Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 222: Beyond Extinction — with Ali Kazimi
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Ali Kazimi
[theme music]
Kathy Feng 0:02
Hello listeners! I’m Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Ali Kazimi. Ali is a Governor General’s Award winning documentarian, and associate professor at York University's School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design. Together, Am and Ali discuss the filmmaking and research process of his various films, including his latest, Beyond Extinction: A Sinixt Resurgence, as well as the effort it takes to maintain autonomy as a filmmaker. We hope you enjoy the episode!
[theme music fades]
Ali Kazimi 0:44
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We are very lucky to have filmmaker documentarian Ali Kazemi with us. Welcome Ali.
Ali Kazimi 0:55
Thank you, Am. It's wonderful to be here.
Am Johal 0:58
Yeah. We had a chance to be in conversation last year at the DOXA Film Festival where you were screening your latest documentary and had a masterclass. It was wonderful to be in conversation with you. I'll just start with you, maybe introducing yourself a little bit.
Ali Kazimi 1:15
I'm a documentary filmmaker. But I also have done a little bit of work in video installation. I teach—I'm a professor at York University. I teach film production. I came to Canada in 83. So this is—this August will be 40 years since I came here. I initially came as a film student on exchange from India to York and York had set up a film program, a graduate of film program in India, at a university in Delhi, the Jamia Millia Islamia University. After a year, I was given the option to stay on. And ended up actually finishing a second undergraduate degree in film production, and then worked as a documentary film—independent documentary filmmaker pretty much till I joined York in 2006. So, almost 20 years, I worked as an independent filmmaker, and then decided that it was just a really hard go at it, to make the kinds of films that I want to make and to get funding for them. And to get—to earn a living wage in that process was challenging. So I decided I would, I would teach at York. And I've been teaching since, but I've continued my practice, as a filmmaker.
Am Johal 2:30
What first drew you to making films, like even as a student deciding to pursue film, is it something you're always in love with?
Ali Kazimi 2:38
I was in love with film, but I had never considered filmmaking as an option. What had drawn me was photography, and particularly documentary photography. And I was self-taught. I learned processing and printing as a teenager. And by the time I got to university, after highschool, I didn't know what, what I wanted to do. So I did a general degree in, in science, in physics, chemistry, and math. And then I joined a college in—part of Delhi University, St. Stephen's College, which had a wonderful photographic society, a long standing photographic society. And that pushed me to new, pushed my understanding of photography and increase my practice.
By the time I finished university, I realized that I was also doing radio. I was—the All India Radio, which is the equivalent of CBC in here. I had a youth channel called Yuna Vani. And I was doing in English I was doing short, extended feature reports on current affairs. I had my own music show in, in sort of pop music, pop and rock, was what I played. But I decided I wanted to combine the two of them. I was inspired by a film that was shot here actually in Vancouver, a film called A Time to Rise by Anand Patwardhan.
Am Johal 4:07
He was just in Vancouver about a year ago, visiting Martin Godfrit and Patricia, and they did a public event here. I met him very briefly, yes.
Ali Kazimi 4:15
Yeah, and so Anand, right from that time has been an inspiration and now a dear friend. So when I saw Time to Rise, suddenly I was, I was very excited because here was film being used in a way that I hadn't been exposed to before. And what I had been exposed to, in terms of documentary, was the theatrically watching Films Division of India, which is the equivalent of the National Film Board here, which showed 10 to 15 minute short docs before every feature. Some of them were interesting, but most of them were, were about nation building. But then here was Anand's film which was strong, oppositional, dissenting. And it, I still remember that moment of excitement.
I heard about this graduate program being set up. The only thing in Delhi that offered remotely of a sense of film training was an advertising school, The Indian Institute of Mass Communication, which was a very prestigious program. In the first term, I realized that this was not for me. I was constantly challenging and questioning my, my professors, you know, on the ethics of why are we selling sugared drinks to rural India, where there's—many people don't have enough to eat? And one of them finally said to me, "Kazimi, what are you doing here?" And that was a really good question.
