After watching Nathan Donovan’s Clubfoot at its Vancouver premiere, I wanted to go home and be alone. It’s a bleak and restrained film that offers little in the way of explanation or resolution, leaving you to sit with the disquiet of what you’ve witnessed. The story follows two adopted boys from separate families who experience displacement and alienation in different ways, until a violent encounter forces their stories together.

A quick peruse on Letterboxd proved that some viewers have been less willing to sit with the uncertainty. Among the more popular reviews, one complains that the film “said almost nothing,” while another calls it confusing, saying Donovan obscures the very details that might make the story legible. I understand the frustration. I left the screening with questions of my own, and a compulsive desire to make sense of what I’d seen. But I was more interested in why the film doesn’t give us enough information to settle on a definitive reading, especially when its subject is the inner life of someone whose actions are difficult to stomach.

For Donovan, an Alberta-born filmmaker, this project was a personal undertaking in more ways than one. The story was drawn from his upbringing with adopted siblings, and he cast his real adopted brothers in the two lead roles, folding his own family into a fictional film that demands real emotion.

I caught up with Nathan just after Clubfoot’s Montreal premiere to talk about portraying the complexities of adoption, the relationship between male vulnerability and violence, and what ambiguity can offer an audience.

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JENN MAXWELL: I know Clubfoot is based on some of your own experiences with your family, but where did the process of the film start? Was there a particular experience or image that ignited everything?

NATHAN DONOVAN: I built the film through storyboards, primarily drawings, and the first drawing I ever did for the film was actually the final shot, the chair under the doorknob. In some ways that’s the spirit of the film holistically; an ambiguous, tense image of a child’s room that has this really violent gesture. 

In terms of the story, it really comes from my life, being with my dad who worked in group homes, and all the other kids we lived with. He told me once, and it always stuck with me, that whenever a child would arrive at the group home, he would say; “Hey, welcome. If you’re open to it, I’d like to hear your story.” That feels very much like my filmmaking approach. This film is made in a very observant way. I’m interested in foster care children who are adopted and what effect that has on them as human beings, and how that impacts them emotionally. 

JENN: In popular media about adoption and the foster system, the narratives are either about rescue and finding a forever home, or abuse and systemic failure. Your movie tackles the a life in between those two extremes. What do you find gets overlooked in the way that adoption is usually portrayed?

NATHAN: It’s really a matter of sensationalism in either direction. You said that quite well, it’s either going to be the worst case possible or this triumph story. Even Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies feels very triumphant to me, in that a different layer of their identity was achieved through the reunion. A lot of adoption films are really centered on the big reunion. I just know that the real stories are really plain and really mundane. There isn’t always this big aha moment where you feel complete. This film was trying to speak on what it means for these characters when the only place they can go means negotiating with or accepting antagonism. They don’t even have the means to even pursue a reunion, and that’s true of a lot of adopted people. 

JENN: It’s interesting you say that. My mom was adopted, and her birth mom got in touch with her when she was in her 40s. It was exactly how you described it. They met and my mom was like, “She’s just some lady.” It’s not always as cinematic as you’d expect.

NATHAN: Yeah, there’s something about adoption that has a nostalgic and romantic affect, like the exchanging of letters and these sparse pieces of information, like photographs. I think that’s inherently romantic because it’s about longing.

JENN: Longing is a huge part of the film. Kristian’s deep sense of feeling unwanted or alienated is so present, and it’s tough to watch because there’s no explanation of where that feeling comes from for him. Is it from the initial process of being adopted or is it because of the household he lives in now? It made me think about the way people internalize rejection and how it becomes an outward expression, and in Kristian’s case, a violent one. Why did you want to bring attention to how these feelings can come out, especially in young men?

NATHAN: That’s a really astute observation of the original source. I’m glad that you mentioned that and picked up on that. I don’t know where exactly it stems from. The film is operating as a binary or a mirroring between the two boys. They face a similar transgression and then we see how it manifests in various different ways. 

