Ian Harnarine's short film Doubles With Slight Pepper struck a chord with audiences and critics when it debuted in 2011, winning numerous international prizes for its high production value and tender portrayal of a father-son relationship built around Trinidad and Tobago's favourite street food. In this short essay, Harnarine shares his experience of seizing upon the opportunity of this reception to develop the piece into the narrative feature Doubles (which recently began racking up its own haul of prizes, including the Reel Canadian Indie Award and the Canadian Film Festival's "People Pick") and reflects on some of the creative and technical challenges he faced while bringing this very personal story to the big screen. Andil Gosine

Around 2009, my father, Dhanidath Harnarine—everyone called him “Dodie”—was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. I was still in graduate school at New York University and would make trips back pretty regularly to check on him and help out as much as I could. My mother, Linda, had taken an early retirement package to be his primary caregiver. 

One night I took to my childhood bed and struggled to make sense of it all. My father became a man entirely dependent on others for simple life tasks. He could not walk up the stairs. He couldn’t hold a conversation. I knew, and I think he knew too, that he was dying. My father didn’t feel like my father anymore. I felt like I was meeting someone new at the end of their life. That night, I wrote the first draft of a script that I called Doubles With Medium Pepper. It was a sprawling screenplay of about fifty pages that covered a father-son relationship in Toronto and in Trinidad. 

The thing is that there’s not much you can do with a fifty-page script: too long for a short film and too short for a feature film. It wasn’t feasible. Over the next year I worked to cut the script down to its essence, until it was about 18 pages, changed the “Medium” to “Slight” in the title, and raised the money to make the short film. What happened with that project was the best thing that could ever happen to a short film: it screened at great festivals, won awards, got licensed by many outlets around the world, and gave me opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have as a filmmaker. I consistently received feedback that people were intrigued by the Indo-Caribbean culture the film represented, and by these characters. They wanted more. 

I went back to my original draft of the script and was surprised at how much of what I still wanted to say was not explored in the short film. Permitted the expanded canvas of a feature film, I dove deeper into the father-son relationship, the mother character, and I was also able to voice some of my critiques of Indo-Caribbean culture, Toronto, and multiculturalism within Canada. With financing secured from Canadian government funding agencies, we set production dates. 

Then COVID hit. Borders closed. Our film is transnational and relies on people moving between countries, which was not possible, so we had to put the project on hold again. Once everyone was vaccinated and it became clear that we could make the film safely, we carried on. Errol Sitahal reprised his role as Ragbir. Errol is perhaps the greatest actor the Caribbean has produced, with instincts to go to places I never thought possible with the written text. I’ve never felt more as an artist than I do when I work with him. Sanjiv Boodhu, now a full-time lawyer in Trinidad, came back to play Dhani, the son, the protagonist of the film. I had this blind faith that he would rise to the challenge of carrying the film and Sanjiv did. When we rounded out the cast with the brilliant Guyanese- Canadian Rashaana Cumberbatch, I integrated more references to Guyanese culture into the story. Leela Sitahal, Errol’s real-life wife, was cast as the mother, and brought authenticity, dignity, and depth to a crucial character in the film. All of this brown skin was lit beautifully by Director of Photography Bob Gundu.

Many of the songs in the film are inspired by the Sunday mornings when my dad would wake everyone up by playing old Bollywood records on the stereo really loud. The song Suhani Raat Dhal Chuki by Mohammed Rafi from the movie Dulari was one of my father’s all-time favorites. The song is used in the one scene that I still have a hard time watching. It’s based on a conversation I had with my father when I drove him back from a doctor’s appointment a few weeks before his death. I asked him what he wanted at his funeral and he answered matter-of-factly with an acceptance of what was coming and how he was feeling. Errol captures that in his performance—it gave me goosebumps on set and it still affects me when I watch the movie. It’s a specific song reference that probably no one else will fully understand but me. 

The pivotal conversation with my father in the car about his wishes for his own funeral inspired the scenes by the ravine. I asked him what he wanted us to do with his ashes and he said “oh, just throw them down there” as we coincidentally drove past a city park which a ravine runs through. The ravines of Toronto are special to me. I spent a lot of time wandering through them, sometimes with my father, just thinking and dreaming. In the film, the ravine is a special place where Errol’s character takes his son to, so he can experience it for himself. On the day of production, I think Errol was having trouble interpreting the scene because there was very little dialogue in it and I was really trying to capture a vibe, rather than have something dramatic happen. I told Errol: “This is your place of Zen and make sure he feels it too.” Errol’s eyes lit up and he said “got it!” He created a beautiful moment between the two characters that reminded me of when my family spread my father’s ashes in the ravine near our home. 

One scene that was directly based on my experience with my father referenced the night that inspired this whole story. Late in the night, I heard my father screaming in pain. He had a cramp in his foot and no matter how he tried to move it, the pain would not stop. I massaged him through it and he went back to sleep. I wrote a scene similar to that for the film and we shot it. It was hard to get through but there is a genuine tenderness and love in that scene between Ragbir and Dhani. I took a break and got some air after we filmed it. But in the end, I cut the scene from the film during the editing process. I had gotten what I needed to get from it. Reliving that moment over and over, take after take, angle after angle, helped me come to terms with that night over a decade ago. I could move on.

There is a funeral scene at the end of the film that we planned to film in Trinidad at the Waterloo cremation site near the Temple in the Sea. The first time I visited this location was at my grandmother’s cremation, which had a profound impact on me: the scent of ghee, camphor, burning wood, and the sea mixing together. The sheer heat emanating from the pyre.  All the rituals performed. Sadness, beauty, tradition, and a real sense of closure. It was one of the few times I saw my father cry. I have since been to other cremations there, all of them exuding the same power. However, my own father’s cremation in Toronto entailed us wheeling his coffin into an incinerator and me pushing a button to start the process, all unseen. I set Ragbir’s funeral in Trinidad. 

Making Doubles let me process my father’s death in a way that allowed me to relive traumatic memories between him and I, but with a necessary detachment considering dozens of crew members, lights, cameras, and sound equipment that constantly reminded me that this isn’t real. The one thing that I’m still trying to make sense of is that my father had to die for me to make this movie. He will never see it.