plans since the Toronto filmmaker began the film before Ford made public his nefarious scheme. Instead, it reflects Weinstein’s rediscovery of Ontario Place, which had become a free park during the COVID pandemic.
“When we were having to be outside, I was exploring the city more,” she recalls about the summer of 2020. “I biked there and sat on the hill overlooking the water and was completely entranced. With my pandemic bubble I watched the sunset and every time I went down there I discovered something new. How is it, I thought, that there is so much magic here when it’s just an empty space with no programming?”
She was aware that there was some kind of impending change coming down the pike and began thinking that her next film could be about the park—not as it was in its prime, not even about what dreadful thing it might become in the future, but as it then stood.
“I didn’t want to make an activist film. I didn’t want to follow the fight to save Ontario Place; we already have access to that information. I was interested in giving voice to the space and to show what it is right now in this precarious moment.”
It was precisely that approach that helped her gain access to the team maintaining the space and their everyday activities: scrubbing the abandoned buildings of graffiti or mending the dilapidated structures or guiding disgruntled Budweiser Stage patrons to available parking. She explained that her plan was to create a kind of love letter, which they accepted.
And she does show the love. Weinstein conveys the passion employees have for the space, while putting her lens on the diverse, sometimes eccentric, always nature-loving communities that have been converging on Ontario Place’s waterfront beaches and open spaces since the park became a free space in 2012.
Among them are bird-watchers; a group of musicians committed to “advancing technology for humanity and the earth,” some of whom play a fascinating contraption called a hydraulophone, an acoustic musical instrument played by contact with water; dog walkers; and an endearing Taiwanese couple who sit together and just talk.
“Grace and Rocky were a gold mine,” says an appreciative Weinstein, something she didn’t understand until she encouraged them to speak in Mandarin. “They talked about everything from truly profound things to whether they’re looking at a swallow or a duck.”
It’s community that intrigues her, as it has in her previous films. Mermaids (2017) follows devotees of the legendary sea creature, who dress up as half humans, half fish at conventions of like-minded fans. In #Blessed (2020), Weinstein tracks the growing C3 church headed by Sam Picken, which, using what could be called questionable tactics, attracts hip millennials looking for something larger than themselves.
“I keep getting drawn to subcultures, people who are trying to find community. As a millennial in a big city in an age of social media I’m interested in the sense of overarching loneliness we contend with,” she says. “This film is different because it’s about a place and not a specific subculture. But I too was looking for an outlet when I started going to Ontario Place. I went there with my core group and it became our community centre.”
Weinstein did try something completely different by making a documentary based not on narrative but on observation, an approach that relies less on story-boarding and more on allowing the camera to take in whatever happens.
“I’ve never before made a purely observational film and I had no idea how hard it would be,” Weinstein recalls. “People don’t do it for a good reason. It’s expensive. You show up and nothing happens and you have to go back again and again. And it’s hard in the editing room because you wind up with so much material. Thank goodness for my editor Caitlin Durlak. I was going to lean more on voiceover, but she said if I was going to go observational I should commit to it.”
Though the film concentrates on Ontario Place’s current limbo state, Weinstein doesn’t stick to the present tense. Your Tomorrow deploys archival footage of Ontario Place when it was a vibrant space where kids reveled in the rides at the children’s park and classical, pop and rock music played at the revolving Forum stage. Unfortunately, obtaining that old film was a real pain.
“The vast majority of the material came from the archives of Ontario, which has a crazy amount of incredible footage. It took many months to get access to what I could see online.
“And it’s next to impossible to tell a true history when there are fewer people to explain what was once there. So, for example, I couldn’t include the marina, which had a vibrant community of boaters, because by the time I was shooting in 2023, the marina was gone.”
So, Ontario Place’s past was not easy to make vivid. And by the time Weinstein was well into her shoot, she knew that she couldn’t completely ignore the future and the fact that changes to Ontario Place were in the making. As the film began shifting under her feet, she created very effective, subtle sequences that make reference to some of Premier Ford’s authoritarian tactics and to what could go terribly wrong.
As birders peer through their binoculars, one comments on how fortunate they are that the birds are nesting because that postponed the felling of the trees. In another tender sequence, a man and his dog keep trying to gain entry to the park via the gate they’ve been using for years but it’s been locked shut. Ford had ploughed ahead with his plan, bypassing committee hearings and debate, public outcry be damned.
Weinstein allows that Ontario Place needs some rehabilitating, just not according to the province’s current plan.
“I don’t think it should stay the way it is on the west island. In an ideal world they’d find a different program that uses the current space to its full effect, one that doesn’t tear down all the trees and that works with what we have, sprucing up the place and making it safe and easy to navigate. I don’t know what that would look like. I do know that there were different proposals that the public never got to see, ones that sounded much more in line with the original spirit of Ontario Place that combined education about Ontario’s heritage with entertainment.”
But, she says, it’s not a straightforward issue. She wants people to watch the film and not be pulled toward a specific reaction. Just so long as viewers leave the cinema not wanting, as one of the anti-Ford activists puts it, “to turn Ontario Place into any place.”
