SUITE SUITE CHINATOWN
Introduced by director Aram Siu Wai Collier
In Suite Suite Chinatown, seven artistically diverse,
award-winning Chinese Canadian filmmakers from the Greater Toronto Area
were asked by the Reel Asian festival, “What is your Chinatown?”
Their responses are woven into an interesting multi-genre cinematic
vision of Chinatown where anything is possible and the unexpected shall
be expected.
Suite Suite Chinatown proffers a place where disposable
materials take on mythic qualities; where family histories and personal
memories unfold in pixilated layers; where the history of any Chinatowns
anywhere can be turned on and off like a light switch. Despite their
different approaches to the Chinatown theme, these second-generation
filmmakers are unified by a nostalgic concern for Chinatown’s past,
present and future.
|
|
Howie Shia and Lilian Chan's Chinatown Overture is an organic animation that alludes to a changing and literally "fluid" Chinatown.
|
|
The animated short by Howie Shia and Lilian Chan Lipsync observes the diversity of Chinese culture and language. |
 |
Serena Lee's Pretty Lucky is a saturated collision of YouTube and karaoke videos with folk art traditions that together are both endearing and tacky. |
 |
Heather Keung's Auntie and Uncles are brooding and boisterous, re-scanned home-move tributes to family characters familiar to us all. |
|
Elizabeth Street, by
Lesley Loksi Chan, features a lone image of Toronto's original Chinatown
and comments on our abilities to turn history on and off. |
|
Aram Siu Wai Collier's neo-noir Plastic Future spins the space and values of Chinatown from a new perspective. |
 |
Joyce Wong's excitingly inclusive HOW TO PARTY...will have audiences stomping their feet. |
PLAYS WITH
A New Year Cake, dir. Aram Siu Wai Collier, 2011, Canada, 23 min. A New Year Cake
is a film profile of a grandmother, Pau Pau, and her family observed
through created fictions, recreated facts and lived events set against
the backdrop of Lunar New Year celebrations in San Francisco. Using a
collaborative approach between the participants and director to create
the film,
A New Year Cake focuses on simple tasks that take on larger meaning through themes of independence, aging, legacy, and food.
A New Year Cake is excerpted from a larger film triptych that is a work in progress currently entitled Cake & Dumplings.
About director Aram Siu Wai Collier:
Chinese and English/Dutch, Aram Siu Wai Collier was born and
raised in San Francisco, where he studied film and worked on the
independently produced PBS documentaries Refugee and Who I Became. He holds an MFA in film production at York University.
Suite Suite Chinatown is generously sponsored by the Manitoba Asian Heritage Society and the Winnipeg Chinese Cultural and Community Centre.