‘A Life Less Empty’ tells a different kind of love story in upcoming film by Rueben Martell

“The one thing with this story is there’s so many mature kids and there’s so many people that you can – you pick your journey,” said Martell, who will also serve as producer.

“I think a lot of times people feel like trauma determines their destination, their journey and for me, I feel like trauma determines how many choices we have in life,” he added, noting people are not predestined to follow a traumatic path.

He explained the protagonist has a wish to go to school but believes he’ll be stuck in a cycle of misery.

“That’s not the way life is, like, you can choose on reserve and blame trauma, or you can go beyond and just learn from it.”

The project has been 20 years in the making – Martell first began the script in his teens – though the latest iteration of the script follows two love stories set in the time of COVID.

A young lady turns up at the reserve for the funeral of the person she loved, but due to restrictions, it is closed to anyone outside of the reserve.

“By chance, she gets onto the reserve,” Martell said, noting the protagonist helps her out. “Then they end up having to quarantine and then spending those 14 days together, they learn a lot from each other.”

The most important aspect of the story is that it’s honest.

“It doesn’t follow the love story tropes, it doesn’t follow the Native tropes. It just follows ‘What can we learn from each other and…how can I get out of the slump I’m in,’” he said.

The idea for the script came days before the pandemic lockdowns began in the country. He and his production crew were just about to wrap shooting for “Don’t Say Its Name” when he entered a drug store in Calgary. A woman of Asian descent was shouting ‘I don’t have it, I don’t have it,’ but that didn’t stop those nearby from backing away.

“People were physically confrontational with her,” he said, referring to the beginning of the COVID era. “It was almost like a madness.”

By the time he got home, the country had shut down. The experience served as an opportunity for introspection.

“If you want to learn about somebody, give them a little bit of power. In this case, it was like, if you want to learn about somebody spend six months or eight months or ten months locked in a house with them.”

‘A Life Less Empty’ had gone through several versions before it ultimately became what it will be. It was a completely different script. Martell used the pandemic as a story device and wondered if his characters met under those strained circumstances, what would happen?

“Having nothing to talk about ‘Why are you on my reserve’ and like ‘Why are you still on the reserve,’ they see things in each other, they mirror each other, and they have a close friendship immediately,” he said.

“They learn from that; they leave different people.”

The crew has begun preproduction and has been funded in part by the Indigenous Screen Office, Indiecan Entertainment and is waiting to do a Telefilm application closer to the end of the month.

“We’ve done some casting already and it’s really exciting casting and it’s like having great talent and then keeping even the talent and cast and crew out of Saskatchewan and bringing it up to Waterhen Lake, it’s…amazing and it’s frightening at the same time,” Martell said, referring choosing to shoot everything in the north and his home community.

Martell plans to shoot principal photography this summer.

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julia.lovettsquires@pattisonmedia.com

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by Julia Lovett-Squires

‘A Life Less Empty’ tells a different kind of love story in upcoming film by Rueben Martell

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