By Katie Perry [1]
BELLEVILLE – A TV Ontario [2] documentary highlighting murder and betrayal, produced by a Belleville reporter, was screened at Loyalist College [3] on Wednesday.
Some Kind of Judas [4] tells the story of a rapper named Kevin Williams (a.k.a. Mayhem Morearty) who was becoming popular in the Toronto music scene. His life suddenly changed in 2010 when he became a witness against his friend Mark Moore, who he saw kill two innocent teenagers.
The documentary focuses on a code always followed in the streets of the tough Toronto neighbourhood where Williams and Moore grew up, and how Williams broke that code with his testimony. “He is labelled a rat,” says Beverly Francis – the mother of Jahmeel Spence, one of Moore’s victims – in the documentary.
Trailer for Some Sort of Judas. Video Courtesy of Mind Refinery/Youtube
Jason Miller, who writes for the Belleville Intelligencer [5], is a producer of the film and attended the Loyalist screening. He said his motivation for producing a documentary about gun violence stemmed from a loss in his own life.
“In 2010, my brother was murdered (in Miller’s native Jamaica) … My first plan was to tell a story about his murder and why it was unsolved and try to get to the bottom of it,” said Miller. He said he intended to go back home to Jamaica but at the time it wasn’t an option.
Miller and Richmond Obeng, the director of Some Sort of Judas, started working together to find a more local story, according to Miller.
“It’s the most challenging thing I’ve undertaken in my life. This is our first major film we’ve done,” he said.
One of the students who attended the screening was Logan Weaver, a second-year paralegal student.
“Overall, I thought it was really powerful and well done,” she said. “I think it covered a topic that you don’t hear a lot about, and I think that is really important.”
The screening in Alumni Hall began Wednesday at noon, and a question-and-answer session was held afterward in the Digital Media Centre at Loyalist.
Miller and Obeng sat down to talk to students about the process behind creating the documentary, how the team worked together, and what skills they had learned from school went into the film.
Finding people who wanted to be a part of the film was not an easy task, said Miller. “When we started this we had an idea. We had none of those subjects; none of the people you see in the film were a part of this.”
The documentary was pitched to TVOntario in the summer of 2014, and went through a development phase to prove it could be made before TV Ontario accepted it, he said.
Some of the skills Miller learned as a journalist helped him gather key interviews, he said.
Miller and Obeng had to start knocking on doors in the neighbourhood where Beverly Francis lives to find her house and ask for an interview, he said.
There were many doors and they didn’t know which door was hers. He told Obeng: “We are going to be newspapermen today. We are going to knock on every single one of them.”
After they’d done so, Obeng realized what journalists put into their work, saying, “Oh, I see what you do for a living,” Miller said.
Obeng and Miller will be promoting their film and say they hope it will screen at film festivals.