Sisters: Dream & Variations follows the artistic journey of fiercely creative siblings to Iceland and beyond at 2021 R2R Film Fest
Catherine Legault’s artful documentary about Jasa Baka and Tyr Jami has its West Coast premiere at the R2R Film Festival
Tyr Jami (left), Debora Alanna, and Jasa Baka perform at Dynjandi waterfall in Iceland.
Sisters: Dream & Variations plays at the Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth, taking place online from April 14 to 23
WITH BOTH PARENTS being prolific visual artists, sisters Tyr Jami and Jasa Baka spent their early years in Vancouver surrounded by creativity. Jami started playing cello at age seven and now, with her Montreal-based band, Syngja, makes ethereal psychedelic electro-acoustic pop inspired by—and incorporating—her late great-grandmother’s cassette recordings of Icelandic folk songs. Baka has been creating fantastical costumes for as long as she can remember; an visual artist, set designer, and installation artist with a playful style of magic realism, she is currently working on her Master’s degree in Fine Art.
When the siblings had the opportunity to travel to Iceland for the first time with their mother to work on a project that combined their multidisciplinary art practices and family history, Catherine Legault found an irresistible focus for her directorial debut.
Sisters: Dream & Variations is a documentary and art film that folds in performance, music, animation, drawings, and vintage photos; it’s a profile of fiercely inventive women for whom art is a way of being. The film has its West Coast premiere at the 2021 Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth, which takes place virtually April 14 to 23 with 18 feature films and 45 shorts from over 35 countries and Indigenous nations.
Legault travelled with the family to Ísafjörður, in the West Fjords, where the sisters did a month-long art residency with ArtsIceland for a project called New Spring /Nýtt Vór in 2017. (Jami subsequently released the album Echoing Rose.) The most dramatic footage captures the women staging a folk tale with their mom, Debora Alanna, in brightly coloured costumes at the craggily magnificent Dynjandi waterfall in the North Fjords against bright Icelandic light.
The seeds for the film, however, were planted many years prior.
Legault first met Jami when she was looking for a cello teacher; she ended up taking lessons from her for about a decade.
“Tyr and Jasa were collaborating artistically on different projects; I was deeply moved by their passionate spirit and artistic style,” Legault tells Stir. “I found their soundscape and visual art very cinematic. That’s what attracted me in the first place.
“At the time, I had been a film editor for more than ten years, and I was ready to move into directing my own film,” she says. “I felt not enough attention was given to up-and-coming artists that were making Montreal’s artistic scene so vibrant, in which Tyr and Jasa were thriving. They were the perfect subjects to express the ideas I was passionate about.”
Catherine Legault.
The film was seven years in the making, with Legault initially filming it as a “one-woman orchestra”, doing most of the camera, sound, and editing herself with the support of her producer, Isabelle Phaneuf-Cyr.
Once the film was edited, Legault invited the sisters to take part in the creative process, shifting the filmmaker-subject dynamic into a collaboration where the subjects could participate in telling their own story.
The team added in animated sequences using audio recordings of the sisters’ great-grandmother, Ingibjorg Johnson, who loved to sing and would sing every chance she got, no matter where she was, whether surrounded by seniors in a care home or, as Jami and Baka recall in an interview with Stir, on a bus in Canada being hugged by hippies.
“I remember meeting her and being so amazed by her,” Jami says. “I was only two or three, but I remember singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ and wishing on a star that she would never die—but it kind of came true, because her tapes live on, and I’m still communicating with her to this day, always finding ways to manipulate the tapes and still making new songs out of them—it’s endless.
“She’s such a fun character,” Jami says. “She’s very much her own kind of visionary.”
The film includes footage of a family reunion, while a through line of the documentary is the sisters’ evolution as artists, as they find their own voice.
“I’m hoping it’s inspiring to young people,” says Jami, formerly of the Vancouver band the Winks. “When I started writing songs, I’d think of it at first as if I was writing a diary: ‘no one is going to see this; it’s just for me’—a space of complete solitude, as if no one is ever going to hear this song or read these lyrics. That seems to be a place I can work from. And growing up with sisters who would read your diaries, you end up writing in code—it forces you to be poetic, you kind of have to write things so that, if someone else were to read it, they might not understand. That’s how I write lyrics, too. As a song, it can be interpreted in different ways.”
Baka, who was the first in the family to move from Vancouver to Montreal, where she studied theatre design at Concordia, ended up relocating to Iceland after her initial visit, having met her partner there. Currently studying at the Iceland University of the Arts (Lístaháskolí Íslands) in Reykjavik, she’s delving into ceramics for the first time; as has been the case her whole life, she is always creating. “Moving across the ocean and having started from scratch and having gotten rid of 90 percent of my possessions and being isolated, not really knowing people—it really forces you to think through everything. I feel like I’m becoming myself again. We’re always going through a rebirth, I think, as artists. Just keep doing things and experimenting.”
Sisters premiered at Montreal’s RIDM in 2019, and a TV version will air on CBC this summer. The team is especially excited about it playing at R2R.
“Vancouver is where Tyr and Jasa grew up and thrived as teenagers so it is really meaningful for us to show the film in their home town,” Legault says. “Another thing that really amazes me is to be able to connect with a young audience at R2R. The film is for all ages, but I’m pleased to know that teenagers are engaged with Tyr and Jasa’s story and are excited to watch a documentary.
“I think it appeals to the young generation in its style and form but it also creates bridges between generations with its themes,” she says. “I believe it’s important to share traditions but also, to keep them alive and current. And I think it’s what Tyr and Jasa are doing in their own way.”
For more information, visit R2R Film Festival.
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