I did manage to do a month-long internship in a, in a nonprofit that was making documentaries. And then this program came along, that was set up by York, so I jumped ship. And that's how I got into film. You know, then I was exposed to the work of, while I was at film school, Mira Nair had come from—with her first documentary called So Far From India, actually it was her first feature documentary. And of course, over there, we were shown a bunch of NFB films. When I came here, I was exposed to the work of Alanis Obomsawin, Paul Cowan, Donald Brittain, and my passion for documentaries just grew.
Am Johal 6:27
And now, your arrival into Canada of, you know, the early 80s, 83/84. What were your thoughts coming from India and landing in a place like Toronto in that, in that time?
Ali Kazimi 6:40
You know, one of my colleagues at York says that race was a concept for him in India, but as soon as he arrived in Canada, he started living race. And that's, that's pretty much true for me. Literally, from the moment, I landed, you know, my colleague, and I had come on student visas, there were these student visas stuck in our passports from the Canadian High Commission. Our professor was waiting to pick us up outside. And we had letters from the university, which we handed them and the scholarship was worth several thousand dollars.
So, we were taken in for secondary interrogation. You know, it was—it was kind of surreal, because we were expecting some kind of—this was the last thing I expected.
[laughs]
And one of the questions I remember him asking, "So, well, how do I know you haven't got this visas in some backstreets of Delhi? Or, where is that money, which suitcases is the money for the scholarship?" And and then he finally said, "the only reason I'm letting you into my country is because you speak such good English."
So that was a that, that was interesting. But, you know, 83/84 there was still a residue of the deep anti-South Asian period that Toronto had gone through and Vancouver as well. This is a period of Paki-bashing, which had been, the term had been imported from the UK, where the far right, led by Enoch Powell, had been pushing against the exclusion of South Asians. It was a very isolating experience initially. There were a few friends I made who are friends till today. But then that initial experience led me and my colleague to explore issues of race and belonging.
Am Johal 8:30
Now, what were some of the first projects you got involved in after you finished school at York?
Ali Kazimi 8:37
You know, it was a difficult time. I graduated in 87, I was still on a student visa. And then it took another two years, I had a work permit for a couple of years. And I only got my landed papers, my permanent residency, in 89. So those two years were, were a bit challenging, because I couldn't access funding, couldn't apply for projects, and so I was deemed—you know, I wasn't Canadian or a permanent resident. And I wasn't sure of what I wanted to do.
I decided that—so I had voraciously watched Canadian television, as a way—and listened to CBC, as a way of beginning to understand the country. And particularly on television, I was struck by these deep stereotypes of—people had of the so called Third World and that were, you know, pushed consciously and unconsciously in the reporting on television. And it was this narrative of hapless victims in the third world who have, who cannot comprehend what's happening to them. And they are looking to the west for answers. And it's the West that is ultimately the savior.
So, a friend of mine in India, Ashish Kothari, who was one of the cofounders of an environmental group called Kalpavriksh, which still exists today. They had done an incredible walk along the Narmada River, they had walked over 1,200 kilometers from the source of the river to its to the point where it finally meets the Arabian Sea. And they had uncovered this largely unknown project called the Narmada Valley Development Project, which was going to create three large dams, 30 medium dams and 300 small dams. And this entire project, if completed, was going to displace millions of people.
So what was interesting was that Kalpavriksh was an environmental group. But I got excited by the idea that environmentalism for them included people, it wasn't just about forests and conservation. And, so in 1990, I went back to India and I met Ashish and he said, “there's this—the leader of the movement, Medha Patkar, is visiting. Why don't you come and meet her?” So I said, "Okay," I was excited. I met her. And she said, she said, "Are you really interested?" I said, "Yes. And I've read—this is what I read up.” And, you know, she's an old friend. She said, "Well, if you're really interested, come with me tonight."
