The underdog for the underrepresented — Meet Scarborough’s own award-winning director Alicia K. Harris

BY SELINA McCALLUM

As much as we may not realize it as a child, representation in the media plays a huge role in how we see ourselves growing up.

Most black women have struggled with their hair for most of their life. When I was in elementary school, I hated having three short braids that never passed my shoulders, while all the other girls had long ponytails or pushed their hair back with a cute headband. It always made me feel like an outcast and seeing no one on the television screen that looked like me made it worse.

Alicia K. Harris is a young, talented and award-winning director, writer, producer and production designer. She has made it her personal mission to feature the unique stories of the underrepresented, focusing more on women.

She was born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario and says that her imagination was nurtured as a child by playing outside.

“I’m a big supporter of where I’m from, I think it really contributed a lot to me becoming an artist because I grew up around green space and the freedom to ride my bike in the neighbourhood,” said Harris. “It gave me a more adventurous space to be imaginative outside a lot.”

 In high school, she started to write and direct plays.

“There was a combination of the writing, and directing actors, and seeing lighting and all those things come together. The main thing I liked about it was that it encompassed all of the arts. It was real plays that gave me the full picture of what it feels like to be a director,” said Harris.

She graduated from Ryerson’s School of Image Arts. Her first film, Fatherhood (2014) a short documentary on a young father, was broadcasted nationally twice and screened in several festivals worldwide. It won best short film at Canada International Film Festival and Scarborough Film Festival in 2015.

Harris’s fictional directorial debut, Love Stinks (2016), won best director, best film and the people’s choice awards at the school’s end of year festival.

“Now I’m very excited and confident in my direction of being a director. I feel like when I look back at all the little things that I did, like writing songs and directing plays, it makes so much sense now because I am doing pieces of doing all those things I did when I was younger,” said Harris. “I want to make work that has a positive impact on children and youth.”

 Her most recent film, PICK, is about a young black girl who goes to school on picture day with an afro and faces the consequences.

The film opens up with the young black girl trying to do her hair while staring in the mirror. She gently pulls at the frizzy curls, and sprays water on it to keep it down. Not taking in how long she is taking, she ends up being late for school.

Harris wrote, directed and produced the film, which was officially selected to screen at 11 film festivals around the world. It also won Best Short Film at Miami Film Festival and Best Film, People’s Choice Awards, by ByBlacks.

“I have a very distinct mission and it’s going to be filling the gap on what I feel is missing. I think it’s important to recognize that we can never have enough representation. We can never have enough representation of one group, especially a group that has been previously been ignored,” said Harris.

Harris is also the co-founder of Sugar Glass Films, a boutique production company that is dedicated to making films on stories of the underrepresented. Harris says that through her production company, she is trying to authentically share her own truth.

“Whenever there is a film that maybe doesn’t authentically capture a black persona’s experience, because there’s so little of this representation, people are holding on to that film as an example of this is how this group is,” said Harris. “It can be really damaging, because then that group can be negatively affected, because there is yet again, another misrepresentation of them.”

Harris and her film have been featured in the Toronto Star, CTV News, CP24, Breakfast Television, Essence and AfroPunk.

PICK is the first film in Harris’ HAIR IS trilogy of short films exploring the personal and political intersections of black hair, identity, and freedom. Harris has also been exploring what black hair means to her, as she cut off all of her straight hair and went back to her natural afro.

“I don’t know if I would have done that if I hadn’t spent literally years making this film. It was actually the shoot dates were coming up and that’s what motivated me. I casted this beautiful, young actress with her afro and I didn’t want to be on this film set and not be rocking my natural hair,” said the director. “It didn’t happen overnight; it was years of growing and changing with the film.”

The next film in the trilogy is called On A Sunday At Eleven, which is about a young ballerina who performs her Sunday rituals, while facing the pressures to perform whiteness. Due to the pandemic, unfortunately the making of the film has been put on hold, but Harris looks forward to filming when the lockdown is over.

She draws a little from her own experience for the short film.

“I was the only black girl in my ballet class and there was a really awkward class, a do your own hair class, and I just remember sitting there by myself the whole hour of the class because most black girls did not do their own hair as a child,” said Harris.

The award-winning director suggests for emerging filmmakers to do their research.

“A lot of the things that I have learned I started to think about in film school, but I really just learned on my own. By my own I mean I read a bunch of articles, went to panels and heard other creators speak on what they were doing, I researched every grant that I could be eligible for,” said Harris.

Harris is an extremely friendly, compassionate, ambitious and talented filmmaker who has an incredibly bright future.

“I really do want to reach a point in the world where, we can just be thinking more about how we feel when we’re around certain people and not connect those feelings to stereotypes,” said Harris.

Her passion to tell our stories that have been ignored, suppressed or done wrong for too long is inspiring and will shake the stereotypes around the world, one film at a time.