Director Karen Chapman tackles the horrors of domestic violence in Village Guardianbut not from the perspective of an abused wife who must resist or flee from the violent emotional outbursts of an insecure or jealous husband.

Her debut feature film, which will have its world premiere at TIFF on September 11, tells the story of Beverly-Jean, an abused wife (Olunike Adeliya) who does not call the police or crisis centers and silently endures a life of mental and physical abuse.

If anything, Beverly-Jean’s domineering husband appears only fleetingly in flashbacks and, Chapman adds, may have suffered from inherited traumas himself.

“That’s the complicated nature of loving someone who hurts you,” she says. “It’s not as black and white as, ‘He’s bad.’ He did something bad, and he probably did something bad, and that’s why he treats people that way. So how do you stop that cycle?”

Despite the lack of physical bruises, Beverly-Jean’s face is scarred by trauma as her family grapples with dark secrets passed down through generations. The lesson is that the absence of physical violence doesn’t mean the abuse has gone away.

“It’s just about facing (domestic violence) with honesty, not hiding it with shame,” Chapman says. Her slow-burn approach to violence in Village Guardian is partly due to the fact that domestic violence is still a taboo topic in the black Canadian community of Scarborough, Toronto, where the film is set.

“Culturally, it’s just not something we say out loud,” she explains. “It’s rude. It makes people uncomfortable. And that made me want to make this film even more.”

Village Guardian

Chapman adds that she deliberately chose to show Beverly-Jean’s dark emotions and paranoia after escaping an abusive marriage, rather than showing the domestic violence itself.

“We all know what these things are, what they look like,” she emphasizes, adding that she focused on the aftermath of generational emotional trauma in the family. “My instinct was that being a failure was familiar, that everyone knew what it was like to no longer do what you were supposed to do and to live in the shadow of that.”

But Village Guardian ultimately gets to the heart of the matter. Beverly-Jean, after watching her daughter, Tamika (Zahra Bentham), suffer from panic attacks and her son, Tristin (Micah Mensah-Jatoe), be accused of hitting a boy at school, struggles to put an end to the trauma her family is struggling with.

“Seeing Tristin angry scares her because he’s such a sweet kid,” Chapman says. “She knows it’s not benign. She knows it has to be addressed right away or he’ll turn into a beast.”

Chapman, a graduate of Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Center, directed her previous short film Measure debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019 and won the International Hollywood Foreign Press and Residency Award at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards, which she attended. Her latest film, the documentary Quiet Minds, Quiet Streetshad its world premiere at TIFF in 2022.

Chapman adds, however, that its world premiere in Toronto at the Scotiabank Theatre for Village Guardian will be marked by sadness, as the film was partly inspired by her deceased mother.

Chapman says, “I did the film because she had so much to say. ‘Make sure you make a film about me!’ She was very, very clear about that. So it will be a beautiful moment, but bittersweet.”