[laughs]
So, I had a few hours to, to go back to my sister's place, pack up, and off I went with Medha. And I spent two weeks with her crisscrossing the valley and it was a transformative experience. It convinced me that this is what I wanted to make a film on. So, I remember coming back—there was no time to raise money, and I decided to, I had some savings, and I rented a camera, which was a Hi8 camera, professional Hi8 camera, a format that had not been tested, but promised broadcasts standard and I broke the camera apart to smuggle it in. I convinced the customs officers that these Hi8 tapes were actually audio cassette tapes—they look like, just slightly bigger than audio cassette tapes—hired a crew and we arrived on Christmas Day in the Narmada Valley.
And we'd been told that there was going to be a peace march, there's going to be a protest march that was going to walk from the middle of the submergence zone of one of the large dams, called the Sardar Sarovar Dam, and they were going to walk over 100 kilometers from the middle of the submergence zone to the dam site. And they assured me that this is going to take 10 days, so I'd come prepared for 10 days. Well, it took five weeks.
[laughs]
And I came back with all this footage. The reason I wanted to do this film was—and the film is called Narmada: A Valley Rises—because I was trying to create an alternative narrative to the narrative that I saw on Canadian television. And I felt that as someone who grew up in India, now living in Canada, I could bridge that. And, you know, certainly my understanding of what was happening in India was, had also radically shifted by my experience in Canada, but also the Canadian experience and its treatment of Indigenous peoples over here. So, from the time I arrived to the time I went to shoot this film, my worldview had been highly politicized, and, and engaged. That film took another three and a half years to make. And it premiered at TIFF in 1994.
And since then, what I've been trying to do is to make films that —because it's so hard to make films—I keep telling my students, you know, you have to be really committed to an idea, you have to be absolutely passionate, because you're going to be tested about your faith and what you want to do at every stage. You'll hear 'no' more than you'll hear 'yes.' And each time you hear no, it will raise doubts, and it will raise questions, whether you're doing the right thing or not. So your commitment has to be, in a way, absolute.
So, you know, I've made films that deal with, with race in different ways in Canada. And my practice has been to look at race archives, which I fell in love with while researching some archival footage for Narmada, and the, the migrant experience. And I asked myself, okay, so I've done this film in India. I don't necessarily want to do another film there, I want to explore what's happening in Canada around race. And there was not a lot of work being done in that time. And the reason there was not a lot of work being done is that there were very few film—documentary filmmakers of colour from the mid 80s to the mid 90s. And all of them who were trying to do this work, were facing all kinds of barriers. These were not stories that were easy to convince broadcasters to, to come on board. And the broadcaster is key because they then—then triggers other funding and other support. That's what I was committed to doing.
Am Johal 14:59
I'm gonna ask you about your film, Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas, you screened a little bit during our conversation last year. And how did you start that project or how did that come about?
Ali Kazimi 15:14
That started in film school actually. So, it was a project that—I did that in my second year. And again, every year we thought we were going to go back. So this was a project that I was going to take back with me to India and I wanted to make something about Canada. And I didn't want to make, I didn't want to duplicate what my Canadian colleagues, who had gone to India on exchange had done, coming back with cliched images of ragpickers, slums, cars on streets. This kind of very superficial, visual stereotypical image of the margins of India. I had been really quite shocked by the position of Indigenous peoples in Canada. And so I said, “Okay, I want to make a film about this.” You know, the responses from my colleagues pushed me even more. I remember some of my classmates making comments—sort of racist, stereotypical comments about Indigenous peoples and how one could never work with them and all kinds of stuff and, and that just fueled my commitment to do something.
But I didn't know where to begin. So, I thought I'd start by reading and then having conversations. So, homelessness—Indigenous homelessness was something I thought I wanted to do. So, I went to a soup kitchen in, in Toronto. There was a place set up called Council Fire set up by an Anishinabeg elder. And when I called her up, she said, "Okay, you really want to do this?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Well, why don't you come and serve soup then?" So, I went to the soup kitchen, I served soup. And then I would sit and have conversations with people. And I quickly realized, I just didn't have time and the depth of understanding to do this any justice.
