Shira Avni Filmography / Filmographie de Shira Avni

• Watch / purchase Shira Avni’s films at NFB / ONF
• Shira Avni’s profile at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema

Films

From Far Away / Venue de loin (2000), co-directed by Serene El-haj Daoud

From Far Away by Shira Avni& by Serene El-haj Daoud, National Film Board of Canada

John and Michael / John et Michael (2004)

John and Michael by Shira Avni, National Film Board of Canada

Tying Your Own Shoes / En laçant mes souliers (2009)

Tying Your Own Shoes by Shira Avni, National Film Board of Canada

Petra’s Poem / Le poème de Petra (2012)

Petra's Poem by Shira Avni, National Film Board of Canada

Jeff Chiba Stearns Filmography / Filmographie de Jeff Chiba Stearns

Studio: Meditating Bunny

Follow Jeff Chiba Stearns on: twitter, facebook, vimeo, youtube

Kip and Kyle (2000)

The Horror of Kindergarten (2001)

What Are You Anyways? (2005)

Yellow Sticky Notes (2007)

Yellow Sticky Notes from Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

One Big Hapa Family (2010)

One Big Hapa Family Trailer from Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

Ode to a Post-It Note (2010)

Ode to A Post-it Note from Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

Yellow Sticky Notes: Canadian Anijam (2013) 

– omnibus with contributions from Cordell Barker, Lillian Chan, Paul Driessen, David Fine and Alison Snowden, Christopher Hinton, Louise Johnson, Jody Kramer, Jowl Mackenzie, Marv Newland, Jonathan Ng, Janet Perlman, Howie Shia, Malcolm Sutherland

Yellow Sticky Notes | Canadian Anijam from Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

Cats (2014)

Minoru: Memory of Exile (Minoru: souvenirs d'un exile, 1992)

“Let our slogan be for British Columbia: No Japs from the Rockies to the sea.”

These were the words famously spoken by Ian Alistair Mackenzie the Liberal Cabinet Minister for Vancouver Centre during the 1944 federal election.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mackenzie had played a key role in the government's decision to intern Japanese-Canadians living on the Pacific coast for the duration of the war.  In the 1970s and 1980s literature and film began to surface addressing the injustices suffered by Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia.  Pierre Burton addressed the subject on his television show and the materials presented were published by Janice Patton in her book The Exodus of the Japanese: Stories from the Pierre Burton Show (1973) and journalist Ken Adachi wrote The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (1976).  Two semi-autobiographical works, Shizuye Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp (1971) and Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981), have become staples in the Canadian classroom because of the moving way that they tell their stories from the point of view of a child.

Since Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s official apology to the victims of this abuse of human rights in 1988, many Nisei, Sansei, and more recently Yonsei have come forward to share their family stories.  Michael Fukushima’s animated documentary Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992) was one of the first of the post-redress films.  His proposal to make an animation based upon his father Minoru Fukushima’s story landed on the desk of William Pettigrew at the NFB at about the same time that they were contacted by the Japanese Canadian Redress Secretariat (JCRS) about the possibility of funding educational films about the internment.

Fukushima did not learn of his father’s experiences until the issue of redress raised his head in the late 1980s.  According to the film’s first-person narration, in the fall of 1987, at the age of 26, Fukushima asked his father for the first time about his childhood.  Fukushima’s guiding voice is interwoven with the voice of his father and accompanied by traditional Japanese music played on the shamisen, koto, and taiko. The animation uses a variety of media including cutouts, paintings, and photographs.

The past and the present are also interwoven through Fukushima’s use of relics of the past in the form of family and archival photographs and archival documents.  As Minoru begins to tell of his happy early childhood in Vancouver, the image of Minoru as a child comes to life in a faded family photograph.  A colourful cutout of Minoru jumps out of the picture and leads us through archival photographs of Vancouver’s city streets.  Minoru looks back fondly on his childhood in Vancouver.  He describes how his parents ran their grocery store for almost 20 years from when they arrived in Canada until their internment.

Minoru speaks of how they were sheltered as children from news of the war.    Even the internment camp didn’t seem that bad to the kids: it was almost like a summer camp and he recalls learning how to swim there.  This is a sentiment shared by renowned environmentalist David Suzuki in his 2007 eponymous autobiography, who wrote that his love of nature was came from the idyllic time he spent in the interior of British Columbia – a time when he was blissfully unaware of the hardships endured by his parents until after the war.   

