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Much has been said about how the film Scarborough – a critical success with 11 Canadian Screen Award nominations and a runner-up finish for the Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award and the Toronto Film Critics Association’s $100,000 Rogers Award for Best Canadian Film – has a side “ documentary”. I ask her co-director, Shasha Nakhai, what this means to her.

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“It’s really just agility,” she explains. “The agility to adapt to each actor and each location, prioritizing their needs and adapting our style of work accordingly. Because when you’re a documentary filmmaker, you walk into a place and you humble yourself in front of this truth bigger than you. You have to know what the truth is before you can try to fake it in your film.

Nakhai and his film and life partner Rich Williamson have opted for the documentary format, with films that include thirty-eight minutesabout the 2018 false missile warning in Hawaii; The sugar bowl, on the sugar cane industry in the Philippines; and take the lighta look at Nigeria’s electricity crisis through the eyes of an electrician.

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Scarborough, based on Catherine Hernandez’s award-winning novel about a trio of children who develop a friendship while attending a neighborhood literacy center, is their first feature-length drama. And, Nakhai admits, they tried a little too hard at first to “fame it.”

“At first we tried to be, like, super-fiction-y,” she laughs. “We tried to land the kids on that strip and then wait two beats and turn heads.” But we’ve learned that you can’t do that. Just let the kids do what they do and work around them. We learned a lot. We learned that we should go back to what we are used to.

It was a philosophy that helped them work with a variety of actors. Scarborough presents about sixty speaking roles played by a mix of veteran and new performers, but mainly the latter. Nakhai says the casting involved reaching out to acting groups and acting schools and through social media. “Some are just friends that we called and said, ‘Can you please be in this movie. “”

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One of the key characters is the literacy center coordinator, Ms. Hina, played by Aliya Kanani. Nakhai says the actor worked as a comedian and, before the pandemic, as a flight attendant. “So the character of Ms. Hina is not very far from who she really is. She’s just a cheerful, energetic person – the kids loved her because she’s so funny – and she’s also used to quarreling with people. As a flight attendant, you get used to that. She really could order the whole platter when she was there. She really thrived on improvisation and just playing with the kids.

Scarborough is in many ways a love letter to a community and was mostly shot around the Kingston Road and Galloway area where it is set. “It was important for us to film in Scarborough for the sake of authenticity and respect,” she says, “but also for the sake of logistics. We didn’t have money to build things from scratch or to do visual effects or anything like that.

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Nakhai moved to Toronto from his native Nigeria when he was 15 and still has family there and in the Philippines. But she remembers her first encounter with the Eastern Region, which was once a borough and then its own city before becoming part of Toronto.

“I had a friend of the family that I sometimes stayed with on vacation and stuff,” she says. “She was living in Scarborough, and I just remember it being like, ‘Oh my God, we have to go all the way in the winter on the bus! “” (As a native of Scarborough, this writer can confirm that the TTC bus routes 86 and 116 are indeed endless.)

“But I will say that at the time, Scarborough was the only place I could find good Filipino or Nigerian food, because there weren’t really any restaurants downtown that served that kind of food,” she remembers. “It was my introduction to Scarborough.”

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Racial diversity is central to the film, with characters white, indigenous, Filipino, Christian, Muslim and more.

“History still cannot encompass the diversity of Scarborough,” notes Nakhai. “At first I was a bit frustrated that there wasn’t enough representation. But then I thought to myself, why do I have to undo historical underrepresentation by –” She raises her hands. “You can’t include everyone.” That said, the film features a rich tapestry of characters.

Scarborough had a rocky road to break free thanks to the pandemic. Production began in summer 2019, but the last days of filming in spring 2020 were canceled due to the lockdown. They didn’t roll the cameras again for several months. Similarly, a planned release after a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall has been repeatedly pushed back due to theater closures.

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Nakhai says it helped that his co-manager was also his partner. “It was both good and bad in a very extreme way,” she explains. “At some point, our apartment became a kind of warehouse, because we had all these accessories and equipment here. It was very difficult to separate work and life, especially when shooting for a year. But it also meant that in the beginning we had a shortcut… and we could pivot very quickly together.

The filming downtime also gave the couple time to think about what they could do next. “We would like to do more sci-fi and horror,” she says. “And the pandemic break allowed me to have a script ready.”

Scarborough now plays in Toronto, Hamilton, Saskatoon and, yes, Scarborough; and opens March 11 in Vancouver and Sudbury, with more cities to follow.