But there was a Indigenous magazine, a wonderful magazine, shortlived, unfortunately, called Sweet Grass that had been—starting to publish out of Toronto and in one of the issues was this portfolio by a young, self described urban Iroquois photographer, Jeffrey Thomas. And I was so excited. I still remember that moment, because—for two reasons, one, the way he was using documentary photography was completely different from the classical sense that I had learned looking at American and European photographers and some Indian photographers. His work was, was unique in terms of its composition and what the compositions were trying to say. And he was also working with diptychs, these juxtapositions.
So, I finally tracked him down and had a conversation and he was, he was about four years older than me. And we were, we were young and he was quite surprised that I had sought him out. Because he said, "You know, I'm just just starting off, why why would you want to make a film on me?" And that—it was a good question. So I’ve described the first part. To the second thing was, I could relate to him as a photographer. So we could, we could talk about photography. And I was interested in his approach. What he was trying to do was to challenge the visual stereotypes of Indigenous people that really—and photographically emerged out of, particularly, of the work of iconic American photographer, Edward Sherriff Curtis.
Now, Curtis had done a multi-volume set of books called the North American Indian. And he'd made a commitment to himself that he was going to document the traditional way of life in the American West, and actually the Canadian West, before colonization. Before Indigenous people became modernized, and therefore [before] their culture vanished. So he would pose people and he was working with very slow shutter speeds, old cameras, large plates, so people had to sit very still. So he would, he would select his people who had tremendous character. And a book had come out at the same time in 84 that unearthed, before and after images of Curtis's own negatives, where it was seen that he had—you know, if you took if you took a portrait of two men sitting in a teepee resting in their traditional clothes, but there was an alarm clock in between them, so Curtis would erase that out. Because it wasn't supposed to be there. This was, these were supposed to be pre-contact images. And then it was further revealed that he used the same headdress. For example, he carried costumes with him and put on headdresses on people, or asked them to wear the same clothes.
And so Curtis was being denounced. Jeff was part of that denunciation. And he was trying to challenge those—Curtis's images—by doing his own before and after with powwow dances. And he would photograph powwow dancers in their ordinary clothes, you know, leaning against their cars. And then the next image would be them in their full powwow regalia, sort of looking, like, almost like the Curtis-like images, but shot radically differently with, with completely non-traditional compositional style. And so we went, we started working on this film. Unfortunately, Jeff's personal life fell apart, and he left Toronto. So I was left with a partially finished film. But it was, I was shooting on 16 millimeter. So I held on to the negative. Moved several times. And then I met Jeff's son, Bear Thomas, who told me that his dad was working in the National Archives, and I said I was going, going there for some research.
So I met Jeff and I showed him the cut of the film that I had done till then. And I documented, which is the moment in the film itself, and he was kind of, of course he's—we're both older, he's more established. And we decided to pick up the film again. But he said, "You know, I was always concerned about this being about me. I just don't like this focus solely about [me].” So I said, “why don't we take this approach about—where it is a dialogue between us." So it is a dialogic approach. It's the first film where I started using my own voice and locating myself. So I locate myself. And I locate myself as, in a way, as a naive interlocutor, where I mentioned many moments in the film, for example, when Jeff and I went to First Nations—the Six Nations reserve, his reserve for the first time, which is in Brantford, Ontario. I remember looking for totem poles.
[laughs]
Because there were so many totems—there are, there are—in public places in Toronto, there's at least half a dozen totem poles. And I remember Jeff turning to me very patiently explaining that totem poles are not part of—they are only on the Pacific coast. So I felt embarrassed. But I included all those moments in the film as part of my own learning, through this experience, and that's how the film came about.
