Each morning Beverly-Jean (Olunike Adeliyi) rises at the crack of dawn and commutes from Lawrence Heights to the bustling heart of Toronto. She leaves behind her squalid grey apartment complex to work for a family in an affluent neighbourhood.
Steady and reliable, she spends her days scrubbing toilets and spoon-feeding the elderly man in her care. After work, she heads straight home to look after her teenage children, Tamika (Zahra Bentham) and Tristin (Micah Mensah-Jatoe). Life hasn’t been easy for this family of three since they lost their home. They now share an all-too-small apartment with Beverly-Jean’s free-spirited mother, affectionately referred to as Grandma (Maxine Simpson).
Beverly-Jean moves through life with the single-minded focus of escaping Lawrence Heights; a place where too many mothers have had to scrub their children’s blood off the pavement. But her ferocious need to protect Tamika and Tristin stifles them and causes tension at home.
Beverly-Jean is a hardworking provider who loves with all her heart. But she doesn’t always know how to show kindness — to her kids or herself. She slowly realizes that her own unprocessed trauma is at the heart of the issue. Unless she confronts the pain she’s suppressing, her relationship with her family will deteriorate further. What unfolds next is a soul-stirring story of healing and self-discovery as Beverly-Jean learns to broaden her horizons.
Right off the bat, let’s just give Adeliyi all her flowers because she turns in a show-stopping performance. Her character Beverly-Jean is the beating heart of the film and she’s riveting every second she’s on screen. She’s a complicated character with so many facets to her personality. And Adeliyi serves up emotional gut punch after gut punch as we watch this anguished woman fighting to care for everyone but herself.
Few filmmakers have brought the Black Canadian experience to life as vividly and authentically as Chapman. Her characters confront the grim reality of poverty and violence, but the film never descends into trauma porn. What sets this film apart from too many other stories about Black lives is the way it makes space for moments of beauty amidst the characters’ daily struggles. Whether sharing home-cooked meals or getting a “braid-up,” there’s a feeling of warmth and connection between characters that gives them strength while facing the daily grind.
Village Keeper is a story about the ways three generations of women navigate claiming space for themselves in the world. Throughout the film, writer-director Karen Chapman returns to the theme of sowing and reaping. She expresses this concept, quite literally, focusing on the moments when seeds are planted and harvested from gardens and potted plants.
But this concept also manifests within the story through the relationship between mothers and daughters, and how each generation of women seeds their children with life lessons that they may harvest into wisdom. Through this heartfelt lens, everyday moments like harvesting vegetables from a community garden and cooking curry chicken with Grandma carry the weight of sacred rituals, where community elders nourish the younger generation’s bodies and minds.
Village Keeper’s dialogue and narrative structure aren’t its strongest elements, and it’s not always graceful switching between tones. At times this story is as subtle as a sledgehammer. I suspect part of this issue is its lean 83-minute runtime — there’s likely a meatier version of this story sitting in an editing booth somewhere. But these are minor quibbles for a film that works so effectively on a thematic and emotional level.
Chapman is a master of mood and atmosphere. She possesses a stunning ability to sculpt soul-rocking sequences erupting with her characters’ pent-up emotions. She applies cinematic language to open windows to her characters’ hearts and souls in unspoken, but deeply resonant ways.
It helps that cinematographer Jordan Oram sumptuously photographs the cast and community with attentive adoration. And Dalton Tennant’s score is as warm and gentle as a summer breeze. These elements work in tandem to breathe life into a series of elegant moments that dance across the screen like visual poetry.
Village Keeper explores the many traps that keep people stuck in difficult situations; from life-defining cycles of intergenerational trauma to the predatory nuisance of payday money-lenders. The film aptly conveys how living with stress and anxiety distorts one’s perspective, making small bumps in the road look like insurmountable mountains. And for all of Beverly-Jean’s resilience, she’s normalized her discomfort to the point where she’s forgotten that she’s worthy of life’s many pleasures.
The film examines the long and arduous road towards self-actualization, recognizing the path towards self-improvement isn’t a straight light. Beverly-Jean, like the rest of us, struggles to change for the better, experiencing setbacks and backsliding along the way. There’s no easy solution to her problems, but there’s grace in the struggle as she commits to becoming a better version of herself, moment by moment, day by day.
Village Keeper is a deeply compassionate film that explores a woman’s journey to break free from the shackles of her trauma. Chapman proves herself a vital new voice in Canadian cinema delving into the harsh realities of the Black experience while also making space for moments of joy and beauty. And with Adeliyi’s powerhouse performance anchoring the film, Village Keeper stands poised to turn plenty of heads.
