After a buzzy premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Ontario Place documentary Your Tomorrow is back for a theatrical run.
Your Tomorrow is an intimate look at the community of bird watchers, retirees, guerrilla gardeners, winter swimmers and teenage maintenance workers who were regular fixtures of Ontario Place before it was closed to the public for redevelopment.
Director Ali Weinstein and her crew filmed this eccentric but lovable cast of characters over 100 days to produce a contemplative, almost serene, documentary.
The decision to put a private spa at Ontario Place has spurred protests, lawsuits and most recently, a scathing audit report, but Weinstein said her film isn’t trying to push an agenda. Instead of focusing on the controversy that surrounds the redevelopment, Your Tomorrow celebrates Ontario Place for what it was.
The film will reopen Hot Docs programming on Dec. 6 after the theatre cancelled its summer slate. TorontoToday sat down with Weinstein to talk about her personal connections to Ontario Place and finding community with the park regulars.
Your Tomorrow will be screened at Hot Docs on Dec. 6, 7, 8 and at the Fox Theatre on Dec. 11 and 12.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What personally drew you to document Ontario Place through this redevelopment?
Ali Weinstein (AW): I became obsessed with Ontario Place during the pandemic. It was the summer of 2020. I was depressed. I was losing my mind being inside all the time. And I think all of us were looking for outdoor spaces, and I just wound up at Ontario Place one day without really meaning to go there.
It was the first time I had been there in many years, although I did go as a child when it was open as an amusement park. Exploring the space anew, I just was shocked at how exciting and fun this place was, even without all the amusement park rides. It became the spot that my friends and I would go to to hang out and I also saw that a lot of other people were using the space in so many different ways. I started to notice I would see the same people over and over and over again — they were regulars.
After I had rediscovered Ontario Place for myself, the announcement was made about what it would become. That it was going to be privatized partially, and that this big indoor space was going to be plunked onto the West Island, which at that point was this beautiful outdoor, magical parkland that was free and accessible. So I really wanted to document what was happening in the space, before it changed forever.
Q: Was part of this project then to archive Ontario Place as it was?
AW: I think that was part of it. It probably goes without saying, since I'm a documentary filmmaker, but I am obsessed with documenting. I have a really strong sense of nostalgia, and I can be sentimental and want to hang on to special moments to reflect on. But I think part of my motivation was also to present to viewers — in a soft and not heavy handed way — what is so important about a space like this one. What can it do for people? What can having public space mean in the lives of different people?
I wanted to take an observational approach to do that because I felt that I could transmit that to viewers even better than having someone say to you in an interview, ‘I just really love being here.’
The magic that I felt at Ontario Place was so ineffable and so hard to communicate I didn't know that words would do it justice.
Q: My favourite person that you highlight in the film is the man who plants flowers across Ontario Place. Can you tell me a bit more about him?
AW: I love that you appreciate Nuno. His name is Nuno Carolo. I met Nuno on the beach. I think I just happened upon him on one of my first days of filming. He was really proud of this garden that he had been planting at Ontario Place every summer for the last few years.
Early in my process, I was doing some audio-only interviews with some people I was meeting so I would have a bit of the background on who they were. Nuno described how being at Ontario Place and planting these plants really brought him back to his childhood, growing up in Portugal, where his family were farmers.
The way he spoke about his garden and the experiences he had at Ontario Place, there was just so much passion and it was clearly so meaningful to him. That's really transmitted with all the love and care he put into planting that garden and the way that he loved to share the fruits — the literal fruits of his labor — with the other people on the beach, which you see in the film.
I didn't go into the film really expecting this, but in the edit, it became clear to me that a lot of the people I met there had this theme of feeling like children again when they were in the space. And it's something I could relate to. I felt this desire to explore in a way that I don't in my everyday life.
Q: Apart from the Ontario Place regulars, maintenance staff also play a large role in the documentary. Was it challenging to get permission to film staff?
AW: When I started filming at Ontario Place, it was under a different ministry than it is right now because a lot shifted while I was filming in terms of it transferring into a redevelopment zone. For so many years, Ontario Place was this weird, unusual agency of the government that was operated at arms length.
I knew that if I really wanted to reflect who comes and uses a space, who inhabits a space, the staff are also part of that. When I started to talk to them about what I was doing, I think they respected my approach and that I was trying to show a faithful portrait of what this place was right now. I was pretty clear that I wasn't trying to create some kind of exposé or a highly political film, and they seemed really happy to allow me to film their day to day.
Q: You spent so much time at Ontario Place with these people. What kind of lessons did you come away with?
AW: Even after I stopped filming, I stayed very much in touch with everyone I met at Ontario Place. They all had formed such a really beautiful community. There were so many people that I met there who were different ages, different backgrounds, had different careers, and they just had so much love and mutual respect.
When all of us gathered around the time that the trees were torn down on the West Island just this past fall, everyone was sort of eulogizing the space together. I felt like all I really wanted to say was how grateful I was for the community that I found there because I spent so much time with them. In my own personal life, there were ups and downs over the past couple years, and there were hard moments in my life that some of them knew about because we had become friends along the way. The support and love that I received from them during filming and editing was so meaningful to me. I really cherished all of that experience.
The importance of community really struck me. I think that is the beauty of having a physical, accessible space — a third space — where people aren't tied together by their profession or school or family. They can come together for different reasons. These spaces matter more than we understand. It’s really hard to quantify that and put that into a municipal study but it’s real and it’s important.
