May 18 2006

Award-Winning Filmmakers join Cineworks for our first Salon of the 2006/2007 season, part ofexplorASIAN 2006.

Canadian women working in the documentary genre have changed the way we see and understand the world. This dynamic panel discussion features three award-winning Asian Canadian women working at the interstices of non-fiction and fiction filmmaking: Linda Ohama (OBAACHAN's GARDEN), Ann Marie Fleming (THE MAGICAL LIFE OF LONG TACK SAM) and Karin Lee (COMRADE DAD). NON-FICTION / FICTION is the first Cinematic Salon in our 8th season and will take place Thursday May 18th, 7:00pm at Cineworks Studio (1131 Howe St., back lane entrance). Admission is by donation.

At the intersections of gender, race, the personal and the political, these Asian Canadian women directors the examine form and content of documentary. They frequently combine experimental, narrative, and documentary approaches, creating what Kass Banning has called “the feminist hybrid documentary”. NON-FICTION / FICTION will discuss the characteristics of a specifically feminist approach to documentary filmmaking, a genre typically associated with “objectivity” and “realism”.



Ann Marie Fleming is one of Canada's most distinctive independent filmmaking talents. Her diverse body of work includes shorts, documentaries, avant-garde and animated films and the recent feature THE FRENCH GUY. A strong believer that the personal is the political, her films delve into auto/biographical and family history with a rare blend of irony, pathos, whimsy and humor. As she says in her documentary THE MAGICAL LIFE OF LONG TACK SAM "history is relatives."



Karin Lee is a fourth-generation Chinese Canadian filmmaker. Her films and videos include the Gemini award-winning documentary MADE IN CHINA and COMRADE DAD, a documentary about the Communist bookstore that her father ran in Vancouver from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s.



Linda Ohama is a third-generation Japanese Canadian artist and filmmaker. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Harbourfront Centre and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her documentaries include THE LAST HARVEST and OBAACHAN’S GARDEN, which won the Audience Award at the 2001 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Moderator Su-Anne Yeo was born in Singapore and raised in London, England and Vancouver. A PhD student in Communication at Simon Fraser University, she is conducting research on experimental documentaries and Asian Canadian social movements. She is Director of Programming for the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and worked previously for public broadcasters in British Columbia and Singapore.

See Karen Lee's COMRADE DAD part of explorFILM http://www.explorasian.org/eventdocs/explorfilm.html



This event is sponsored by Women in Film and Video Vancouver, the National Film Board of Canada and made possible with the support of the Province of BC and the City of Vancouver.

Now in its 8th season, CINEMATIC SALON provides a rare opportunity for independent film community and audiences to engage with filmmakers on a variety of creative topics in an intimate and interactive environment.