Flow of Thoughts – Episode 02: Thoughts on Film (feat. Natalie Murao, Thea Loo, and Alejandro Yoshizawa)
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Transcript
MOSES: The ACAM Podcast in the University of British Columbia is recorded and situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish [Squamish, Tsleil Waututh, and Musqueam] people.
THEA: I think, “Why film? Why the short film? Why make that stuff? Why do I like it?” I agree with Natalie that it’s fun to make, to make things that I feel are not on TV or not on Netflix, [that] I’m not seeing represented, and I love to put together images that people maybe haven’t seen before.
MOSES: Hello, and welcome to the ACAM podcast. I’m your host, Moses Caliboso. On today’s podcast, we will be featuring flows of thought, on film and the filmmaking process from Natalie Murao, Thea Loo, and Alejandro Yoshizawa (Al), over a series of two conversations conducted by myself. My conversation with Natalie and Thea centres around the two’s short film No More Parties (2020), which Natalie directs and Thea produces.
We talk about inspirations for the project, takes on diasporic cinema, and the artistic process of representation. Whereas my conversation with Al centres around his work as the instructor for UBC’s ACAM 350 class, a class dedicated to community-based filmmaking, and using the notion of “finding the film in the edit” as a guiding post. We found this podcast “in the edit”—or, Nat, Thea, and Al’s words found ways to complement each other.
NATALIE: I don’t know. I’ve always been interested in filmmaking, I think. And I think it started off as just photography as a hobby…
MOSES: This is Natalie. Natalie Murao is a fourth generation Japanese Canadian filmmaker and educator from Vancouver. Her work explores themes of generational disconnect, personal memory, and communication. She received her BFA in film production from Simon Fraser University. Her graduating film, Floating Light (2017), went on to play at festivals such as the Asian American International Film Festival, Centre for Asian American Media Festival, and Whistler Film Festival, where it won the ShortWork Student Award.
Her most recent film, No More Parties (2020), was made with the help of the National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker Assistance Program, and had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival. It has since been selected for the TIFF Next Wave Film Festival, and the “Canada’s Not Short on Talent” program at Clermont-Ferrand in 2021, supported by Telefilm. Natalie currently works as a Learning and Outreach Coordinator at the Cinematheque (Vancouver), facilitating filmmaking and media workshops for youth.
NATALIE: … and, like, kind of enjoying writing stories here and there. And then in my high school, we had a film class, like a film production class, and also Film Studies class. So I think that’s when I started to grow more of an appreciation for it. And then film school, that’s when I was like, “Oh, I should start making stories that are relevant to my life.” And when I started doing that, I felt like it resonated with my friends a lot and other people.
And I just thought… I’m losing my train of thought. But I just think that filmmaking, it really puts you there in the story, in the moment, at least for me, when I’m trying to communicate something. I feel like it’s so rich and that you really can be transported to a different, you know, country or culture, more so than other artistic forms. And that’s why I like it, and that’s why I gravitate towards it.
THEA: I started out just loving watching actors.
MOSES: This is Thea. Thea Loo is an emerging film producer who holds a BFA in film production from Simon Fraser University. Currently, she leads outreach programming at the Cinematheque in Vancouver, facilitating and delivering various filmmaking workshops and project-based community programmes. Since June, she has also taken a position as a producer with BDB Productions Inc., a Toronto-based production company dedicated to Black representation on film. Thea’s most recently produced short film, No More Parties (2020), directed by Natalie [Murao], will represent Canadian talent as it takes part in the Telefilm Not Short on Talent program at the Clermont-Ferrand film market in France. She is currently in production for her short documentary, Nanay, which is focused on the patterns of trauma affecting immigrant Filipino families, and it will premiere online in April.
THEA: I did a lot of theatre stuff in high school, and I was always behind the scenes, because of course I like to play with the tech, and and with the lights, and the sound. But I really love to watch people act. And then that paired with the fact that I fancy myself a photographer, and I love to take pictures and I love—I don’t like to take pictures on the street, I like to take pictures, either of just my friends, or I like to take them by lighting and crafting an image. And that comes from theatre, from building a set, you know, and planning your lights out. And then that translated into film because I realized that if I wanted to keep watching actors, and I wanted to keep playing with tech, but I also like cameras, I’d have to go into film. So it wasn’t—I didn’t naturally think of film. It’s just sort of the culmination of all my hobbies.
