Clement Virgo says Steal Away is his most ambitious work yet

Clement Virgo doesn’t talk about his film the way you might expect — especially for a director whose resume includes the legendary series The Wire, the critically acclaimed adaptation of The Book of Negroes and Brother, which swept the Canadian Screen Awards in 2023.

But when the Canadian director is asked whether he’s nervous about how Steal Away — in theatres Friday — will be received by a wider audience, there’s anything but confidence in his voice.

“Absolutely, man. I was nervous. I don’t know if I’m completely successful — I’m hoping I’m successful at it,” he said.

“But as an artist, all you can do is scratch your own itch and experiment and push. And this film really … gave me butterflies trying to figure [it out], trying to untangle it.”

Given the fact it is what he describes as his most ambitious film yet, a certain amount of nervousness makes sense. Written with the help of his wife, author Tamara Faith Berger, Virgo adapted Karolyn Smardz Frost’s fictionalized account of a 15-year-old girl’s escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

But where Steal Away Home takes place in the 19th century, Steal Away shifts to the future — reimagining America’s past as a futuristic fairytale.

The film, which does not feature enslaved people directly as Virgo wanted to steer clear of repeating oppressively bleak depictions of Black futures, centres around two main characters: Cécile (Mallori Johnson) and Fanny (Angourie Rice).

We follow the African traveller Cécile as she stumbles on Fanny’s home and family — white northerners in a Belgium that comes across like a somewhat futuristic, somewhat Antebellum South interpretation. 

The family’s stately manor seems to offer opportunity and freedom for Cécile — that is, until Fanny’s obsession with her, and the potentially supernatural secrets hidden in that house, push things to a boiling point. 

There are a mix of themes, from coming-of-age to psychosexual thriller, horror, Afrofuturism influences and more — all deliberately chosen topics that compete for air in a kaleidoscopic, admittedly confusing fable.

But it is Afrofuturism that appears most prominent in Steal Away. There are extravagant costumes fashioned from a hyper-modern Congolese culture and suggestions of a powerful but vague Black-led world power, somewhere obscured and out of frame.

Both serve to blur the time period Virgo is depicting and the balance of power in his fictional world, which seems intensely modern and potentially more balanced. And yet also doesn’t.

That, Virgo says, isn’t an accident. 

“I wanted to connect the sense of what happened in the Antebellum South during slavery … to what happened during the Second World War, what happened in the 20th century, [what happened] with colonialism,” he said.

“There’s always a sense that that’s history, and that’s dead, and that will never happen again. But as we see happen[ing] in front of our eyes now … history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain says.”

Hopeful futures

Steal Away also marks a shift in Virgo’s own outlook.

To hear him describe it, his arrival to Canada as an immigrant in the late 1970s was defined by a sense of “welcome possibilities.” And his films, which often deal with Black experiences, have often been coloured by an inherent assumption of steady, if slow, cultural progress. 

This project, meanwhile, was born from something different.

“There’s a sense of ‘are we truly making progress,'” he says, referencing pushback against the idea that immigration is beneficial to society.

“If you look at history — if you look at say the last couple hundred years — there’s a sense of progress, and then there there’s a reaction to that progress. And then there’s a push forward again to more progress.”

Under the layers of metaphor and symbolism, Virgo says the question guiding Steal Away is really: Is progress ever permanent?

How successful he is is up to interpretation — the film’s heady and complicated intentions make for an occasionally inaccessible narrative. Virgo also admits audience appetites for films that make you work have reached a somewhat dismal low point. 

But either way, his answer to that question is tied up in hope.

“I’m here, you’re here, because somebody did not give up and survived,” he said. “And our part of our job is to make sure to push that idea forward into the future.”