“Drive Back Home is a story that’s inspired by true events that happened in the 1960s to my grandfather, Ernie Clowater, and his brother, my great uncle, Hedley Clowater. The only time that my grandfather ever left New Brunswick in his life was when he drove up to Montreal to get his brother out of jail for having sex with a man.

However, I could never understand WHY an uneducated plumber who didn’t know anyone outside of New Brunswick would be able to get his brother out of jail for committing an actual crime. What I discovered was that, unofficially, police departments were motivated to get these cases off the books by offering to drop the charges if family members or employers came to vouch for them. By forcing these men to “out” themselves to people that mattered to them, the police were satisfying two needs at once. The first was to relieve themselves of paperwork and the second was to ensure that the people they took so much offense to still had their lives ruined.

If you’re a young black person in 2024 and you want to know what life was like for ordinary black Canadians in the 1960s, you can ask your black grandparents. But if you’re gay, you don’t have gay grandparents to ask. A film like this would have been the only way for him to see that life., I also wanted this to be real and authentic and funny. I wanted the two men to be imperfect and littered with their own personal baggage that we all have. I used western themes and wanted to give it a cinematic feel of a western by using snow and bleak landscape of a Canadian winter in the same way that John Forde or Sergio Leone would use the harsh landscape of a desert."

– Michael Clowater

“On August 9, 2006, Leonard Watson dropped off his eight-year-old son Kurtis at summer camp. That’s the last time anyone saw him. No bags packed, no calls, no activity in the bank account, no note: Watson disappeared, leaving his family behind. He was considered missing until 30 days later, when he was found dead by apparent suicide.

Fourteen years later, Kurtis Watson discovers a trove of home videos—hundreds of hours recorded by his father leading up to his death—a discovery that inspires a painstaking search for answers in recorded moments, family testimonials, and conversations with people connected to the event in any way, including the Watson family themselves, who come together for the first time to talk about the weight of this memory in their lives. Discoveries of small details lead to impactful and revelatory moments for them, revealing an ever-present stigma around mental health. My Dad’s Tapes documents the tremendously brave embrace of a reality in which some of our most burning questions may forever be unanswered. To hold each other close is all that matters."

– Hot Docs