Three storytellers came together to make Buffy Sainte-Marie documentary

Three women and a lot of Zoom calls.

At the heart of the new documentary “Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On” — premiering Thursday, opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival — is the story of three women working across three time zones to get it done.

For Madison Thomas, an Indigenous filmmaker from Winnipeg, signing on to the project wasn’t a tough decision when Eagle Vision Video Productions called.

“I mean Buffy Sainte-Marie, what young, Indigenous filmmaker hasn’t dreamed about making a film about her as a subject?” Thomas said. “So it was a very easy ‘yes.’”

Andrea Warner, who wrote an authorized biography of the iconic singer/songwriter/activist in 2018, went from being a consultant to being the film’s co-writer and associate producer.

Then of course, there was Sainte-Marie herself.

“Our number one goal … was making sure Buffy was an active member of her own story,” Thomas said. “Buffy’s quite savvy when it comes to film and visual art, not necessarily documentary filmmaking. She’s a storyteller first and foremost so it would have been a huge disadvantage not to pick that brain as much as possible.”

The tricky part was the weekly Zoom calls, co-ordinating the schedules of three people in three time zones: Thomas in Winnipeg, Warner in Vancouver and Sainte-Marie in Hawaii, where she has lived for decades.

“We really bonded weekly over Zoom. We had a couple of moments in real life where we could see each other during the pandemic, but it was really infrequent,” Warner said.

Lining up Sainte-Marie’s peers in the music industry to sing her praises was not so tough at all. Joni Mitchell, Robbie Robertson, Jackson Browne all make appearances in the film.

“Buffy’s name opened up a lot of doors for us. A response we got so consistently was … ‘I don’t do interviews anymore, but for Buffy I will,’” Thomas said. “There really wasn’t a ton of pushback or us having to grovel for interviews.

“In fact, there’s people we interviewed, wonderful people with amazing stories that didn’t even make the film. That’s how many we had,” she added, although a future DVD release is likely to include plenty of extras.

For Warner, part of the challenge was winnowing down a long, eventful life of creating music, anti-war activism, and defending and nurturing the Indigenous community to a feature-documentary length.

“I do think Buffy’s story could be like 10, 12, 14 hours long. There’s just so much material,” Warner said.

Both she and Thomas came away from the experience with renewed respect for the film’s subject.

“For me, it’s really Buffy’s patience that really inspired me. I’m somewhat of impatient person, I always want things to happen now, I want change to happen now, I want things to get better now and that’s just not the way the world works,” Thomas said.

“Any time I get faced with a frustrating situation … I find myself thinking ‘What would Buffy do in this situation, how would Buffy react?’ Usually the answer is with compassion and love and understanding and as a teacher. I take inspiration from Buffy as a teacher first and foremost.”

Warner said she’s inspired by Sainte-Marie’s lifelong quest for truth.

“She knows that the histories that get written down aren’t always the truth and, very frequently, they’re not at all what happened. She always goes deeper and I’m inspired by that. She really believes that knowledge is a gift. Even if that knowledge is hard, that’s still a gift, a huge gift. Sometimes the hardest truths are a gift,” Warner said.

The film is the feature-length documentary debut for Thomas, who has found steady work in short documentaries and series television.

“(Because) of the boxes we’re put in, we’re kind of narrowly defined in a lot of ways,” she said. “Oh, Indigenous filmmakers make this type of story. Well, the way I look at is first and foremost, I’m a storyteller who happens to come form an Indigenous background. But it’s not the only thing about me.”

Becoming an Indigenous filmmaker “wasn’t as big of a challenge for me … because those who came before me really blazed a trail and really broke down a lot of the barriers,” Thomas added, pointing to Lisa Meeches, executive producer and founder of Eagle Vision.

“The reality is that because of the work the generation before me did, I haven’t had to face as many challenges against the larger mainstream system. I (also) think the system has a different type of appetite for Indigenous storytelling nowadays. I feel very fortunate to come up in the time I have,” Thomas said.

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