So, we followed powwow dancers. We visit Jeff's great aunt, who was an inspiration to him. We visited Alert Bay when I discovered that Edward Curtis had photographed that community. And in 1991, I had shot—Vancouver Metis filmmaker, Loretta Todd. I shot part of her film called Forgotten Warriors about Native war veterans. The production manager was Barb Cranmer, also a filmmaker. She was from Alert Bay. And I called up, I called up Barb and I said, “Is there anyone in your community who remembers Edward Curtis?” She said, “Oh, Ali, my great aunt. She's nearly 100 years old, so you better come now.” And so off Jeff and I went, literally within, within a month. So that's how that film came about.
And what's interesting is that in 2019, I got the Governor General's Award, and Jeff is a good friend. So I called up Jeff and I said, “I'm not supposed to share this, but you know, I'm, I'm coming to Ottawa”—that where he lives—“for the Governor General's Award.” He laughed, and he said, “I'm not supposed to tell this to you either, but I've— I'm also getting the award.”
[laughs]
So we were—a few months later we in Rideau Hall, looking at ourselves and just laughing, thinking, we could never have imagined this, the first time when we met at the, at the native friendship center in Toronto in 1984, that 35 years later, we'd be here, in Rideau Hall, getting this this award.
Am Johal 23:45
Yeah, it's a really memorable part of that film, where you're showing images, and I think it's from Edward Curtis' In The Land of the Head Hunters, and the person who you're describing was almost 100. She was a young girl in, in the film.
Ali Kazimi 24:01
Yeah. And so we showed her the film that Edward Curtis shot in the community, which was called In The Land of the Head Hunters. Now that film is the film that would eventually inspire Robert Flaherty, who did Nanook of the North. So he learned everything from Curtis—Curtis' experience. And Maggie, when she watched the film, she kept laughing. And she’d point—for her, it was a home movie, she kept pointing out, that's my uncle. That's another relative. And when there was a—her daughter was with us, and she disclosed to her daughter, in the Kwakiutl language, in Kwakʼwala, that Curtis had asked her to pose naked. As she kept—and she keeps looking at the camera giving this coy, smiling, laughing, said, “I was only 17.” And her daughter's completely surprised, she said, “I've never heard that story before.”
So, and you know, for Jeff, it was interesting meeting her because it gave him a deeper understanding of Curtis's approach to people. And the fact that Curtis wasn't forcing anybody to do this. That he had a deep respect, he was trying to raise money—he was trying to do two things at the same, he's trying to walk a fine line between doing this large, mega documentation project, but at the same time making images that would sell to the public. And in fact, in his last, the last book that he does, he stops—he starts documenting people in everyday western clothes. And by this time, Jeff had evolved in his understanding of Curtis. And that, that moment of meeting Maggie and hearing her talk about her relationship with Curtis, I think solidified his, his view on what was, what was happening between the people who were sitting for this portrait, and Curtis.
Am Johal 26:04
Now, later on, you, of course, did the film around the Komagata Maru, Continuous Journey. And it's remarkable once again, you know, going into the archives, where you, you find the film footage that, you know, people had talked about, but nobody really knew where it was. And just wondering if you could speak a little bit to, you know, your research and how you approach the story. You know, I was taught in history classes when I was in high school, parents talked about it, but you are trying to tell the story in a full sweep, in a different way. But how your approach to research allows you to have the luck in finding something like this.
Ali Kazimi 26:43
And luck it was, Am.
[laughs]
It wasn't—and you know, you said that people had known, no, nobody knew this footage existed. So for people who don't know, the Komagata Maru was a ship that came to Vancouver in 1914, May 23. It was carrying 376 would be immigrants from India, it was forced to anchor just over a kilometer offshore from, from the harbor, and no one was allowed to disembark and then there was a court case. And finally, 22 people who had lived in Canada before were allowed to disembark and the rest were turned away. And the court basically asserted that Canada had the right to discriminate against fellow British subjects on the basis of race. And the project was to create a white man's country and hold Canada as a white man's country. And, of course, these different strategies were applied for the Japanese and the Chinese before them.
