Montreal-based filmmaker Justine Martin first encountered twin brothers Raphaël and Rémi, who feature in her short film Oasis (a short documentary Oscar contender and her first film since graduating from Concordia University’s film programme) when she babysat them.
“When I was younger, I was living in the same street as them. I’ve known them for a long time. I think I started babysitting them when they were five years old.”
Martin witnessed the boys growing up. They had a very close bond. Raphaël has developmental difficulties and Rémi was always there to look after him. The documentary follows the boys when they are 13. By this stage, they’re not exactly drifting apart but there are changes in their relationship. There is more distance between them.
“I really wanted to make a documentary about a subject I knew and that was close to me,” Martin reflects on what motivated her to make Oasis. She is intrigued by the “thin line” between childhood and young adulthood. “With the twins, the timing was perfect. They were at this time of life where one was more stuck in childhood and witnessing his twin brother growing up at a faster pace.”
It’s not as if there is a sudden rupture between the boys. In a way, Martin suggests, they are “powerless” to stop the changes. One is going to a different school. They are simply not going to spend as much time together as in the past.
“The difference is not always negative. It is the natural part of life when you start to be a teenager and you don’t have the same interests any more…you feel it is not like it was before.”
Having experienced almost everything together in the last, both siblings realise they are going to have more separate lives. Raphaël’s developmental issues mean he will not be given the same opportunities as Rémi. That is the bittersweet undercurrent to the story.
The director achieves an extraordinary sense of intimacy with her subjects. “We already had this really strong relationship and sense of trust with each other. They [the twins] really saw it [the film] as a game. For them, I was not the director but still the babysitter!”
Martin would show them the camera, explain to them how it worked and would treat them as co-conspirators.
“It was one of my goals to make it feel as if it was a fiction,” she says of her poetic approach. “I really wanted the film to feel like a wave of emotions rather than of facts.”
A large part of the film was made over the summer months when the boys are whiling away the holidays in the countryside and sunbathing by the lake. We see them playing with frogs which they put in their mouths and then return to the water. They’re shown on a camping trip.
“I planned different activities, swimming or biking. Creating this specific framing enabled me to get different emotional responses from the twins. It also allowed them to be themselves.”
Martin was taking a very nuanced approach. She realised that she would learn more about the boys’ changing relationship from their behaviour and gestures than from their words. The parents and other adults are deliberately kept at arms’ length. We don’t see their friends. We don’t see the boys playing with their phones or laptops. The focus is very much on their bond and the time they spend in each other’s presence.
“It was important for me that it was all lived through their eyes,” Martin says.
This was a “passion project” done on a modest budget. The director was working with other recent film school graduates. Her producer was Louis-Emmanuel Gagné-Brochu of Déjà Vu. “We knew each other a bit. We all wanted to make our own first films after school. We were all on the same page and we all wanted the same thing,” she says of her colleagues.
The 25-year-old director hopes her film will have a resonance for anyone with siblings. “For me, it was that universal feeling of growing up and the feeling that at a certain point, the relationship with your brother or sister is not the same anymore,” she reflects. Oasis was partly inspired by her relationship with her own sister – which in childhood was similar to that between the boys.
The documentary has had a charmed life on the festival circuit. It screened in 2022 at events such as DOK Leipzig and IDFA and went on to win three awards at Oscar qualifying events.
Quebec-based short film outfit Travelling Distribution has been handling the international roll-out. Through them, the doc was sent to Op-Docs, the New York Times’ platform for short documentaries which quickly got behind it.
Martin has already shot a new project, a fiction film short called The Fake Tree due to be released later in the year. She also hopes eventually to make a feature with the twins. This will look at their lives over a longer period and will chronicle their “first steps in adulthood.” (It has the working title of Sundays).
And, yes, the boys have now seen Oasis. “We watched it at their house…they saw it with their mother. They really enjoyed it. It was a really precious moment,” the director says. Watching the doc, Raphaël noticed how much his brother was doing for him. “He thanked him for being there with him. It was a really fun and sweet moment.”
