Two questions came to mind when I heard about Chandler Levack’s new romantic comedy Mile End Kicks, set in Montreal’s bustling indie music scene in 2011. The first was why is a Torontonian making a movie about our city’s coolest neighbourhood? The second was what took someone so long?

Sitting down with The Gazette last week, Levack had answers to both queries. She even saw them coming, broaching the two topics before I had a chance to. In her defence, the filmmaker is not a total Montreal neophyte. Having lived here on and off over the past decade and-a-half, she describes the city as “a great source of creative inspiration and the great unrequited love of my life.”

Each time, she has told herself she is moving here for real, “then I always go and get my heart broken because I can’t speak French very well, I can’t work so I run out of money. It’s devastating to me. It’s such an inspiring, wonderful place to be and there’s such an incredible artistic community there, both francophone and anglophone.”

Levack first moved here as a 27-year-old music critic in 2011 to house-sit for a friend. She wrote a cover story for Maisonneuve magazine about Montreal’s thriving music scene, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and felt reborn.

She had spent her early 20s toiling away in Toronto writing for music magazines, “rarely with other women around as mentors,” she noted. Part of her inspiration for the film was “to talk about being a woman in the music industry and navigating the male gaze.”

In Toronto, she had found herself “shaped by the cannon of what 45-year-old men in plaid shirts liked, and trying to pare it back in a way that would make them see me as their equal.

“When I moved to Montreal, I got to be an actual young person again and hang out with people my own age, to see what is like to really be in the scene at a pivotal point in music and see great artists perform,” she said. “Of course, I was still a weird nerd full of social anxiety and terrified to talk to anybody, but I really felt like something very exciting was happening right in front of me.”

Acts like Grimes, Mac DeMarco and Levack’s favourite, Tops, were on the verge of........

© Montreal Gazette