Every once in a while a film comes around to make you let out laughs you didn’t know you had in you.
And even more rarely, the movie is made in your backyard, allowing the fun to hit closer to home.
That was the experience I had while watching Bria Mack Gets A Life at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) screening over the weekend.
The comedy series, coming to Crave this fall, was filmed in the GTA and effortlessly showcases what adulthood looks and feels like for women of colour, in this case through the lens of a young Black Caribbean woman.
The audience witnesses the main character Bria, brilliantly played by Malaika Hennie-Hamadi, learn to navigate the awkward everyday life of someone in the workforce who is also fresh out of university.
The real drama is brought on by Bria’s mother’s retirement plan to jet off into the sunset with her new man and sell their home in Brampton, leaving her daughter to fend for herself.
And thanks to a lack of funds and a desperate need of a roommate, she eventually gets a job in downtown Toronto where her patience is tested to the ultimate degree by one co-worker who wants to touch her hair and remind her that they too have a Black member in their family.
Throughout the film, Bria is accompanied by an imaginary and invisible hype girl named “Black Attack”, beautifully played by Hannan Younis, who shows up out of nowhere to give her sister some good, mostly bad, advice.
Now Toronto had the opportunity to sit down with the lead characters as well as the show creator, Sasha Leigh-Henry ahead of the TIFF premier.
“The inspiration for Bria was my own life and my own experiences,” Leigh-Henry shared earlier this month.
In fact, Bria’s on-screen life is a spitting image of Leigh-Henry’s real life, in part due to having Black parents who were on her to get productive and stay busy as well as having to navigate microaggressions at work.
“I wouldn’t say [any]thing, but in my mind I had [a Black attack], this inner voice that you are having a conversation with,” she continued.
In a nutshell, Leigh-Henry took her lived experiences and “cranked the dial up” making this one of her most stand out projects and something Canadian television was waiting for.
Hennie-Hamadi also shared that she found common ground with the main character that she’s come to know and love.
“I had to find my own path and in a lot of ways that’s what Bria is going through in this show. She knows she’ll find the light at the end of the road,” she said.
Following the TIFF screening on Sunday, and during a question and answer session, Hennie-Hamadi spoke with Now Toronto once more about how she handles being a Black female lead in an industry that has a long way to go in representation.
“Because I have a great foundation of Black women and Black actresses in my life it makes it that much easier. At the end of the day, if one of us wins, we all win.”
