Filmmaker Sarah Goodman doesn’t like to be a fly on the wall.
Instead of coldly observing the world around her, the Toronto-born director strives to create warm, lasting relationships with the subjects of her films. For 2004’s Army of One, she bonded with young men and women enlisting in the U.S. army in the shadow of 9/11. For When We Were Boys, released in 2009, she bonded with a class of middle-schoolers at an elite Toronto boys’ school.
Goodman is still in touch with the young men and women who populated those docs.
“I really value the process, and developing relationships across boundaries – not even just to make the film, but just as something I want to do with my life – is hugely important for me,” she says.
That empathy toward her subjects has helped to make Goodman’s documentaries award-winning, critically acclaimed films. Recently, she began to transfer that heart to the realm of fiction film.
Her first feature, Porch Stories, earned similarly strong notices and played to packed cinemas during a one-week engagement in Toronto in June. (It will be on video on demand and iTunes later this summer.)
Sarah Goodman
The drama, set in Toronto’s Little Portugal neighbourhood, revolves around three love stories taking place in three adjacent homes.
That collaborative process Goodman speaks so fondly of helped turn Porch Stories into a more immediate film. She wrote the screenplay over five months but re-worked parts of the story after speaking with her two leads, played by Laura Barrett and Jose Miguel Contreras.
Barrett and Contreras are both Toronto musicians, and so Goodman tweaked the script to make their characters old bandmates.
“I’ve always learned by doing,” Goodman says. “I’ve never gone to film school.”
Goodman graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor in Fine Arts, after majoring in drawing and painting, but says she was interested in becoming a filmmaker. Although she was attracted to fiction stories, Goodman says she was compelled to go out and make something personal after Sept. 11, 2001, a period when she was living in New York.
The result was Army of One, which won the Best Canadian Feature Documentary prize at Hot Docs.
Goodman says she credits her sociologist father for spurring her interest in documentary film.
“I had always kind of learned from him, and innately just been interested in the ways people interact and what it says about who we are as a society,” she says. “Documentaries seemed like a perfect fit.”
Although Porch Stories may seem many miles away from Army of One, both films have a similar focus. The characters in both are young adults trying to figure out their future.
In the film, Barrett plays Emma, a woman in her 20s questioning whether or not she wants to get married to Stefan, played by Alex Tindal. When an old friend, Gabriel (played by Contreras), returns home from a long trip in South America, the plot thickens.
“A lot of people of my generation struggle with uncertainty about who you are or what you’re going to do,” she says. “Porch Stories was deliberately about that.” Goodman’s experience as a documentarian gives Porch Stories an authentic, lived-in feel. The drama also has many non-professional actors in the cast and was filmed in black-and-white.
Despite the esthetic, the film feels rooted in modern-day Toronto. Residents of the neighbourhood complain about the looming condos going up nearby.
That naturalism is one of the film’s major achievements.
“I was really pre-occupied with capturing the fabric of the neighbourhood,” Goodman says. “The overall feeling of the film is kind of inseparable from the process by which it was made, which was on this micro-budget with a small group of people.”
The move from documentary to fiction wasn’t a huge change for Goodman. She was still working with a small budget and crew.
However, one big change was the tightened schedule. Army of One and When We Were Boys were filmed over the span of a few years, but Porch Stories only had 15 shooting days.
Nevertheless, this debut was always meant to be a stepping-stone to bigger, more ambitious films, Goodman tells The CJN.
“I wanted to… get the first film out there, and basically learn while I was doing it,” she says. “I’ve always learned by doing.”
Goodman is now working on various projects, including several TV series and Lake 239, an environmental thriller set in northern Ontario.
Nevertheless, she still yearns to work on more non-fiction films.
“I would eventually like to make another documentary,” she says. “There’s just only so much time in the day.”
Even if she isn’t a fly on the wall, Goodman should keep carrying a buzz for many years. n
For updates on Porch Stories’ theatrical screenings, join the mailing list at
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