DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Fight is the most personal film I’ve ever made.

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At its heart, it’s about survival — about addiction, trauma, friendship, and the brutal hope that drives you to keep going even when the world keeps knocking you down. It’s about mothers and daughters. It’s about the people we leave behind, and the people we become when we’re desperate to do better.

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When I started this film, I was a new father — broke, exhausted, and struggling with my own mental health and addiction. Trying to make art felt like fighting underwater. I’d fallen in love with Terrence Malick’s dreamlike, improvisational style and wanted to make something raw, something honest. So we did something wild: we made a feature film with no script — just a story, some actors, and a willingness to go wherever the scene took us.

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That process nearly broke me. The first cut was five hours long. We screened a 2.5-hour version in 2018, then shelved it for years. In that time, I hit some of the darkest lows of my life — questioning whether I’d ever finish the damn thing. But with the love and patience of my partner and co-creator Erica Sherwood, we found our way back. Now, almost a decade after we first shot it, Fight is finally ready in the form it was always meant to take — stripped back, bruised, and fully alive.

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This is our second feature together, following A Kind of Wonderful Thing, which became an award-winning, fan-favourite back in 2014. That film taught us we could tell stories. Fight taught us why we had to.

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It was made with no money, a lot of favors, and the relentless support of our community in Niagara. It’s gritty and surreal — part fever dream, part kitchen-sink drama — shot in black and white and colour, stitched together with love, bruises, and a hell of a lot of caffeine. It features strong female leads, queerness, found families, and flawed people doing their best — themes I return to again and again in my work because they reflect the world I live in.

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There’s no hero here. No villain either. Just people trying to survive their past and protect what they love.

— Jason Lupish
Director, Fight