LakshmiCanadian filmmaker R.T. Thorne brings a bold visual flair and a strong voice for industry equality to everything he creates. From directing music videos to award-winning TV shows like The Porter and Utopia Falls, his work blends style with substance. Named Playback Magazine’s 2023 Director of the Year, Thorne now makes his feature debut with 40 Acres, continuing his mission to tell powerful, character-driven stories that challenge and inspire.
Set in a ravaged future where survival comes at a steep cost, 40 Acres unfolds as a tense, post-apocalyptic thriller. The story follows the descendants of a resilient Black–Indigenous farming family, rooted in Canada since the Civil War, who are now forced to defend their land against a ruthless militia. Former soldier Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) and her partner, Galen (Michael Greyeyes), have shielded their family through isolation and sacrifice. But when their son Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor) reaches beyond the boundaries in search of connection, the fragile safety they’ve built begins to crack. With rich historical undercurrents and urgent contemporary resonance, writer-director R.T. Thorne crafts a powerful narrative that places Black and Indigenous lives at the heart of a raw, character-driven struggle for home, identity, and humanity.
One Lash Shot stepped into the creative whirlwind of R.T. Thorne’s mind, as the trailblazing director pulled back the curtain on the trials, triumphs, and raw ambition behind his genre-bending debut feature.
You began your career directing music videos, earned 17 awards along the way, and later transitioned to television, including work on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Eventually, you shifted your focus to long-form filmmaking. What inspired that transition?
I think anybody who gets into directing, any director, they grow up watching film. Film is the ultimate expression of that. It’s such a beautiful art form that can touch you in ways that you don’t even understand. You watch a movie and then you can be thinking about that movie years later and it intersects with a moment of your life and you’re like, “Oh my goodness!”– it means so much to you.
Films have such power so I think, you know, when I first started directing music videos and stuff, I was very much in love with the image and wanted to manipulate the image and I had a very soft spot for music as well and its importance in my life. I wanted to combine the two.
And then as a filmmaker, you evolve. I wanted to tell longer stories and I got into television– that’s a different film medium and it’s a beautiful one as well.
But in my heart, I always wanted to have my own film and deliver my own story. So, when it came time to sort of, I wasn’t getting a lot of scripts that I liked, so I took it upon myself to start to write myself and then teamed up with my co-writer, Glenn Taylor, and told him the story that I was thinking about and we started to bounce around on it and it became 40 Acres.
What compelled you to develop 40 Acres—your debut feature—during your time in TIFF’s Talent Lab? Why did you feel this was the story you needed to tell first?
Well, I mean, I think within myself, I wanted to have a conversation about a particular time in my life with my mother. I owe so much to my mother. She raised me and my brother pretty much alone.
She provided us with a lot of discipline– a very strict mom, but a lot of knowledge and a lot of understanding of who we were. She gave me tools to navigate my life. And so, I wanted to have a conversation about that relationship but also that moment that every family goes through– that every person goes through– when they have to sort of explain to their parents or push away from their parents and say, “You know, I have to figure out my own way in this world”. So, I thought that’s a pivotal relationship moment as a universal one that happens in almost every family. I wanted to talk about that.
But then I’m a genre kid. I love thrillers. I love science fiction. And I love, you know, horror. So, I really was interested in taking that relationship and then projecting it into a genre where the stakes are super high– it’s like staying out past your curfew.
In current days, maybe your parents will get mad. Staying out of your curfew when there are cannibals out there that could eat you, could be a life-or-death situation. So, I like that kind of idea of maybe taking a coming-of-age story that people can relate to and then projecting it into a really dark, weird genre and seeing what happens.
The film directly references Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and its title, 40 Acres, evokes the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule. What drew you to Butler’s work, and why did you anchor your film on that specific legacy?
I’ve been reading Octavia for years. My mother made us read a lot. So that’s right out of my mom. My mom made us read different historical works. So, you learn from the legends and you borrow from them as well. And so, I wanted to do something that sort of did a similar thing–speaking about elements of society and faith and survival.
In terms of the 40 Acres of it– to me, this film wanted to be about a historical land, about farmers. I grew up in Calgary, a farm adjacent, but my father worked in the produce industry. So, I saw this relationship between people and land that produces and sustains them. And so that was always a very interesting dynamic.
It’s an interesting element of a story that I think doesn’t really get told as much in our contemporary times. We just go to the grocery store and get some food, and we don’t think about where it comes from, but there are people who work that land. And I think that’s a very special relationship. So, I wanted to tell a story about farmers and land, and if I project that into the future– my particular future where there’s famine widespread, there are no more animals– then land being the most precious commodity, it heightened the stakes.
And when you go there and you’re having a conversation about land, it made sense to me that one of the things in our own history was this unfulfilled promise that formerly enslaved people would be given a land with which to develop legacy and build wealth, and that was denied. So, I think if we’re having that conversation about this, it had to be historically linked to that.
I wanted to pay tribute as well to the many formerly enslaved Black people who came up through the Underground Railroad and landed in Canada, where they were able to secure land and start a new life for themselves. So that’s a part of Canadian history that I wanted to pay tribute to as well.
And then, if we’re talking about land, you got to talk about the indigenous community as well, who’s had their land consistently stolen through colonialism. So that made the makeup of my family. I just had to see this family, a blended Black and Indigenous family, centered, and as heroes.
