Are We Done Now? is a bittersweet exploration of the way lockdown changed us all
Vancouver director Ben Immanuel drew from his acting students’ real experiences to craft a funny and poignant collaborative film that was years in the making
Gabrielle Miller.
Ben Immanuel.
Are We Done Now? is at the VIFF Centre on April 12, 13, 18, and 20 as part of Canadian Film Week. A Q&A with the filmmakers happens April 12 and 13
IN MARCH 2020, HAVEN Acting Studio instructor Ben Immanuel—like so many others—was forced to shift his classes online as the world locked down. Over the next few months, his Zoom lessons became a kind of safe place for people to share what they were going through during COVID times. As he helped facilitate the difficult discussions that were taking place around the world at the time, it left an indelible mark on the well-known Vancouver actor and filmmaker. That immediately planted the idea for a movie.
“Spending that time with these people, at such a vulnerable, uncertain time: it wasn't even really talking about, you know, COVID,” says Immanuel, speaking to Stir from New York City, where he’s on an annual theatre binge. “It was just everything else that was going on in the world, in their lives and in my life—it was just really bubbling up.”
Conversations with three students stood out in particular. Favour Onwuka was grappling quietly with the killing of George Floyd and being the only Black student in her class. Elliott Ramsey was openly expressing his own feelings around gender fluidity as a nonbinary person of colour. And Natalie Farrow was an acting student who dreamed of building a career on TikTok but was wrestling with fears over being cancelled if she commented on current events.
“And as an older guy now, I was trying to figure out where I fit into these conversations,” Immanuel recalls. “As an old white guy, what can I ask and how does it work?”
Immanuel approached the three students about building a collaborative script and web series out of their transformative pandemic experiences. An initial round of filming at the height of lockdown later expanded into another shoot in 2023 that framed all the stories as a pseudo-documentary, with Immanuel as the filmmaker interviewing a therapist and her struggling clients. Now all that work has grown into the feature film Are We Done Now?, finally making its local debut at the VIFF Centre’s Canadian Film Week celebrations after taking home an audience award at the Yukon’s Available Light Film Festival earlier this year.
Achingly human and authentically funny, the movie is a moving and bittersweet flashback to an era that changed us all. We meet Mercy (Onwuka), the Black acting student who witnesses her white peers working through their grief over George Floyd in one online class; finally, in one of the film’s most moving scenes, she opens up freely with her parents and brother over Zoom about all her feelings around the issue.
We get to know Jayme (Ramsey, also well-known on the arts scene as a curator at the Polygon Gallery), who has some priceless and hilarious scenes trying to educate bro-dude pandemic roommate Derrick (Giacomo Baessato) on gender fluidity. And Lennon (Natalie Farrow) is the white student navigating social media and a judgmental mother.
Linking the various storylines is the character of Pamela (Corner Gas alumna Gabrielle Miller), who brings beautiful, comedic nuance to a therapist who is wrestling with pandemic isolation of her own. Immanuel’s Dow, sitting the required six feet away from his interview subjects, also provides a throughline—connecting so much with his interviewees that he gives each a thoughtful surprise gift (one that was never divulged before they shot those scenes, he reveals).
Throughout, the folk songs of Adrian Glynn provide a plaintive soundtrack.
“We were still in COVID, so I just took a lot of walks around the Seawall, just listening to Adrian,” Immanuel recalls of the singer-songwriter behind stage hits like You're Just a Place That I Know. “And I do like single-voice soundtracks—Simon & Garfunkel in The Graduate, or Cat Stevens in Harold and Maude. I do love when, you know, a single voice is sort of another character in the film. So just listening to his songs, I began to think of transitions between characters and scenes. That was really, really helpful for me.”
Largely self-financed and the subject of endless pitches over the years, the indie project was clearly a labour of love for Immanuel, whose previous feature films are Down River and Moving Malcolm.
When studio pitches and TV offers fell through, Immanuel fell back on his old mantra: “Just fuck it and just make it, find the money and do my film.
“You know, it’s not the most savvy financial way of making films,” Immanuel says, “but it just means if you really want to do it, you have a story you really want to tell, if you stick with it long enough, the right people will come and help you carry it across the finish line.”
The fact that his former students had opened up so much of their personal stories for the film, over years of collaboration, added extra motivation.
“I just felt absolutely obligated,” he admits. “‘We’ve got to make this happen.’ And with that, yeah, there was definitely a lot of pressure and a lot of responsibility.”
At one point in Are We Done Now?, Immanuel’s film-director character Dow has a mini-breakdown to his therapist, distraught over how he’s going to fund his documentary to completion. Let’s just say Immanuel didn’t have to reach that far for that scene.
“That sort-of breakdown was improvised, but I definitely was holding it back all day,” he allows.
For viewers, the care and sensitivity that Immanuel has toward his actor-collaborators comes through. He struck a unique contract with his former students, promising never to ask them to do or say anything in front of the camera that they didn’t believe in, and giving them final say on the script.
“I think we all understand the delicate nature of who tells what stories,” he says.
What is perhaps most striking about Are We Done Now? and its performances is how authentic the acting feels—no surprise, when you consider how rooted they are in real experiences as they were being lived. But there’s an empathy that underlies that, in large part deriving from Immanuel’s own experiences in movies by the likes of B.C. bright lights Bruce Sweeney and Carl Bessai. (In some of those movies, he was billed as Ben Ratner: in 2021, he took his middle name as his surname to avoid being mistaken for Hollywood director-producer Brett Ratner.)
“What I can do is love the characters,” Immanuel reflects. “An actor knows when you have that much love and care for their character. I know it’s very authentically motivating. Ultimately, it’s the best thing I can offer.”
What has been so fascinating for the filmmaker has been the way the characters changed and evolved before his eyes, through the experiences of the actors, between 2020 and 2023, and right up to today. In the film, for example, Onwuka’s Mercy talks about her dream of working in child psychology—and now, five years later, Onwuka can’t attend the Vancouver premiere because she has a thriving practice in that field.
“In the film, they’re young characters going through COVID at crucial parts in their life, so the personal arcs in their lives are remarkable to me,” Immanuel marvels. “You know, that’s just so rewarding for me that I’m able to document the truth of their lives and put it into this. That’s the biggest pleasure for me in this collaboration, that we sort of watch them get through maybe the most difficult times of their lives, and they all come out the better for it.” 
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