It is not until the end of the war that things take a turn for the worse.  The Fukushima family discovers that despite being Canadian citizens, they must make a choice of moving somewhere outside of British Columbia in Canada or be deported back to Japan.  It turns out that the internment of Japanese-Canadians ignited “long-standing anti-Japanese sentiments” and local merchants, fishermen, and farmers supported the government in the seizing of all Japanese property and liquidating it.  The funds raised from the sale of their property was used to fund the cost of their own internment.

Minoru: Memory of Exile by Michael Fukushima, National Film Board of Canada

Uncertain as to what would be best for the family Minoru’s father decides to take the Japan option although Minoru and his siblings cannot speak any Japanese and are Canadian citizens.  They return to their father’s village where they encounter poverty and resentment by the locals who see them as foreigners.  By the time Canada reverses its policy on Japanese Canadians in the late 1940s because of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, their family it too poor to be able to afford the journey back to British Columbia.  In a case of bitter irony, when the Korean War breaks out in 1950, the Canadian government tries to recruit the same Japanese-Canadians they had banished a few years earlier.  Minoru jumps at the chance along with about 40 others and thus begins his journey back to the only country that ever felt like home to him – despite the injustice and racism he experienced there. 

Minoru: Memory of Exile is an early example of an animated documentary – a medium that has become more common nowadays with great films like Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004).  It demonstrates the unique ability of animation to express things with greater depth and poignancy than mere archival footage or interview footage could ever do.  The animation fills the “silences” that Fukushima speaks of as being a large part of his identity as a Sansei Canaidan.  Following in his footsteps, Yonsei Canadian animator/documentary filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns also used animation to bring to life his Uncle Suey Koga’s stories about the internment in his feature length documentary One Big Hapa Family (read review). 

Michael Fukushima directed at least one other animation at the NFB before beginning his transition into becoming a producer.  Over the past decade he has built a reputation over as one of Canada’s top animation producers.  Minoru: Memory of Exile shows us his roots as an artist in his own right.  It is both informative and moving in how it tells the story of Minoru.   A warm tribute from a son in recognition of the sacrifices made by both his father and his grandparents to enable him to grow up Canadian.  

Related Reading: Michael Fukushima: The Art of Producing Art

This review was originally posted on my sister blog Nishikata Film Review on November 27, 2012.

direction/design/animation

Michael Fukushima

narration

Minoru Fukushima

Michael Fukushima

animation assistance/colour rendering

Faye Hamilton

producer

William Pettigrew

additional colour rendering

Colette Brière

sound design

Normand Roger

taiko

John Endo Greenaway

koto

Teresa Kobayashi

shakuhachi

Takeo Yamashiro

animation camera

Jacques Avoine

Ray Dumas

Lynda Pelley

re-recording

Jean-Pierre Joutel

apprentice mixer

Terry Mardini

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

One Big Hapa Family (2010)

Kunal Sen's animation of Uncle Suey's childhood memories.

At the 2006 reunion of the Koga side of his family, Yonsei Canadian animator Jeff Chiba Stearns noticed for the first time that after his grandparents’ generation, not a single member of the Japanese side of his family had married another person of Japanese ethnicity. He did a bit of research and discovered that the Japanese in Canada are the most integrated of any other Asian community in the country. One Big Hapa Family documents his journey into his family’s history, and by extension the history of the Japanese in British Columbia, to find out why Japanese Canadians have such a high mixed marriage rate.

In so doing, Stearns has brought together two very Canadian cinematic traditions: documentary film and animation. He collected interviews with all members of his family, local historians, and other intermarried couples in order to get a broad perspective on the issue of ethnicity and marriage in Canadian culture. The material that he collected was then loosely structured like the layers of an onion: first the story of the elders (the Issei and Nisei generations in his family), followed by the story of his parents’ generation, his own generation, and even the newest members of the family, with his own personal journey being the core of the documentary.

Jeff Chiba Stearns with Grandpa Koga

The resulting film is a compelling mixture of archival photos and film footage, family photos and home movies, interviews and animation. The animated sequences are colourful, visually engaging, and demonstrate a variety of animation techniques. Stearns himself does some chalkboard, ink on paper, and stop motion sequences – not to mention the Yellow Sticky Note animation style for which he is known. Additional animation was done by Ben Meinhardt, Louise Johnson, Kunal Sen, Todd Ramsey, Jonathan Ng, and Sean Sherwin. Some sequences that really stood out for me were Louise Johnson’s beautiful paint-on-glass animation for Roy’s internment train story, Todd Ramsey’s imagining of the angry Kelowna mob, and Kunal Sen’s animation of Uncle Suey’s racism stories from his childhood. 

