Director Charles Officer speaks onstage at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival screening of 'Akilla's Escape' at West Island Open Air Cinema at Ontario Place in Toronto on Sept. 12, 2020.Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Creating a television show is never easy. Doubly so when you’re working in the resource-crunched Canadian system. Exponentially so when that Canadian television series has its carefully laid plans derailed at the very last minute. Such was the case in the summer of 2021, when director Charles Officer once again proved himself as not only a visionary storyteller but a fiercely committed and creative leader.
Mr. Officer was in Winnipeg staring ahead at five months of intense shooting for the groundbreaking CBC/BET+ historical drama The Porter, with directing duties on the series’ eight episodes split between himself and R.T. Thorne. The team planned to start production with something easy – a few two-hander scenes, characters sitting around a table having a conversation – before getting to the real challenge of shooting dozens of extras in railway stations and locomotives to tell the story of the Black Canadians whose work as train porters in the 1920s led to breakthroughs in the civil-rights movement.
But then Via Rail dropped the unexpected news that it needed to renovate its stations, meaning that crucial shooting locations would soon be off-limits. Suddenly, the future of CBC’s most ambitious series in recent memory was in jeopardy before a single frame was shot. The entire production team, in Mr. Thorne’s words, “kind of freaked out.” Except Mr. Officer.
“He moved up all the train scenes – the most complicated work, with the most extras and the longest days – right to the beginning, without knowing the cast yet, without knowing how to get this thing working,” Mr. Thorne recalls. “Charles was scared, but he went out and just got it done. He was that kind of director. He could do anything, and he never lost his cool. And look at those episodes – it’s beautiful work, his eye for framing and aesthetics and action on full display. He knocked it out of the park.”
Mr. Officer’s work on The Porter helped the series become an instant critical sensation, going on to earn a record 12 Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Direction.
“Unfortunately Charles was sick and couldn’t make it to the Canadian Screen Awards, so he didn’t get the opportunity to be honoured in the way that he should,” recalls Arnold Pinnock, co-creator of The Porter alongside Bruce Ramsay. “But what he accomplished will go down in Canadian history.”
On Dec. 1, Mr. Officer died, aged 48, of complications due to a rare autoimmune disease. While the filmmaker had been struggling since receiving a double lung transplant earlier this year due to that disease, his death left family, friends, and the entire Canadian entertainment industry in shock.
“We’ve not just lost a filmmaker, but a creative force in this community,” says producer Damon D’Oliveira, who alongside Mr. Officer and a handful of others helped create the Black Screen Office in 2020. “I always called Charles a poet because he wasn’t just a filmmaker – he was an artist who could shift from one form of expression to another so fluidly.”
Mr. Officer was born in Toronto on Oct. 28, 1975, the youngest child of electrician Herbert and nurse Ionie. Alongside his three sisters, Jeanette, Hannah and Christine, Charles grew up in the city’s east-end Don Valley neighbourhood. (Half-brothers Berjaie and Berjoe would later join the family.) He revelled in his cultural roots, which included his mother’s Jamaican and Sephardic Jewish heritage, and excelled at sports, which led to him playing professional hockey in Europe in the early 1990s.
“We know artists can do everything, but artists having an athletic side is a rarity. But he also described it as an art form, too – he could tell a story out there on the ice,” says producer Jake Yanowski, Mr. Officer’s friend and partner in their company Canesugar Filmworks.
After returning to Canada in his 20s, Mr. Officer studied graphic design at the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University) – eventually designing the poster for Atom Egoyan’s version of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company – before shifting into acting, landing a spot at New York’s famed Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and scoring roles in films by fellow Canadians Clement Virgo and Bruce McDonald.
Yet Mr. Officer was quickly drawn into the world of writing and directing, a shift that, according to longtime friend and collaborator Ingrid Veninger, seemed entirely natural.
“His heart was being a leader, a leader of telling these stories,” recalls Ms. Veninger, who first met Mr. Officer in a class led by famed acting coach Jacqueline McClintock. “Maybe there was an element of Charlie wanting to control the narrative, but it’s a dance between that and surrendering yourself to the narrative, and being open to having his perspective shift. He was always interested in true transformation.”
