THU, JUL 7 / 7 pm
DIRS: LESLEY LOKSI CHAN, LILLIAN CHAN, ARAM SIU WAI COLLIER, HEATHER KEUNG, SERENA LEE, HOWIE SHIA, JOYCE WONG
2010 | CANADA | 40 MIN
In Suite Suite Chinatown, seven artistically diverse, award-winning Chinese Canadian filmmakers from the Greater Toronto Area are asked: “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.
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.
