Winston DeGiobbi's Mass for Shut-Ins (2017) is exclusively showing August 23 – September 22, 2018 on MUBI in most countries in the world as part of the series Canada's Next Generation.
My grandfather’s salad days moved a little faster than most in our family. There was the arrest for selling moonshine—stories of countless bar fights and car accidents, one where he was thrown from a truck that flipped down an embankment, killing his best friend. This happened during his eight years spent as a farmhand. When he moved back to Cape Breton Island he worked a few construction jobs before settling down as a coal miner—a job he would retire from while I was living with my parents in Ontario. Not a lot of time would pass before I was asking to finish Junior High in my hometown of New Waterford, which meant moving in with my grandparents. For the most part, I would call this place home all through my teens.
Every weekend my grandfather would drink rum and we would watch action movies on VHS. His good friend Higgy, who he met in the coal mine, would often come over and join us. Higgy was incredibly eccentric for a coal miner and oddly enough had nothing in common with my grandfather. In the winter he wore a Russian fur hat and would fall asleep at the kitchen table mid conversation. He performed a trick at parties by singing “How Great Thou Art”—holding a note for over a minute. You could see his face turn purple and it was sometimes recorded by my grandfather on a clunky home video camera. Eventually I would include the footage in a short film I made right before this feature called Higgy Wants In.
I’m 28 now and only a couple of years ago I found myself living back at my grandparents while working as a sales agent for the in-vehicle safety and security system, OnStar. It seemed like we were getting back to the rum and movie weekends, only now I’d be engaging in it with a guilty conscience. I began to imagine what it would look like if I had no desire to do anything. Would it be enabled? I imagined a man in his twenties so detached from reality he’s found himself completely dependent and would go to any length to maintain such a dependency. He looked like a boy. Kay Jay was born from those musings. It would help shape my script about a young man coddled by his Loppers—a broke, tattooed grandfather in repose from a wayward life of hitting up strip clubs and bootlegging. I would say, more than anything, I was tapping into a strange atmosphere found in the home movies and a state of stagnancy and isolation specific to this kind of milieu. After all, only an environment like this could breed a thing like Mass for Shut-Ins, one of the longest running television shows in Canada. The intent is to bring Sunday mass to those who are housebound from a physical illness or agoraphobia—its origins located in a studio just 20 minutes from New Waterford.
I find in cinema what we usually get is the trust fund kid who experiences wanderlust and most of the time finds a sense of purpose on their travels. I can’t relate. I wanted to see Kay Jay. I know that world. It contains the absurd poetry of Pepsi addiction with each day a little more shaky. There’s a lot of pent-up energy and venom that will, more often than not, dissipate in a sugar crash.