Broken Social Scene documentary It’s All Gonna Break is a snapshot of friendship | Canada Voices

For years, there was a running joke among music fans that if you were Canadian, there was a good chance you were probably a member of Broken Social Scene. The sprawling indie-rock collective, which began in 1999 as the lo-fi duo recording project of musicians Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew, often later ballooned to up to 20 members onstage and spawned the success stories of acts such as Feist, Stars, Metric and more.

So it’s perhaps surprising that it’s taken more than two decades for a documentary film about the band to see the light of day. (Bruce McDonald’s 2010 feature This Movie is Broken captured the glorious noise of a particularly epic hometown show, but offered an awkward fictionalized narrative.)

In fact, to hear him tell it, Toronto cinematographer Stephen Chung has been working on his directorial debut, It’s All Gonna Break – which premieres at Toronto’s Hot Docs Cinema on Jan. 24 and 25 – since the band’s earliest days. A quiet, shy kid obsessed with underground sounds, Chung was immersed in the heyday of the Toronto music scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, meeting soon-to-be BSS members Canning, Drew and Charles Spearin (of the instrumental collective Do Make Say Think) individually before the three began collaborating.

“I don’t play an instrument – I only play records. So when they started jamming together and doing stuff, I had just gotten my first video camera, and I started hanging out with them and documenting everything,” Chung recalls.

“Everybody that gets into this [creative] world usually comes from a place where they can’t speak; they can’t communicate how they feel. So they have to find something that helps them be truthful to their sense of how they take things in. For Stevie, I saw that it was images quite early on,” Drew notes.

“So he just started filming like mad, but nobody really wanted to tell our story or thought there was anything worthy there – nobody’s dead; there’s no celebrity talking heads. … But I loved the idea that here was this Chinese-Jamaican guy wanting to tell this story about this bunch of, like, privileged white indie-rock kids who actually got to connect with humanity on an underground level.”

Drawing from more than 1,000 hours of footage shot between 1998 and 2007, Chung captures BSS’s trajectory from the formative recording and jam sessions (with an ever-growing constellation of fellow local rising stars such as Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, Amy Millan, Jason Collett and others) in Drew’s west-end basement, right through to how the band became one of the harbingers of the early-aughts indie-rock movement when their 2002 sophomore album, You Forgot It In People, blew up thanks to a rave Pitchfork review.

“Things were happening for our band, or Stars, or Feist – the fact it was happening at all was exciting enough for anyone who was involved, and you can get taken up in it,” Canning says. “It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re flying to Japan today. We’re playing Lollapalooza and going on after Erykah Badu at Coachella’ – it was a wild time.”

Chung, however, had mostly gotten off the ride by the time BSS went supernova – he’d gotten married, had kids and started working in the film industry. But in 2007, he painstakingly pulled together a rough cut of a documentary and sent it to the band – only to have them turn it down.

“They were in a place where I don’t know what was going on for them – probably some internal struggles and pressure from the success, and it just wasn’t the right time for them; it felt a little too early,” he says. “They just didn’t want to put it out at that time, and it broke my heart. It was super devastating, because I had put a lot of money, energy and time into it.”

Chung moved on, but the dream of compiling a documentary about his friends and the music he loved so much continued to gnaw at him. During the pandemic, with his usual work paused, he decided to try again – this time with a slightly different approach.

“It was like an unfulfilled itch that I had to scratch. And I called up Kevy – he was in a bathtub in England – and I told him about my idea to make the film not just about the band, but more about me and my own intersection with the Toronto music scene. And he said, ‘Amazing – let’s do it.’ ”

It’s All Gonna Break combines the early footage with new interviews with all the key band members reminiscing about that pivotal time in their career, interspersed with Chung’s own memories of that era in Toronto – which, he stresses, couldn’t be replicated today because of the soaring cost of living, venue closings, and the digital disruption that upended the music industry.

Chung’s film also captures how a big part of the early BSS magic lay in what fans dubbed the “Holy Trinity”: the otherworldly vocals of the group’s inimitable female singers – Feist, Haines and Millan – all of whom went on to acclaim with their own projects, necessitating the revolving-door live lineup the band is now known for.

“What resonated with fans was the controlled chaos, and the surprise of who would show up. Really, though, when you think about the monster talent in the core members alone, it was undeniable,” Millan says. “Getting to share a stage with Emily and Leslie – these incomparable forces – is like trying to explain a lightning storm. I learned so much from their presence and abandon.”

What It’s All Gonna Break is not, Chung and the band members point out, is some kind of exposé of BSS’s often-messy interpersonal dynamics that go hand in hand with any big group of creative collaborators who have to navigate the ups and downs of success.

“It’s a snapshot of friendship. We know people will go, ‘Where’s the drama?’ That’s the stuff they want,” Drew says. “I’m grateful we worked with Stephen because we didn’t manipulate anything – it’s just all of us sitting there saying, ‘Hey, this is how I saw it happen.’ I’ll tell you one thing: I know when I die, if they made a documentary about me, these guys would [roast] me the entire time,” he adds, laughing.

Even though it’s finally being released, the film hasn’t had an easy ride along the way, missing a key funding cycle and not being selected for either the Toronto International Film Festival or the Hot Docs festival last year – a major blow, especially for a first-time filmmaker looking for local support, Chung admits.

Now that it’s out, he’s looking forward to a Canadian theatrical run before the film streams on Crave later this year. But first, he’s excited to show the film to a hometown crowd, where he’ll try to corral as many BSS members, old and new, that can fit onto the Hot Docs stage for a Q&A after both screenings.

“It’s a photo album from a time when we were young and hung out and had a lot of fun – a time when lightning struck and these amazing, beautiful, creative people made this fantastic bunch of records,” Chung says.

“I’m very happy with where it landed – it’s just a sweet moment in time. It’s my version of my intersection with the band and how they came together and loved each other and loved making music.”

Special to The Globe and Mail