So, you know, at that time, there were only just over 25 still photographs of the events. But I knew that motion picture cameras were being used. We just talked about Edward Curtis shooting In The Land of the Head Hunters around the same time. And, this was such an important large event, an epic event in Vancouver, that I was convinced somebody, somebody had—must have documented this. I put out a little desperate plea to—there is an International Association of Moving Image Archivists, and archivists tend to be passionate and very generous. And, I got responses from a couple of people in—around the world, I got four responses, and they all said, we've looked for this, but it doesn't exist, no one's come across it. And, you know, they had they offered various theories, this was, this was an era when film stock was made out of nitrate, and was prone to spontaneously catching fire, hence the film later on, was Kodak when Kodak created a film called safety film, which was referred to that that what happened with nitrate stock.
So, and one of the things I did in the film was also talk about, not just the early South Asian experience around, that preceded the Komagata Maru and after it, but also what was happening, what was the Japanese experience and what was the Chinese experience. You know, when these histories are taught they are so compartmentalized. People who know about the Chinese head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act, know only about that, or people who know about the Japanese immigration and then the Japanese internment during the Second World War, it—so it becomes a very narrowly focused narrative. But when you go through the archive, you will realize that that the bureaucrats and and the gatekeepers were make making linkages of all these experiences, and they were applying what they had learned from the Chinese, to the Japanese, and then to the South Asians, and working within an Imperial context, because Canada's External Affairs at that time were handled by the Imperial government in London.
The reason I bring that up is because I reached out to my friend, Richard Fung, who had done a film on early Chinese migration called Dirty Laundry. And he had used a lot of Moving Image archive that he'd sourced from the National Archives in Ottawa. So he had it on tape, and I said, I've got this, this reference to the, the Chinese experience, and the tape had been sitting on my table for years. I had reached a point where I thought I couldn't do this film, it had been five years of hitting a wall. And I just thought, “I just can't do this. It's just impossible.” I was talking to another friend on the phone, and I just got that three quarter inch tape transferred to VHS at the time, that's, that's the way we would look at tapes, and I was scanning it on the phone. Suddenly, these shots of troops with fixed bayonets and ammunition, marching through the streets of Vancouver appeared. And I know it was the only time that has happened—was when, in the final days of attempts were made to push away the Komagata Maru and two Canadian regiments were mobilized in Vancouver and they put up the show of force. They marched through the streets to show the public their resolve, and they were ready to, to attack the passengers on the ship, who had become very defiant by that point.
I think, as I recognize this, I just thought to myself, "Okay, this is that day, and my thought was going to come to mind that the ship, they must have filmed the ship." In—as I was thinking that, the ship appears.
[laughs]
It was, it was this incredibly—I was just stunned and I told my friend, “I've got to stop.” I put the phone down and I watched this. I remember, I had chills, I had goosebumps. And I kept thinking, “This is—I don't know how this is happening.” I—and that section lasts only about, just under two minutes. I rewound it back, watched it again and I literally started crying.
[laughs]
I—it was—for two reasons. One, I had found this, something that—and you know, watching that as a moving image is radically different from watching still images. It literally come makes the moment come alive. And I also knew that there was no going back for me, that I had to finish the film some way. And, you know, since then, I've been working—I've been passionate about, what is there in the archive and what is not, what is collected,what is not collected. These—this collection that—the reason this footage was there, and that was randomly put into a reel—it was a reel of basically clips from Vancouver that had been salvaged by collectors and archivists, that had all been spliced together, in a truly random order, with no relationship to each other, but just belonging to a certain period from, say, 1910 to—or 1912 to 1922, in that 10 year period. And this footage was there. And it was completely—it was not cataloged as being—there was not even a key word, nothing. Yeah and finally it led to me finishing that, that film.