Quite frankly, in this future, they’re the most resilient. They’re the ones that people are calling for help because they’re relying on some of their cultural practices, indigenous agricultural practices, how to grow and how to treat crops that are failing without the use of chemicals because they won’t have that kind of stuff. So, all of those things were very important to me. These cultural practices that only Indigenous and Black people can mine from their history and mine from their culture are how this family is surviving.
There’s an interesting duality in the film. On one side, it’s a gripping, sometimes violent thriller. On the other, it’s a touching story of a blended family—the Freemans—descendants of African-Native American farmers who migrated to Canada post-Civil War. Was that contrast intentional? What guided that choice?
Yeah, it’s absolutely intentional. Some of my favourite filmmakers are Bong Joon-ho and Steven Spielberg– they’re just incredible at weaving together family-centered stories and sort of high-concept things. And I think at the end of the day, we can all relate to that kind of thing.
They are heavy influences on me. I wanted to tell a thriller story, but it had to have heart. It had to have a core where it’s really about the people that are in this family. I made an intentional choice with the people that you see in the film. I never really cut away to anybody else. I don’t show the exterior life of anybody else. It’s not about the cannibals. It is about this family and their conflicts. Messing up could be their death. The world is putting pressure on them. There are cannibals out there, but if they make the wrong decisions within the family, that could be their death. And I thought that was more interesting than just a revenge movie, for instance, where there’s only one stake. You got to get revenge. This happened, you have to go get revenge.
I wanted you to be conflicted about the decisions that they’re making and the danger that they’re putting themselves in. I wanted a film where Hailey says this is the way it is and she’s right. But she’s also wrong because her kids can’t go on living like that. I wanted a film where Emanuel is right, you do need people, but you have to trust the right people.
So those are the kinds of things that are very present in everyday life. We’re always making our decisions with as much information we have at the moment. And I like stories that are a little deeper than that. They’re a little deeper like that. They force you into corners with these characters and then you see what they do and you might not agree. I think the world is gray and I like it when characters can be wrong and right at the same time.
Danielle has an undeniably magnetic presence on screen. Can you walk us through the casting process—how you found her, and what it was like working with her throughout the production?
Oh, I mean, Danielle was always my first choice for this role. Anything that I’ve seen her in, as you said, she is incredibly magnetic and steals every scene that she’s in. She just brings a wonderful humanity to every role that she plays. She’s so grounded and embodies that humanity I needed for this role because it’s a very dark proposition– what I’m proposing.
This character essentially has imprisoned her family for their own safety and then has taught them to be able to kill people. And I didn’t want that to be the heightened part of the film. We’ve seen a lot of movies that sort of trivialize violence, and I didn’t really want it to be that. I wanted it to be a grounded decision. So, I needed an actress that could bring that gravitas.
And we were really fortunate. I had seen her in Patrick Somerville’s Station 11 and developed a relationship and a friendship with Patrick.
Eventually, I called him up and said, “Hey man, I wrote something, it’s a little dark, but I’m thinking Danielle might be a great choice for it”. He said, “Danielle Deadwyler is always the right choice”. So, he put a word in for us and we got the material to her and she responded.
It was an absolute blessing.
Todor Kobakov’s score is exceptional, and the film’s sound design is equally striking. How did you approach the music and audio elements in shaping the emotional tone of the story?
The slow-motion dance sequence set to ‘Calm Down’ is visually and emotionally stunning, and the final shot paired with ‘Slow Up’ is unforgettable. Could you walk me through your vision for those moments and how they came together in collaboration with the music?
I’m a huge fan of amazing film scores and I knew that I wanted to work with somebody who could ground the film in an organic sense.
Todor is an incredible artist and the way he built the score; he went out and recorded sounds in nature. He didn’t want to use standard percussion. He hit oil drums, channelled organic elements and made them into percussive elements because he wanted the film to be grounded in the reality of this family on this farm and in this place where you don’t have a lot of technology.
And I think it makes you feel the film in a way that is– I can’t articulate– but it’s one of the best scores I’ve ever heard. And I’m not just saying that because it’s my film. So, thank you, Todor, for that.
Then the placement of music, absolutely. Look, music is another cultural element that I think is so important to Black communities, to everybody, really, truthfully. It was vital to my life as a teenager growing up. It spoke to me in ways that I couldn’t speak to my siblings. So, there’s nothing like feeling a piece of music. I am a music video director, so I wanted a moment in the film that a lot of people can relate to— which is your parents catching you with somebody you shouldn’t really be with! Like that high-stakes moment that we all know! And in this world, your mom might actually kill this person! I wanted it to be one of the best moments of your life and all of a sudden one of the worst moments of your life.
Lastly, the film explores a range of powerful themes—above all, the love of family, but also xenophobia in a post-apocalyptic setting, resilience in the face of trauma, and unyielding determination. In your view, what’s the central message you aimed to convey through the story? If you had to choose just one, what would it be?
How do you pick one? Obviously, I would like to speak about a lot of things, although I wrote them all into the film.
But I think the importance of community is something I wanted to speak about. And, the difficult decisions about engaging the community. So, that’s community— your family for one and also how your family engages with that greater community. How we are reliant on one another, even though we threaten one another.
There are elements that the film wanted to have about that conversation. It must be a conversation if we are to continue. So, I’ll leave it at that.
Lakshmi
