Filmmaker climbs up his complicated family tree

EDMONTON — There's the family you get, the family you choose and everything in between — Edmonton filmmaker Guy Lavallee is lucky to live in a loving swirl of it all.

In his new personal documentary Family Ever After, premiering Friday on CBC Gem, Lavallee explores a rather complicated family tree he perches on involving his two children, their birth mother, her mother, his wife and a niece he's super close to — she isn't technically his niece, except in every functional way, she really is.

Adopted himself, the film further questions and gently topples the whole blood privilege thing, including a heartmeltingly cute love song his dad sang him his entire childhood, and does so again on camera, helping to make him feel special and chosen.

“You'd always see it as a plot used in soap opera, like this scandalous thing that somebody is adopted,” he laughs. “I never understood why it should be odd. And then I started thinking and realizing — whether subconsciously or not — I've always had people in my life that I've considered family, or who maybe considered me as family, who aren't related to me.”

SPARKED BY LOVE

The story begins with the delightfully nerdy headbanger Guy falling in love with super-goth HMV co-worker Tammy — the two really could not look more like prototypical '90s record store employees in the old photos.

I'm not going to spoil the film's surprises here, but they get married and decide to have children and, well, it isn't really working.

Then they learn about a since-cancelled Alberta Child Services program, foster to adopt, which is when Kadence and Kale first enter their lives as babies, who at the onset of the actual movie the Lavallees are calling their kids — and indeed they are, now 12 and 11.

We also meet their birth mother, Sandra TochenuikHudon, young and living with addiction when her own mother, Coleen Tochenuik Green, felt she had to get the kids away to safety. They're another two major characters in this fascinating story.

The fact they're interviewed on camera early on hints that at least something has to have worked out by present day, but doesn't quite prepare you for all the intriguing, and occasionally still very emotionally heavy, twists and turns. It's no wonder Lavallee brought up soap operas. But to him, this is normal. It is now, at least.

“I do go into that a little bit in the film,” he says with a laugh, talking about how even adjusting to having kids took some internal work and putting aside of selfishness. “Tammy was a lot quicker to evolve to the situation, to her eternal credit. It's true.

INEVITABLE TWISTS

“I want people to watch the film to find out what happened, but with the big twist, she was way more open to it immediately than I was.”

Which brings us to the aforementioned niece — Jazmin Ferdinandi, the daughter of his best friend, who died young.

“This is such a cliche, but family comes in so many different shapes and sizes that I think family can be whatever you define it to be,” says Lavallee. “I've always only ever referred to her as my niece. She's always only ever referred to me as uncle Guy. And yet we share no blood relation at all.

“I think it's really cool to have people that you consider family whether or not you share a bloodline.”

As the story develops, including interviews with a seemingly ever-growing extended clan and close friends who detail their attempts to get pregnant and adopt, a growing sense of familiarity starts ringing in your head. What it is, exactly?

Oh, right — this is how human families worked for pretty much the entire history of our species, that whole thing, back to our subprimate ancestors. And, of course, the world is covered in cultures which still live in a box way bigger than mom, dad and two kids as some white-picket norm.

But what Lavallee's saying is, well, let's just let him say it: “Normal is wherever you find yourself.”

Lavallee heads up both the NorthwestFest and Rainbow Visions film festivals in Edmonton.

It seems odd such a festival cat — this entire project was sparked over drinks at the South by Southwest in Texas years ago as he was telling another director his family story — would end up premiering on broadcast TV instead of working the fests. This makes him laugh, yet again.

Family Ever After premieres Friday on CBC Gem, and will be broadcast at Saturday evening on CBC TV.