ALEJANDRO: My route to becoming a filmmaker was really atypical.
MOSES: This is Al. Alejandro Yoshizawa is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, specializing in documentaries, community stories, oral history, and digital media. His films include the award-winning documentary, All our Father’s Relations (2016), Since 2014, he has also taught courses in film production, as well as [for] Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia.
ALEJANDRO: As an undergraduate at UBC, I studied physics and did a minor in history. And then when I went to graduate school, I was [there] for history. So I didn’t go to film school, you know. But my first film, when I made my first film, was when I was an undergraduate at UBC. I would say that I was part of the community which the film represents. So it was about my grandfather, so no surprise, family, right? It was about my grandfather, who I was quite close with, who was, you know, born in Japan. And it was made on the ten year anniversary of his passing. So I just interviewed everyone in my family. And we talked about Grandpa, and we talked about growing up Japanese Canadian, we talked about internment.
And so it was really almost like a reflexive moment. I was creating something for a class, I was creating something that was going to have an outward public face. But I was making it as just a family member in this random Japanese Canadian family. So I was very much the community, I was very much part of the community that my first film came out of. And then as I sort of worked at Concordia [University], I looked at oral history in public history. In particular, when you’re talking to people about their past, it always evokes community as well.
I mean, to me, what is a community film? It’s a film that engages with not only issues, and themes, and topics that are related to the communities in which we live, but also collaborates with the people in those communities. And I think that’s one of the main takeaways from ACAM 350. It’s not… the point isn’t to make a film about a community as an outsider, you know, as a student or as a filmmaker. It is to try to give the voices and collaborate on equal levels with the members of the community themselves, which is really challenging, it’s really difficult. And I certainly, you know, give the students a lot of credit for their efforts. And efforts to not only do that to try to find these stories, and collaborate ethically, but also, you know, just just to work with these different members in the community who sometimes might be reluctant or whatnot. So, no, no—don’t think you can put your finger on it exactly, and be like, “This is what it is.” But certainly, those are the traits that I see come out in the work that we do.
NATALIE: Yeah, so I wrote and directed No More Parties (2020).
MOSES: The synopsis for No More Parties is that Rose, a young Asian Canadianm lives at home with her parents. Despite her sprained ankle and mom’s lecturing, she attends her friend’s karaoke party. Rose must face the consequences of her stubbornness, but reevaluates everything when she hears another voice that is louder than hers.
NATALIE: I actually wrote it in maybe my last year of university, so like 2017. That was just the beginning of it, it wasn’t really anything, and then I worked on it a bit more. And then we ended up pitching it to Storyhive. And it didn’t get there. But we ended up getting some support from the National Film Board of Canada and their Filmmaker Assistant Program. And then, that same time, I was going to be moving to Japan for the JET Program. So I was like, oh shoot, I have to actually make this film. So I think we filmed it and I was packing up to move all in the same month. So it kind of happened really quickly. And I kind of wish I had a little bit more time to work on it. But it pushed me to actually get it done, and make it, and I ended up editing it while I was away in Japan, and then I came back from Japan. And now I’ve released it.
THEA: Yeah, so we shot the film back in 2018. And that was a two-day shoot; it should have been three, but that’s how far we could get. And then as you know, Natalie went to Japan. So we waited and we waited. That was the editing process, which I suppose was kind of like a remote editing collaboration. We had the music done in Montreal, by a good friend of ours. And Natalie was editing Japan, and I was helping our DP colour in Vancouver. I didn’t colour, but we were collaborating on that. And I was sending versions of the [Adobe] Premiere project to our colorist, and dropping off the drives. And I was kind of helping Natalie with synchronizing titles, and sound of course. I [synced] the sound in the end.
