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For Calgary filmmaker Gillian McKercher, the first spark of inspiration for her sophomore narrative feature, Lucky Star, came to her during her university days when she was studying engineering.
She was fascinated by the idea of what she calls “casual cheating”: nothing as flagrant as cheating on a test but more along the lines of collecting the previous year’s lab reports and using them as a “roadmap” for your own work. It’s not explicitly forbidden, but occupies a moral grey zone and is certainly looked down upon. Initially, McKercher envisioned a story about a daughter who gets caught cheating and enlists her father to help cover it up.
“But the more that I noodled on the idea, the more I became excited by the father’s story,” says McKercher, whose film will screen Saturday, Sept. 28 as part of the Calgary International Film Festival at Scotiabank Theatre Chinook. “What if he was the one who was the cheater and his kids were the ones who helped cover it up?”
Many drafts later, the screenplay became something else again, which tends to happen when ideas are developed over years. The cheating angle wasn’t completely lost, but became a much smaller subplot that represents one of a number of morally suspect activities that a Chinese-Canadian family adopts when facing economic pressure in Calgary.
The focus did turn to Lucky, a somewhat ironically nicknamed ex-gambler and the father of two daughters who finds himself in financial straits after falling for a tax scam. Played by Calgary expat Terry Chen, Lucky was already economically strapped due to the every-day expenses of life in the Calgary suburbs where, on the surface, the family seems to be living a normal existence. McKercher used a suburban house in the Thorncliffe area of Calgary as the family home. It’s filled with Christmas decorations and the family has a busy schedule that includes cultural dance lessons for the reluctant youngest daughter Jenny (played by Summer Ly), while eldest daughter Grace (played by Calgary’s Conni Miu) is busy balancing preparation for her final exams and a part-time job. Meanwhile, he is running his own computer-repair business and his wife, Noel, (played by Olivia Cheng) works in retail.
But after Lucky loses thousands of dollars, he begins to rely on Grace financially, which leads to a role reversal. He also returns to gambling, a vice that his family assumed he had given up. Desperation kicks in and cracks begin to show in the family as he attempts to keep it all a secret from his exasperated wife and children. An ensemble drama that boasts naturalistic performances from an incredible ensemble cast and realistic dialogue, the film eventually becomes an exploration of fatherhood and masculinity as the family dynamics shift.
“Here we have a dad who, in his mind, is doing his best but is being stripped of a lot of his power to take care of his family, whether it’s not having enough money because of the jobs he takes on or an inability for social mobility upward,” McKercher says. “So how does that affect him and his ability to be a dad? Also, at the time that I was writing this, I was just hearing so much about dads in my life who were just failing and sucking so badly and yet the kids still love them. Even in the most extreme case when the child and parent were estranged, there’s still a love there. I was really interested in that. We can’t celebrate some of the actions that they do but we still love them.”
Lucky Star is the second narrative feature by McKercher. Her debut, Circle of Steel, screened at the Calgary film festival in 2018 and won an audience-choice award. An insider’s look into the oil and gas industry, it was a subtle satire that McKercher made after being laid off from her job in 2016. As a teenager, she worked summer jobs in oil and gas before interning as an operations-engineer-in-training. After graduating from U of C, she worked as a project engineer and reserves engineer.
Circle of Steel was well received during its festival run and streamed across Canada on video-on-demand. In 2019, McKercher studied at Toronto’s Canadian Film Centre. Back in Calgary, she co-founded the production company Kino Sum, which specializes in narrative films, documentaries and music videos. That includes McKercher’s 2021 documentary, Orphaned, which explored the environmental and financial cost of Alberta’s “orphaned” wells.
“The subjects I care about are family, labour, energy and the environment,” she says. “I care a lot about people working: What does it look like for people who are working and struggling to make ends meet or just interacting with things in their life? With Orphaned, it was orphaned wells and the people who had to clean them up physically, not just people who see it as a number on a spreadsheet but people who actually physically have to go out and clean them all up. It’s a huge job. With Lucky Star it’s similar. All of the family is hustling to put on a brave face and go about daily life. That’s something I’m interested in and the drama that goes along with it.”
With Lucky Star, McKercher says she was interested in exploring the unique experiences of second-generation Canadians and breaking from the traditional immigrants-in-Canada storyline.
“I’m a second-generation Chinese-Canadian; my mom immigrated to Canada in the 70s,” she says. “I’m really inspired by second-gen stories. At the time I was writing Lucky Star I was watching a lot of the Sopranos. I loved Jewish-American cinema. I love Italian-American cinema. A lot of those stories are second-gen where the culture is still very much a part of your life, but there has been a loss of culture as well. So you know these things but you are still holding onto something that your parents told you about. There’s a certain dynamism that I like where it’s not exactly an immigrant story anymore. The kids have been born, they are established. What is their life like? That was what I wanted to show with this story. Personally, I really wanted to see a Chinese family on screen where it wasn’t the immigrant North American story, where it’s like ‘it’s so hard for us losing our culture’ and it feels like ‘Oh the motherland, we had so much and lost so much and I wish I was back there,’ this yearning for the motherland. I wanted to show something where we are established here; we are Canadian and this is what we are dealing with now as this diaspora.”
Lucky Star will screen Saturday, Sept. 28 at Scotiabank Theatre Chinook at 7:15 p.m. as part of the Calgary International Film Festival. This screening is sold out.