Unusual documentary explores tough life and rich mind of homeless man

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Hoping to make a film about homelessness, Melanie Shatzky and Brian Cassidy had been volunteering at a Montreal shelter for months when they ran into Lloyd.

Identified only by his first name to protect his identity, Lloyd became the subject of A Man Imagined, the new documentary from the couple, who specialize in artistic approaches to difficult subjects. (The Patron Saints, their prescient 2011 film, was shot inside a nursing home.) Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, it will make its North American premiere at the Doxa festival in Vancouver Wednesday after a world premiere in Rotterdam.

“We thought we would make a panoramic about people experiencing homelessness. We met a lot of really interesting people,” Shatzky said. “But at the year mark, we met Lloyd.”

“He had a real aura and a presence about him that was totally captivating to us,” Cassidy said. “Lloyd approached us and showed great interest in the process. It became clear to us that as much as we wanted to make something with this man, he also had this desire to be seen, to participate.”

“And to create,” Shatzky adds.

A Man Imagined is more a portrait of one person’s life and way of being rather than a narrative documentary. In an unusual collaboration that lasted two and half years, the filmmakers shot both interviews and agreed-upon scenes, following Lloyd’s life on the streets and his occasional retreat to the shelter where they met him. The film shows him sleeping rough in a doorway on a winter night and attempting to survive by selling discarded objects – a coffee maker, a plastic pony – to passersby. In one scene he trudges between parked cars and trucks offering an incongruous pair of pink curtains to the drivers.

But the film also evokes Lloyd’s sensitivities.

“He’s a very kind and gentle person who is very curious about the details of the world around him,” Shatzky said. “He notices everything. He is very creative – he picks up all kinds of things from the ground and will string together outfits based on what he has collected.”

To capture their subject’s potent observation of his surroundings and connection to the natural world, Shatzky and Cassidy included scenes in nature, in particular with animals, where intense lighting and sound create an effect that is almost surreal.

“Melanie and I are visual artists and our interest in cinema-making goes beyond journalistic storytelling. We look for people in our films, protagonists that have something that is very striking in their aspect,” Cassidy adds. “I think what we’re looking for in a way is a certain bare essence, a person’s – without sounding too lofty – a person’s soul.”

Lloyd speaks often about his childhood on a farm, and tells a story about rescuing kittens from a sack in which they were about to be drowned. Otherwise, his past is rather mysterious.

“We’re not holding any cards that we don’t show,” Cassidy adds, pointing to a scene where he and Shatzky ask Lloyd questions about his past as all the information they have.

He is identified as schizophrenic although he always appears lucid on camera. Now in late middle age, he recounts an odd story about his youth: He says his parents were murdered when he was young by a friend who wanted to give Lloyd his freedom.

“I believe that he believes it. It is his reality. His reality is different from most people’s reality,” Shatzky said. “There is some unknowable trauma about his childhood, some kind of separation with his parents that he can’t reconcile, a rupture of sorts.”

However, the film does not dwell on Lloyd’s sorrows: He talks at one point about buying a pipe, but Shatzky and Cassidy do not explore his addictions, concentrating instead on his street smarts. The filmmakers paid Lloyd as they would an actor: “Enough that he was valued, but not enough where he would get into trouble,” Shatzky said.

They remain in regular touch – “He’s part of our extended family,” Cassidy said – and are optimistic that he can continue living his own way.

“It seems like his life is filled with chaos and intense risk, which to some degree it is. But he’s also a very careful and calculating person,” Cassidy said. “We certainly didn’t pity him while we were making the movie and he doesn’t pity himself.”

Doxa continues in Vancouver until Sunday.