NATALIE: I guess you also asked “What was the inspiration for it,” how it kind of started in my brain. And there’s kind of two parts to it. So the first part would be: there’s a lot of talk about the affordability crisis. And kind of like, representing, I guess, “foreign” buyers and these satellite kids in a certain light. And I thought I would kind of put out my take about it, because I grew up around some satellite kids. They would, you know, live alone in a house and then go to high school with me. Or they maybe would live with their grandparents while their parents are away. And so I kind of wanted to humanize them a bit more, show it from their perspective, not in a dramatic way. They just kind of like… here is the situation.
And the other half of the inspiration would be showing, kind of, the Asian household. And I’ll say a little quick story that inspired me. We were watching a film in film class, and it was a film from China. And the girl [in the film], she was in her twenties, and she’s living with her parents. And someone made the comment, “Oh, she should just move out. Like, why is she being babied, living with her parents?” I thought, oh, this—I was really offended by that. I didn’t say anything.
And I felt like, oh, well, actually, maybe they don’t understand. Like, there’s a bit more of a comfort staying at home with your parents. All my other Asian friends, we all kind of live at home with our parents, and we don’t rush to move out. So I thought, okay, well, we don’t see that household in the media very often. I wanted to show that. So there’s kind of these two sides of the story: of living alone and having your parents far away, and then also living with your parents, and kind of that feeling of it.
MOSES: One of the things I asked all three filmmakers about was what thematic narrative and genre through lines emerge, within what we consider “diasporic cinema,” both from the perspectives of student filmmaking as well as their own work as short filmmakers themselves.
ALEJANDRO: With regards to your question, there are common themes that I see come out of the films. I would say yes, and I would say that it’s probably not a surprise to anyone, if I said that probably the two of the biggest themes that come out are identity and family, or family and identity. And identity can sort of extend to community identity. You know, the students are university students, they’re young people. And I think—I don’t want to talk in such cliches, but you know, “finding themselves,” and being able to say something to express themselves, maybe using film for the first time. Yeah, we see a lot—I see a lot of films that deal with identity and family. And a lot of excellent films too.
NATALIE: I think it’s a big question. Diaspora, as a genre, is so vast, right? And I’ve been thinking about that. I feel like when someone mentions diasporic cinema, or the diaspora genre, it’s like you can’t quite pinpoint it, right? Because it’s going to be so diverse, right? Everyone has different experiences, and yeah, I guess it usually is usually paired up with things—or I usually think of diasporic cinemas as having common themes, say, assimilation similar things like that. Language, language loss, generational divides, things like that. And there’s not really like a visual, a visual thread that connects them all together.
There’s always kind of an in-betweenness. And also, I’ve been thinking about how maybe that’s because… you know, say, for example, we want to tell an “Asian Canadian story.” But when an Asian Canadian person wants to tell that story, they have to work within the framework of the conventional way of filmmaking, or the conventional sense of what a narrative is in that scene, right? So I’m trying to figure out, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. “Okay, what is this in-betweenness of them?” Or “What other ways that they can be bridging? And what ways are they breaking?” and things like that.
THEA: As Natalie mentioned, the in-betweenness. Language, intergenerational issues, race issues. I also think of longing, and missing something, I think of being torn between two things. And I find—I like to think that the longings and the things you’re torn between are really complex, they’re not easy. It’s not longing for the girl, you know, or something, it’s longing for your mom that you’re never going to see again, or that you don’t know if you’re going to see again, for example.
So I think that there isn’t—I agree with Natalie—that there isn’t a visual thread that you could just pull apart. I recently watched a film that was Vietnamese, it was by a Vietnamese filmmaker, but it took place in I think Germany. So it is diasporic in that sense. I mean, I had never seen a film like that, because I’ve only seen Asian Canadian, Asian American films, generally. And so this one was really interesting. And I was really—it was hard for me to enter into. That’s what I’ll say. Because I couldn’t understand, I guess, the culture that she was navigating. But it was really great. And I wouldn’t say that visually, it was any particularly similar to stuff that I see in Canada or America.
