The Bear Truth

A Canadian creator, Matthew Forbes comes from a mixed-race family that cherishes the arts. With more than one novel to his name, a couple of short films and loads of content marketing projects, Matthew adores the cinema and hopes to graduate to writing and directing features.

Matthew worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for almost twenty years, off and on, and has worked internationally, including five years in China.

As a racialized person who is genderqueer as well as a survivor of childhood trauma, Matthew has a powerful sense of empathy and is obsessed with crafting stories that say something.

Matthew’s first short, “David,” which he wrote, produced and directed, has won multiple awards and laurels, both for the screenplay as well as the completed film.

“David” tells the story about a real person named David Shannon, who sadly passed away in 2018. The author, Matthew Forbes, met David when they both worked at the CBC. Like most people, Matthew knew David as a charming, hilarious, kind, handsome man; the kind of person who drew one in, who gave off their own kind of light. It was only after David had passed, at his wake, did one of his brothers mention in passing that during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, David, who at the time was an openly gay activist, sat and cared for men who had been ostracized by their families and communities following their terminal diagnoses.

David simply couldn’t bear the thought of these human beings dying alone. He did this with around fifty people, and for the rest of his life never talked about it. Indeed even doing research for the short film based on David’s experience, it proved impossible to get information about it, even from his fellow activists at the time (who knew he was doing work of the sort, but had no details, apart from confirming general facts).

“David,” the short, follows the eponymous character from a protest, where he demands recognition of the gay community’s suffering through the HIV/AIDS crisis, to a conversation with a Landlady. She has a tenant who is dying of AIDS, and has been cut off from his family and friends, and heard that David is someone who can help. He follows her to the patient’s apartment, and, over a period of weeks, cares for the man. We see artifacts from the patient’s life, showing him to have been a dynamic, intelligent human being, who then dies. After the patient’s death, the Landlady shows up to inform David that someone she knows has a tenant in similar straits. David takes the information, is stricken by grief, but somehow manages to soldier on.

The film was shot in Richmond Hill, Ontario, in the spring of 2021. Having just come off the Covid restrictions, it was extremely difficult to get filming permits and insurance, but it all came together. A fantastically professional cast and crew are always critical to making a project work, and “David” was no exception.

In addition to creating “David,” Matthew Forbes wrote a feature called “L Section,” a truly heartfelt exploration of trauma – not its causes but how one deals with it. Inspired by the writing of journalist/sociologist Sebastian Junger, it takes a somewhat different view of trauma as experienced by former military men and women. Traditionally, society sees traumatized soldiers as having suffered inevitable scars from their service, and their struggles on re-entering civilian life are untreatable.

Mr. Junger posits a different hypothesis. Studies have shown that much, even most of the trauma associated with members of the military was inflicted long before their term of service. Indeed, the closeness and mutual support soldiers find in the military provides strength and healing; it’s the return to civilian life, in our cold, atomized society, that causes tremendous suffering and isolation, and hence, to an elevated level of suicides, addiction and other expressions of mental illness.

In his book “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging”, Mr. Junger finds countless examples of societies where closeness and compassion cause greater happiness and less trauma. Matthew wished to write a screenplay about soldiers that presented that line of reasoning on the screen rather than the well-worn trope of soldiers damaged by war struggling to fit in with “normal” civilian society.

From Mr. Junger’s website:

Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today.

“L Section” is not about military misfits, it’s about struggling human beings and their leader who understands the best course for healing. The original working title was “The Tribe,” but it later changed to its current version, “L Section,” based on the organizational structure of the Canadian military (the section is the smallest unit in the army).

While producing and directing “David,” Matthew submitted the “L Section” screenplay to numerous film festivals and screenplay competitions, earning a stunning 65% selection rate. This is a passionate, carefully-written script that Matthew plans to direct. It is set in Canada, with Canadian characters, but has a message that is universal – and urgent.