It took the most popular Canadian doc award at 2017’s VIFF. But Melanie Wood’s portrait of spoken word artist Shane Koyczan, Shut Up and Say Something, left the Georgia Straight, at first, a little unsatisfied. 

With interviews conducted by his collaborator Stuart Gillies, Wood’s film catches the spoken word artist on road trips between gigs. More poignantly, it also follows Koyczan to Yellowknife, where he’s reunited on camera with his estranged father. In an unbearably intense final scene, we see a tearful Len Koyczan reading a poem that attempts to describe his son’s feelings about their relationship.

Shut Up and Say Something (airing May 29 and 30 on the Knowledge Network) is never less than watchable, and it pulses with Koyczan’s natural appeal. But it elides certain details about its subject that scream for more attention—his father’s residential school background, for one—while simultaneously raising some uncomfortable ethical questions when the film does attempt to dig a little deeper into the family’s private affairs. As viewers, we then find ourselves implicated by our own curiosity.

Reaching out to the Straight shortly after its theatrical release in late March, Wood revealed that Shut Up and Say Something was—we were not surprised to learn—one of the thornier projects the veteran filmmaker had ever taken on.

“Maybe the way I’ve been marketing it is a bit backwards, because really I see it as a film about the importance of family, and of finding family,” she later explains over coffee on Vancouver’s West Side. Wood was separated from her own mother at the age of four, and it was Koyczan’s backstory that called out to her when Gillies approached with the three years of interview footage he’d amassed.

“It was just a kind of boys-on-the-road thing. They had no focus, no plan,” she says. Wood told them: "I want to make a film about Shane’s personal journey, not his career.” She subsequently persuaded her sometimes reluctant subject to appear onscreen with the grandmother who raised him, and to eventually meet with his father. While the end result finds a natural audience with Koyczan’s fans, Wood has observed that Shut Up has a considerably wider impact thanks to its personal story.

“That’s what I end up seeing in the theatre whenever I’m at a screening,” she says. “People are crying. Grown men are crying. Others come up to me and say things like: ‘I have a son, I haven’t seen him in 10 years, I need to book a flight.’ That brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. And that has nothing to do with Shane; it has to do with the power of the film, with Shane in it, which brings power because of the way that he speaks.”

Nonetheless, there are perceptible tensions within the film that leave the impression of an unfinished project. Once spoken, the words residential school certainly create an expectation, especially given that Koyzcan’s work has so often examined a childhood blighted by family trauma. Wood notes that “he feels victimized by his past,” but that she found herself in a situation delicate on more than one front.

“I thought it was important because Shane raised it with his dad, and his dad said what he wanted to say about it—but that was all they wanted to say,” she offers. “I didn’t want to pursue it. His dad didn’t want to harp on it. He’s very pragmatic. He said. ‘That happened to me, it’s behind me, it’s one of those reasons that I was less of a parent than I wanted to be, but I take full responsibility, let’s move on.’”

She continues: “I did get some comments from people after the Vancouver screenings. I got some letters from a couple of people saying, ‘You should have done more with that’, but that’s not this film. It’s not about residential schools. It’s about a father-son journey. That is one of the things they deal with, but that’s not my film.”

Wood adds that she was “heartened” when Ojibwe cultural critic Jesse Wente assured her that she hadn’t “crossed that line in terms of trying to tell a story that wasn’t mine to tell.” With a pained chuckle, she reveals that he was a little concerned, however, with the film’s climactic scene. The Straight similarly raised a mild objection in our review on behalf of the viewer. Some, inevitably, will be unsettled by the film’s depiction of such an intensely private moment.

“Did I have B plan for the end of my film? I don’t know that I did,” she says with a laugh, explaining that Koyczan wrote the poem to his father as filming proceeded. But it was always agreed that the decision to use it would be Len’s. “And there was no hesitation with his dad,” confirms Wood. “He said, ’Absolutely, if this helps even one person, I’m okay with it.’”

Koyczan’s 12-year-old nephew Harlan was no less courageous in sharing his experience with the film’s audience. There’s a revelation caught right on camera during a visit by Koyczan to his half-sister in Whitehorse, and it rocks Harlan particularly hard. Shane wanted it out the movie, but Wood stood her ground. 

“I had to do some soul searching around that because I do not want to harm anybody,” she concedes.

“On the other hand, I was there, and Harlan is not Shane. He’s a very well-rounded child. Wise beyond his years. In that moment, yes, he’s shocked. But when we brought Harlan to the stage in Whitehorse with Shane and his mom, Harlan is the one who shone. He answered questions, he stood up for himself, he said, ‘I’m helping people by doing this, I don’t mind at all that that scene is in there, and I hope people understand how important family is.’ And this is coming from a 12-year-old kid. I thought, ‘Okay, there you go. He’s okay. It’s the rest of us who aren’t okay.’”

Indeed, if there’s one person who isn’t entirely okay with Shut Up and Say Something, it’s Shane Koyczan. 

“This is the first film I’ve made where the subject isn’t very happy,” Wood says. “We talk about it. We’ve argued opposite sides of the same point on stage, in front of an audience, which I think is really interesting.”

The filmmaker notes that Koyczan tends to distance himself from projects—like the Olympics, or the opera Stickboy—“where he hasn’t had total artistic control.”

“And that’s just who he is,” she concludes.

A recent screening in Koyczan’s hometown of Penticton drew a standing ovation, and Wood believes that “he’s starting to be more comfortable. But he won’t advertise for it, he won’t send out messages to his fans that it’s going to be on. That’s okay. It’s a film about him. If someone made a film about me would I tell all my friends that they have to go see it? I’m not so sure.”