The way in which Sen animates Uncle Suey’s experiences at the Okanagan Mission School is brilliantly done. First, seeing the teacher’s fountain pen shortening the boy’s name “Suemori” to “Sue,” without regard for the fact that she is saddling the boy with a girl’s name is visually impactful.  Then, when Uncle Suey recites  the words from a racist children’s rhyme that he learned at the school, the words lift up off the page so that they circle the image of young Suey reading aloud (see top image). In this sequence Sen has captured the way in which these words have haunted Uncle Suey his whole life, circling round and round the image of him as a young boy, just as they must have done in his head all these years. A very moving scene that only animation could capture in this way.

In addition to the animation, Stearns has employed a number of other visual techniques that give the film a unique look. There is an objective documentary camera that shoots interviews and Stearns himself in a fairly standard fashion, but this is alternated with a subjective camera which Stearns shoots himself. This footage was captured using a Canon 40D Digital SLR camera for taking rapid fire photo sequences. The sequences that were shot in this fashion take on a jerky, ‘animated’ look that reminded me of Grant Munro and Norman McLaren’s pixilation technique (see Oscar-winning NFB film: Neighbours/Voisins, 1952). It also matches well with the rapid montages of family photographs.

Yellow Sticky Note animation sequence

The sequence in One Big Hapa Family which featured footage from Stearns’ 2005 trip contrasts the differences between Japanese and Canadian conceptions of national identity. In Japan, Stearns found his “Japaneseness” being rejected by most people that he encountered. His appearance and body language did not fit their mould of what it means to be “Japanese”.  In my experience, the Japanese rarely openly question their own sense of national identity because their school system hammers into them the myth of a monoethnic culture – a myth that has been wonderfully negated in books like John Lie’s Multiethnic Japan (Harvard UP, 2001), and David Suzuki and Keibo Oiwa’s The Japan We Never Knew: A Journey of Discovery (Stoddart, 1996). By contrast, in Canada we are taught that identity is a multifaceted entity that is individually rather collectively defined as almost all of us are either mixed ethnicities (or “hapa” - a Hawaiian loan word Stearns explores the use of in this film) or recent immigrants. 

The concept of Japanese-Canadian identity gets refracted into a multiplicity of meanings by Jeff Chiba Stearns’s family when he confronts the younger generation with his camera and asks them the uncomfortable question “What are you?”  For a first time documentarian, he demonstrates a real knack for editing – there are wonderful montages of past and present home movies and photographs that demonstrate both change and continuity within the family. The film also offers up wonderful moments where the memories of one generation differ from those of another generation. The couples of the Sansei generation assert that there were no problems within the family with intermarriage, but that is contradicted by Grandma Stearns who reveals that she and Grandma Chiba did have concerns, but did not tell the younger folks about it. The Yonsei generation also reveals that Japanese food was only eaten for New Year’s or when their father was away because their Caucasian Dad did not like sushi. These tantalizing gems suggest that there are many more stories simmering beneath the surface, but I think that Stearns has managed to balance the needs of his documentary with respect for the privacy of his family quite handily.

One Big Hapa Family is a unique film that captures both serious issues of racism and integration, while at the same time providing a lot of laughs through the wonderful family stories that are shared. It is fascinating to see that after two generations of a concerted effort to integrate, the younger generations are making an effort to retain/reclaim some of their Japanese culture and language. While the main focus may be on Japanese-Canadian identity, it is through the mirror of the Koga family that viewers will see the complexity of their own family and national histories in a new light.

One Big Hapa Family is available for international purchase on Region-Free DVD via the Official Website. It includes both the 85’ Director’s Cut and the 48’ Broadcast version. Bonus materials: One Big Hapa Family CD featuring the soundtrack by Genevieve Vincent.

Jeff Chiba Stearns Filmography
(click on links to watch the films/trailers)

2000 Kip and Kyle

2001 The Horror of Kindergarten

2005 What Are You Anyways?

2007 Yellow Sticky Notes

2010 One Big Hapa Family

2010 Ode to a Post-It Note

To learn more about the film check out:

A talk by Jeff Chiba Stearns after the premiere in Calgary

and

An Interview with Jeff Chiba Stearns

This review was originally published on my sister blog Nishikata Film Review on December 15, 2010.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014