An ice storm and SARS hysteria (it's history now) couldn't keep Torontonians away from their beloved film festivals in April. In the movie-going capital of North America, the third ReelWorld Film Festival and the tenth Hot Docs Film Festival screened several strong documentaries made by or about Asian North Americans.
Devoted to filmmakers of colour, ReelWorld (April 2-6) crowned Carolyn Wong's "Yin Yin/Jade Love" their Best Canadian Short. It's a bittersweet valentine to Wong's grandmother ("Jade Love" being her name in English) who survived forced marriage and racism to immigrate from China to Canada. Wong began the film after stories about her late grandmother began trickling out of her family. Like a detective story, the movie amounts to a granddaughter's exploration of her grandmother's inner life. Wong's narration reveals her surprise of unearthing her family secrets, particularly the unhappy marriage Jade Love endured with her husband for the sake of her children.
Other documentaries saw filmmakers tracing their roots as well. "Yah Yah" by American Yiuwing Lam is a finely edited film that could run longer than its six minutes by delving deeper into his childhood relationship with his grandfather. "Finding Fire Under My Grandma's Fingernails" finds Akira Boch returning to his mother's birthplace, a Colorado internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War Two. "Fire" is a dry piece, though it shines when Boch's mother returns to the arid ruins where she was born. In the most touching moment, Boch's mother is too choked up to speak.
Gil Gauvreau's "Spirit of the Dragon" captured the Best Canadian Documentary Award for its profile of Chinese-Canadian leader, Jean Lumb. The government stripped Lumb of her Canadian citizenship when she married a Chinese man in 1939. Eighteen years later Lumb led the change in immigration laws which reinstated her citizenship along with many other Chinese-Canadians. Two decades later she received the Order of Canada, then was ironically appointed a Citizenship Court judge. Gauvreau was Lumb's neighbour of many years and deserves credit for chronicling her amazing life before she passed away last summer.
Increasingly, Caucasian Canadian documentarians like Gauvreau are turning their cameras on Asian subjects. This was especially true at Hot Docs, one of the largest documentary festivals in the world, which premiered "C.D. Hoy: Portraits of the Frontier." The film tells the story of Chow Dong Hoy, a Chinese immigrant who in the early 1900s chronicled the Canadian west in his portraits of Aboriginal cowboys, Chinese workers and white pioneers. Directors Lynn Booth and Faith Moosang successfully convey the importance of Hoy's work and illustrate Hoy's amazing rags-to-riches life.
Shelley Saywell examined the life of another historic immigrant in the heartbreaking "Kim's Story: The Road From Vietnam," part of a retrospective awarded the social activist filmmaker. Kim Phuc was the naked, burned Vietnamese girl in Nick Ut's famous 1972 "napalm" photograph. This horrific image forms the backbone of perhaps the most powerful and emotional film of the festival. The movie traces the whereabouts of Phuc who turned Christian and settled in Toronto. Though made in 1997, the film carries an immediacy heightened by Phuc's presence at the screening. Most poignant in the film was seeing Phuc forgive the American solider (both are now devout Christians) who co-ordinated the bombing of her village (he was told civilians would be evacuated).
Korbett Matthews' "Devouring Buddha" focuses on the same dark period of Asian history: the killing fields of Cambodia. However, whereas Kim and Hoy are told in traditional narratives, Matthews' film embarks on a startling 16-minute experimental tone poem. It imaginatively blends standard images of Khmer Rouge prisons and their slain victims with abstract footage of public places and empty spaces. With collaborator Prem Sooriyakumar Matthews holds the film together with eerie music and intuitive editing. Awarded the Best First Documentary, "Devouring Buddha" pushes the boundaries of the non-fiction form.
The standout effort by an Asian Canadian was Arlene Ami's "Say I Do," a revealing look at the mail order bride industry. The film profiles three Filipino women who married Caucasian men in the remote B.C. interior. The marriages were arranged through mail order websites, a booming trade Ami attacks. Filipinos are preferred brides, because they are Catholic, docile wives. These women marry foreigners to escape a life of poverty, and their marriages amount to little more than business arrangements. "Say I Do"'s sympathies clearly lie with the women, portraying them as prisoners isolated in a strange land. One husband recalls that he and his new bride had trouble communicating because of her poor English, not mentioning his non-existent Tagalog. As an Asian male, I was upset with the ease that these white men could obtain an Asian wife, and credit Ami for bringing a neglected subject to light.
Yung Chang's "From Earth To Mouth" is a meditative profile of Lau King-Fai, a Chinese grandmother who runs a farm in southern Ontario, growing Chinese vegetables for markets and restaurants. The film offers an interesting portrait of a woman who has survived famine and the Cultural Revolution to prosper in a new country. Cinematographer Francois Vincellete does a fine job of capturing the beauty of the farm.
Canadians enjoy a long tradition of documentaries which often overshadow our fictional features, an area Hollywood monopolizes. With affordable video technology, Asian Canadians are telling more of their stories as documentaries while non-Asian filmmakers find inspiration from Asian cultures in Canada's multicultural society. While feature films such as "Better Luck Tomorrow" and "Charlotte Sometimes" are revolutionizing Asian American filmmaking, the future Asian Canadian filmmaking may very well lie in docs.