Alongside Ms. Veninger as his producer, Mr. Officer found his breakthrough behind the camera with his feature directorial debut, the 2008 drama Nurse.Fighter.Boy. Inspired by his sister Hannah’s battle with sickle cell anemia, the film tells the story of an ailing single mother, her young son and the melancholy boxer who enters their lives. With tender performances from its leads, including Homicide: Life on the Street star Clark Johnson, and vivid aesthetics (shots were filled with highly saturated yellows, reds and blues), the film was a critical smash, earning 10 Genie Award nominations.
Instead of continuing on the path of feature-narrative filmmaking, though, Mr. Officer oscillated between episodic television work and documentary cinema, including his 2010 National Film Board doc Mighty Jerome, which chronicled the life of Canadian track and field star Harry Jerome.
“I don’t think that he wanted to repeat himself; he was always looking for new ways to grow and learn and be challenged and develop new skills,” Ms. Veninger says. “Moving into non-fiction spaces, he found those new stories that revealed new things about the human condition.”
Crucially, that involved highlighting the voices of people who are not often heard in the Canadian filmmaking landscape.
Mr. Officer, pictured in Toronto, on June 11, 2015, is remembered as someone who would help people and earned the nickname the 'touchable brother' for his commitment to fighting for others in the community.Tim Fraser/The Globe and Mail
“I remember watching his doc Unarmed Verses, which was not explicitly about police brutality or racism upfront but showed a story about a young Black girl just reflecting on community and what home means, and I thought: That’s who I want to work with,” recalls Desmond Cole, author of The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, which Mr. Officer adapted into a 2017 CBC doc.
“When Charles pitched the doc to the CBC, he met with their executives and they were like, ‘This seems a little too hard for our mainstream audiences.’ And I’ve heard that so many times in my career,” Mr. Cole adds. “But instead of giving up, Charles challenged those people. He advocated for himself, and for other Black creatives whose work is so often highlighted for a moment and then forgotten about.”
To Mr. Pinnock, Mr. Officer’s commitment to fighting for others in the community earned him the nickname the “touchable brother.”
“No matter what his status, how high he climbed, he always had time to help people,” says the actor and writer. “I would never have continued on the long, tough journey of The Porter if it wasn’t for the conversations we had, realizing that, yes, this is doable.”
Versatility was key, too. After 2017′s double hit of Unarmed Verses and The Skin We’re In, Mr. Officer was approached to make a doc about the enduring cultural impact of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novel The Little Prince, including the author’s Canadian connection (he wrote substantial parts of the book while visiting a friend in Quebec). The result is Invisible Essence, a beautifully tender, highly evocative film that takes remarkable risks, including casting a blind boy undergoing eye surgery to narrate parts of the film, reading The Little Prince in braille for the first time.
“The Saint-Exupéry estate was so overwhelmed by Charles that they didn’t license us copyright – they waived copyright entirely,” says noted entertainment lawyer Michael Levine, who has worked with Mr. Officer for years. “I’ve been practising for more than four decades, and I’ve never seen something like that. Charles worked magic.”
Mr. Officer would eventually find his way back to fiction-based filmmaking by revisiting his past – specifically, a script he had been holding onto for almost a decade, a crime thriller called Akilla’s Escape.
“After Nurse.Fighter.Boy, he always intended for Akilla to be his next film, but he wanted to do it when the time was right” Mr. Yanowski says. “After we did Invisible Essence, we started having some great conversations, and realized we had to do this now.”
The result is a gripping neo-noir that straddles the Toronto of today and the Jamaica of yesterday, with a gripping leading performance from multihyphenate Saul Williams, who also produced the score alongside Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja. Released in 2020, Akilla’s Escape was an immediate hit on the festival circuit, highlighting a bold cinematic voice who could not be contained by genre or form.
“When you think about his legacy, it’s all about the diversity of his catalogue, and within that the communities he gives voice to,” says Mr. Thorne, Mr. Officer’s directing partner on The Porter. “He knew he was telling stories that no one else would be telling.”
For the past year, Mr. Officer had been developing a range of projects (including an update of the hockey film Youngbloods) – sometimes working from his hospital bed, where he would entertain visitors ranging from family members to creative collaborators.
“He had so many more stories left to tell, and that had the potential to reach further and wider,” Ms. Veninger says.
At the same time, Mr. Officer was just beginning his journey as a father, raising his two-year-old son, Selah, with his partner, actor Alice Snaden.
“For him, being a father was the most exciting thing ever,” Mr. Yanowski says. “It’s devastating, but the greatest gift is that there’s a piece of Charles on this planet who is still alive. And who will be able to see all the things that his father left behind.”