But I do agree that there is a dominant aesthetic that reigns over all the films that I’ve been seeing, such as at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival. The filmmakers aren’t necessarily breaking away from, but they’re just changing, the mise-en-scène, and you know, it’s just completely different things in the mise-en-scène. Diasporic film loves to feature food, you know, there’s food in every diasporic film I’ve ever watched. That includes the one that was Vietnamese Germa[n], it was actually about food. So, yeah, there’s definitely themes.
I don’t know about visually, but it’s cool that the diasporic film is so vast, as Natalie said. It’s so much more than what we’re just making in Vancouver. It’s all over the world, actually. I’m still waiting on seeing a Filipino Dubai film and waiting for it to happen. Maybe I’ll make one. But yeah, it’s so vast, and I think it’s exciting. That’s what I think about it. I think when I think about it it’s exciting, because I can’t wait to see what the next person is going to make. I can’t wait to make a film myself. There’s just so many stories that have yet to be told. I think that there is an energy to it. And a lot of the diasporic films that I’m seeing in Canada, they’re coming from folks who are in their twenties, thirties, and that’s because they immigrated, or their parents immigrated, maybe in the nineties. And so there’s this rise of films coming through that I’m really enjoying, and I’m loving that I’m meeting a lot of filmmakers who are about my age as well, at least in Canada.
ALEJANDRO: Well, I’ve always liked those stories, those histories, those personal stories, those community stories. Like I said, the very first film I made was just strictly a passion project about my own family’s history. And I was just fascinated to hear, you know, those old stories, those anecdotes. To hear how larger, you know, sociopolitical forces affected or tugged on my family, and the various paths that they took.
With regards to film and sort of the cinematic form, I would say that sort of the democratization of film has been huge. So now you can use a smartphone, you know. I mean, “now”—you could have done that five years ago, use a smartphone to make a pretty good looking film. It wasn’t the same, you know, ten years ago, fifteen, twenty years ago, certainly when I was younger and more like university age. I think that accessibility has opened up an opportunity for so many stories to come out. And then of course, you have, you know, new media platforms, like for instance Vimeo, or YouTube, whatever, where you can just put it all up there and share it with the world or share with your family.
So for me, it was just a combination of: I love history, I think history is just a big story, so you know, anything, any type of history is interesting to me. And then you have this accessibility to these really powerful tools to tell stories, and to share stories and to, you know, affect people. Probably those two combined.
NATALIE: So far, yeah, the films I’ve made have all been very personal stories, or that I experienced and then I put into the film. So for me at least, I just want to see stories that I think need to be told, and I believe I am the right person to tell it as well. Like, I don’t want to tell a story that I’m not fit to tell, or don’t have the right to. And, also, if I have an idea, or I have a feeling… like I think with No More Parties (2020), it was more like a pent-up feeling I had at the time, experiencing living at home. Like, “I just need to tell this.” I had to come out.
And then with Floating Light (2017), I think, it happened when Thea and I were in screenwriting class. And Thea, you were writing—I think you were writing Little Church (2020). And then we were kind of, maybe talking about faith or religion or something, and then that sparked my mind. And I started really thinking about how faith and religion have played a part in my experience growing up. And so it was something that was just, in my mind, a lot I just had to put out there. But maybe in regards to diasporic filmmaking, yeah, maybe in diasporic filmmaking, autobiography plays a big role, because we feel like we need to tell it. I don’t know, maybe that’s just my take on it. Like we see it’s absent, and we just have that motivation that we need to put it out there.
THEA: I think that world-building ends up being a key part of writing the script. What is the world that you’re working in? You know, what’s the mise-en-scène going to look like? I think [that] I think about world-building more than I think about characters. Not because I don’t want to think about my characters, but rather, because that’s the one thing that I know I have mastery over. I know exactly what the world is, exactly what I want it to look like.
You can kind of start with the tropes, you know, [like] a Filipino guy carrying a guitar, right? But how can I make that authentic? Well, I can make it indispensable, because it is indispensable. So I find that, you know, making Little Church (2020), and way back, I was thinking a lot about what’s important to me as a Filipino, what binds me and all my friends together. And I would definitely say that it’s music, whether that’s music that we sing in church, or just music generally, like [in] No More Parties (2020). And so I knew that I couldn’t have a soundscape that was empty.
