Hidden in Plain Sight

Cobourg film producer and musician Jody Glover makes her debut with the deeply moving Holocaust docu-drama Hidden.

Jody Glover seems surprised – almost incredulous – about what she’s accomplished and the circuitous career route she took to arrive here from there. At least, that might be what her ever-present smile is about. The first-time documentarian does have a lot to smile about: a great job, two happy, productive adult kids and a delightful honorary son from Uganda, a beautiful home in Cobourg, Scott, her supportive, if sometimes skeptical husband, and the love of her life (sorry, Scott), their two-year-old Goldador Maisie. “When you say ‘career,’” says Glover, “I think I sort of drifted into a career. I went to school for music at the University of Western Ontario, U of T, and the Royal Conservatory of Music and had plans to be a music teacher. But in 1995, I ended up in Chicago with Scott, who had just gotten a job there, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just go down and teach.’ But that proved a little more difficult than I imagined; the only jobs left were the ones where the teachers had left – running from the school! I was a little green, I’ve got to say.”

“I ended up in a school just outside of Chicago in the town of Waukegan, and it was a nightmare. It was exactly like those movies you see – cue the angry rap music, enter the naïve young teacher – I had a bodyguard in my classroom!” recalls Glover. “It was kind of scary. There were just so many kids coming from such bad backgrounds, in gangs, on the streets, so there were a lot of incidents. I wasn’t cut out for it. Music should be fun to learn and it just wasn’t. I only lasted three months.”

Glover also had a math degree, so Scott got her a job in the tech company where he worked. He put her through a weekend of database boot camp, and because the industry was so young and growing so fast, they needed people. She didn’t even have to interview; they just took Scott’s word for it and she had a job.

“I went down to Silicon Valley,” says Glover. “And I still remember sitting through this big meeting where they were all talking about technology, and I was just nodding and listening. I said to Scott afterwards, ‘Am I supposed to know all that?’ And he said, ‘Yes, they’re not going to tell you again. That was your lesson.’ I was a little out of my comfort zone, that’s for sure! I started off as a trainer; I knew just enough to teach them what they needed. The customers were just grateful to have someone show up.”

Having fun, expressing one’s passions, breaking rules – and dare we say? – faking it until making it, might just be Glover’s key to happiness and success.

Fast forward to 2014: “I had started using my first big camera to make training and marketing videos at work. I was paying attention to all the things that make the final product better, and I remember telling a friend that I would like to make a movie someday. I didn’t have an idea about a specific film, but I knew it was a direction I wanted to go in. I felt that I had some good skills on the computer, I could do the music for a film, and I’d always been creative.”

But something was starting to bother her: she had been neglecting her keyboard skills. “When you go to university to study piano,” she says, “you reach a very high level, and by the time you graduate you’re playing so much music, remembering so much music.” But after being away from it for almost 20 years, she wondered, “Am I using that part of my brain enough, or am I losing it?”

Spoiler alert: she didn’t lose it. In fact, come 2019 and her invitation to help make the feature documentary, Hidden, she would draw deeply from her musical well.

“I’m Native … I think I know what it’s like to be the underdog, to be part of a group of people who have been looked down upon.” JODY GLOVER

Between production and audio duties, she began work on her first documentary. Hidden tells the story of Kati Preston, who survived the Second World War by hiding from the Nazis in the hayloft of a Hungarian farm for three months when she was just four. The director was Kati’s son, Daniel Matmor, and the film was shot in Port Hope, Campbellford, Cobourg, the little town of Dacre, Ontario and Hungary.

In addition to producing the film, Glover composed, orchestrated, arranged and performed most of the music. “Funnily enough,” she says, “I think that’s the part I found the hardest, because I know the difference between good music and bad music, and I’m tougher on myself when it comes to the music. Good background music supports the story.” She did all this on her MIDI – a computerized keyboard – and her beloved glossy black grand, with a little help from another Northumberland musician, Saskia Tomkins. “Saskia played the violin parts so that we could have a natural glissando effect – a swooping glide from one pitch to another – in the orchestral score.”

“The music you’ll hear carrying Hidden,” says Glover, “was a complete variety of things: the overture from an opera, Saskia’s beautiful violin, old German anti-Nazi music. It was all about trying to play to – or fit into – what was happening in the film at that moment. I wanted to be truthful with the music.”

Her music serves to interpret the emotional upheaval that Holocaust survivor Kati Preston endured, and that’s something Jody Glover understands.

“I’m Native. But I was never embarrassed with the stigma attached to it when I was a kid. We’re Batchewana First Nations, though I wasn’t raised in any of the traditions. In the summers, we stayed with my grandmother, who was very traditional Ojibway. We knew all about the Sixties Scoop and we were well aware of the history, so I think I know what it’s like to be the underdog, to be part of a group of people who have been looked down upon. I think I can relate to what it means to be Jewish and discriminated against. So it wasn’t a real stretch for me to be able to take on Kati’s story, because I get how she feels, and what she’s fighting for.

“Maybe my next film will have something to do with Native people. Because now when I go up there, it saddens me in a way. A lot of stuff has come out through the Truth and Reconciliation process: the legacy, the generational trauma, the poverty. Which does make me think about how I can give back, what I can do that will help the community. I think I’ll shine a light on something somewhere, somehow.”

For Glover, creating documentary films is a coalescence of all her years in tech, her music degrees, her childhood – and her heritage.

“There are so many different elements to film,” she says. “You never tire of it. You can just switch to something else: let’s go work with colour, let’s go work with sound now, let’s write or work with picture; there are just so many creative avenues in film. And luckily, because we were a small group, I got to dabble in them all. It ignited a fire in me. I love it and I absolutely want to do another! I think I’ve ended up exactly where I was meant to. All the roads I have taken have come to this.”