In that regard, a really great film which we borrowed from a little bit is Mysterious Skin by Gregg Araki. One boy is incredibly passive and super meek. He’s sneaking around, he’s quiet. Then the other boy is really desperate and wants to be noticed, and he’s out of control. It was very much about showing just because something happens to someone doesn’t mean it always leads to violence. It can also lead to this passivity, where someone feeds into their own oppression through an inability to advocate for themselves.

JENN: Kristian’s only real companionship is with his friend, Echo. We don’t see much of him, but we can infer that he has a bit of an unstable home life as well. The way their friendship enables destructive behavior is interesting. Each of their loneliness reinforces their worst impulses, which is also a particularly teenage boy thing.

NATHAN: I think that’s absolutely true. Their desperation for closeness allows these things to happen. Echo doesn’t intervene because he’s afraid that if he confronts Kristian, he’ll lose him and that’s not worth it to him. 

JENN: I feel like the film could have also easily just followed the two main boys, so why was adding Echo into the mix a dynamic you were interested in exploring?

NATHAN: It was really important to show that Kristian is not evil, that he has a lot of affection for his friend. There’s camaraderie in the way they just drive together and go to the mall. They have each other. Kristian has this, again, longing, of “I hope that someone can love me even though I have an ugly soul.”

JENN: In the most violent scene between Kristian and Honoré, it’s handled in a way where it doesn’t feel sensational, but just kind of sad. Sometimes I feel like the camera has an ethical responsibility in how it observes male violence. How did you think about shooting that sequence without making it sensational and keeping it honest?

NATHAN: A lot of the camera choices were defined by distance, and that comes from adoption and what I perceive as a condition of adoption. With my brothers, for example, I don’t have the first-person experience of that emotionally, and that keeps me at a distance from them. They’re both mixed race, and when they go in the world it’s a very different experience. It’s a gesture of intimacy to acknowledge that there will always be differences and distance between us. We were trying to convey that with the position of the camera as much as possible.

JENN: The film is quite withholding. We’re left sitting with things that are ambiguous or not fully explained. Especially for difficult subject matters in movies, there’s an expectation that the filmmaker will provide the answers or help audiences understand the why. You made the choice to not give them that. When you choose a more ambiguous route, do you have a particular interpretation in your mind that you’re choosing not to communicate? And are you comfortable with the possibility that audiences are just going to fill in the blanks with something you didn’t intend?

NATHAN: I’m definitely comfortable with that. I think that’s a generous act, because the film is not me. I don’t like a film that doesn’t invite me to do something. Ambiguity is a way to do that. It’s an invitation for people to have a position on the film that can be as sophisticated as anything else.

That ambiguity really stems from the adoption process and the idea that the information you may receive is unstable and untrustworthy. I was thinking about that a lot in terms of the legibility of the film, trying to lean into this idea that I actually don’t want to give too much information about anything, because I want to recreate that effect of information being untrustworthy.

And with our film, I was curious about empathy, and whether you can have empathy for a character that you know nothing about.

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Like I said at the top, I can understand why Clubfoot has left some viewers frustrated. There are moments when its withholding feels a bit antagonistic, and you start to wonder whether the information you’re missing is deliberately absent or just not there. I felt that frustration myself. 

After talking to Nathan, I reconsidered why I wanted answers in the first place. How much of my—or the collective ‘our’—appetite for explanation comes from a desire to make suffering useful? Are we asking for more from characters than we would ask of a person in real life: a coherent account of themselves, an explanation for their worst behaviour, something that would make them easier to understand? 

I’m not sure a film owes us that any more than a person does. 

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Clubfoot won the Grand Prix for Best Canadian Feature at the 2026 Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal.

Nathan was the recipient of the HORIZON Award Special Mention at the 2026 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Stay updated for more Clubfoot screenings.

^{Images Courtesy of VIFF and Manufactured Imagery}