And soundscape is so important to me and Natalie, and anyone could tell watching our films, how important soundscape is. I think that soundscape is, as they say, it’s “fifty percent of the film,” or something, but it really is part of authentic representation. It has to sound right. If you just put some props up in there, put a Filipino guy with a guitar in there, it’s just, it’s not really real until you make sure that the sound is carrying it and that you’re hearing the right things. You know, I mixed the sound for my film, Little Church (2020) and I weaved together so many, so many little things, just so I could make sure that every single comment was right, and every single note was right. So I think that is a huge part of authentic representation. It’s the sound, and it’s a way to stave off the tropes, you know.
And you know, Natalie, you do such a good job with that in No More Parties. It’s not just some Asians in a karaoke bar, you know. Like the shot that we specifically—that we see of [the karaoke bar] panning, so many people have commented on that shot because it’s not fetishizing like it’s “fun Asian folk in a karaoke bar,” but rather the shot is speaking. And I think that weaving these nuanced elements [is] so tied to, firstly of course, the soundscape. But also to make sure that you’re not looking at a trope, but you’re looking at something that is indispensable. And you’ve thought a lot about how you wanted to show that thing that you’re thinking about.
MOSES: One of the parting questions I asked Thea before the end of our conversation was on her work as a producer, as a creator. How do you mediate the multiplicities of voices and considerations, ideas and thoughts, across a singular piece of work?
THEA: It’s a learning process, and I’m still very new at it. Learning how to mediate the small things—you know, it’s the small things, it’s not the big things between differences between people—and therefore understanding their work. As a producer, I want to work on all kinds of films. And of course, in my heart, I would love to work on Asian Canadian work, Asian American work. But I do realize I’m not going to get to work on every project. Not every project I work on is going to be Asian Canadian or Asian American.
And what I try to do personally is just research. When I started working with this company [BDB Productions Inc.] out in Toronto, I watched the TV shows that they told me to watch. And, you know, I don’t know if anyone’s ever heard of Ghost, but I’ve been watching Ghost on Starz, and it’s great. It’s not something I would have ever chosen to watch myself. But you know, even them telling me to go watch Ghost was interesting, because I had never even heard of Starz—“S-T-A-R-Z.”
I’m not sure if you guys are aware of Starz, but it’s a platform for watching stuff, like Netflix. And so, you know, you’ve got to do the research. So if someone says, “This is what I’m inspired by,” go and watch it, and try your best to understand it. And that might even mean not only watching it, but reading every single article review about it, you know, listening to podcasts of people talking about the film or the TV show, and then, you know, carefully considering and weighing why people are saying things about and how I can relate to that, or how I understand that. So yeah, it’s researching.
And it’s also just being very open, you know. I think it’s really important to take people’s opinions seriously, and to take their inspiration seriously, to not just listen to them talk about their background, but to actually dig into it, to hear their whole story, you know, and to try to be friends with them. So I’ve been trying really hard to be friends with these guys in Toronto, because I don’t know anything about them. And they don’t know anything about me. But we’re trying to build a relationship so that when we work on a project together, there’s a lot of trust across the two conversations.
MOSES: The final question that I had to give was toward Al, and that question was: What is the power in indie and community-based filmmaking?
ALEJANDRO: It’s just, you know, telling stories that you might not have heard otherwise, and telling stories that aren’t attached to a big Hollywood studio production. It’s about not only telling the story, but also collaborating. I mean, it’s about making connections that survive beyond sort of the deliverable of the film. And it’s about giving a voice and a platform to people in your own community, or communities that you’re collaborating with. So that’s what I think.
MOSES: And that concludes our podcast today. We’d love to give special thanks to Natalie, Thea and Al for their contribution and for their conversation. The ACAM podcast is produced and created by the University of British Columbia’s Asian Canadian Asian Migration Studies program (ACAM). If you would like to contact us, feel free to catch us at @UBCACAM on either Twitter or Instagram. Thanks for listening.
Learn more about the guests and their work:
Thea Loo
Natalie Murao
Alejandro Yoshizawa