Blood and Water focuses on tsunami tragedy

CANADA: Anton Ambrose lost his family in the blink of an eye on Boxing Day 2004.

When a catastrophic tsunami hit the coast of Sri Lanka, the California gynaecologist and his wife were visiting their daughter, who was running a non-profit centre teaching music to children in their homeland.

But in a matter of minutes his wife Beulah and daughter Orlantha were gone, and Ambrose was left behind to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.

A year later, when Ambrose returned to Sri Lanka, he was accompanied by his nephew, award-winning Halifax filmmaker Rohan Fernando.

The resulting documentary, Blood and Water, chronicling Ambrose’s involvement in a charity concert in his daughter’s name and how he reconciles his loss, screens in the Atlantic Film Festival at 4 p.m. at Empire Theatres’ Park Lane 8 cinema.

“I got lots of calls to do something on the tsunami, people were doing documentaries and wanted me to go over with them. CBC wanted me to talk about it, but really I knew as much about it as they did,” says Fernando. “I hadn’t really considered it until later that summer when Anton called me and asked me to make a film about his daughter.”

The idea of making a film about his late cousin made Fernando a little uneasy, wondering how he could do a proper documentary while helping Ambrose commemorate her. When his uncle agreed to let his nephew be perfectly honest about his subject, in terms of what he’d film and what they’d talk about on camera, the project was set in motion.

“I wondered why this would be a film, and who would really care,” he says.

“Here was this wealthy guy from California and his family, and meanwhile all these other people died who had nothing, so why was this a story? These are the questions on my mind while I was filming.

“But the details of the story, and Anton’s openness to being vulnerable on camera, and his process of trying to make sense of it, I thought that was really interesting. It wouldn’t be about the tsunami. It was about trying to understand what is essentially inexplicable.”

When it focuses on the benefit concert for Orlantha’s dream of a music school in the city of Colombo, Blood and Water moves from the inexplicable to the unexpected: comedy.

We meet the grand-niece of the Shah of Iran, an aspiring country singer who has a maudlin ballad to perform, while kids who have never seen snow sing Jingle Bell Rock.

“The thing that struck me was the absurdity of everything that was happening,” says Fernando. “Here was this horrific event that was at the heart of what they were doing, and they were trying to Band-Aid it up with this benefit.

The Iranian princess comes in to perform because she wants to give of herself, and she talks about helping the stray dogs of Sri Lanka, and it all feels really absurd in light of the real tragedy of it all.

“I thought it was a really interesting exploration of how people deal with grief.

It’s not just Anton, but there are all these people trying to cover it up in some way and sugar-coat it as a way to make things better. And you realise the people behind the concert are really all Americans, and we see an American culture trying to Disney-fy it.”

But for Ambrose, the pieces finally come together when he visits the ruins of the resort where the tidal wave tore apart his family, and reflects on the tragedy with other survivors.

“The tsunami is just a device to get at how someone can be taken from you in an instant, and the film is designed to take you from pity to empathy, which is exactly where I went as I made this film. What happens along the way is that you start to look at your own life, and your feelings change, so in the end instead of feeling sorry for Anton and his loss, you realize this is all of us.”

Chronicle Herald, Canada