Am Johal 33:53
In that film, you also go to the headquarters of the Ghadar Party, as well. How was that experience for you?
Ali Kazimi 34:02
I actually didn't go to the Ghadar party headquarters till after the film—I—because, again, I was working on a limited budget. So, but I use a lot of the Ghadar party, you know, paraphernalia, their newspapers which will publish both in Gurmukhi and in Urdu. I mean, most people forget that Urdu was not just used by the few Muslim families that were here, but many people in Punjab, the province of Punjab in the— in British India was in fact a Muslim majority province, and the language of instruction in schools was Urdu. So, most, if not all, Sikhs also knew how to read Urdu.
But I went to the Ghadar party headquarters in 2005 when my film played at a Punjabi festival in Yuba City, in California, and there was a wonderful librarian in [the] University of California, Davis campus, Punjabi, who had been creating a web page, a very rough web page on Pioneer 06 and it was with him I went to, to San Francisco to the, to the library of—so the Indian government now holds the building. So you have to go to the Indian consulate to get access to go into the Ghadar party headquarters and it was fascinating to see what they were reading. Everything from basic English, there were, there were instruction books on how to use guns. There were books on world affairs. And that, was that was a really interesting and a profound, again, a very moving experience.
Am Johal 35:46
In each of your films, and the next one I'm going to bring up is Random Acts of Legacy, is that you, you know, you begin a project, you have a certain type of idea. And then it's just, you know, the process of research or there's a moment at which something gets stuck, because I think as with all documentary filmmakers, when you begin a project to where you end up, you're not quite sure where that's going to take you. And the research process can shape that, on the case of the Continuous Journey of finding this footage that opens up a new avenue, could you talk a little bit about Random Acts of Legacy, because it begins with accessing a kind of archive and trying to understand what it is.
Ali Kazimi 36:28
Yeah, and that's actually directly linked to my finding this footage, because what, what the Komagata Maru moving image find suggested to me that there were—that there might be other moving image documentation of communities of colour that is not seen.
And the second question it raised is why, why isn't there other documentation of, of people of colour in the archives, both in Canada and the US. As part of the process of making Continuous Journey, I had been buying home movies on eBay. Because it was a way of creating moving images of that time and using them in different ways. Which was far cheaper than getting images from commercial libraries, which, you know, you end up paying as filmmakers, you pay something like $60, $60 a second if you're lucky. And the costs add up very, very rapidly.
So, I would often scan through eBay, and suddenly this—I noticed that this—somebody was selling a lot of 16 millimeter rolls, and they put out an image of what was there in one of the frames and it was this incredibly, impeccably well dressed Chinese couple in Banff. She was wearing a full length mink fur coat and he was wearing a double breasted suit and a hat. There was a kind of a cognitive dissonance for me looking at that images because this, it didn't fit with the, with the whole Chinese experience in the, in that, in that time, because remember, it—the Chinese Exclusion Act is still enforced till 1948. And the Chinese, like the South Asians, don't have the right to vote, therefore the lack of franchise prevents people from getting into any professional career, becoming lawyers or even going to university. So how did this wealthy couple come about? And then, then the seller said—I had an exchange with him—he said, "Oh, by the way, I have a name. There's a name on, on the package." This was shocking to me, because, of course, I searched the name and the name was Silas Fung.
And Silas Fung was an avid collector, based out of Chicago, of the Chicago's World's Fair paraphernalia, and he'd set up his own private museum.
[laughs]
A very eccentric man and, and he then moved that museum to Florida and there was a Chinese American museum in Chicago that had hosted his daughter a few years earlier. I just said to the, to the seller, and at that time, you could do that, “Can I just buy the whole lot? You just name a price to me. This is—belongs to a family and I want to retain, retain it as.” I —it was—I spent over I think it was a couple of $1,000 I sent to him, sight unseen, outside the framework of, of eBay. Think all fingers and toes crossed, thinking, “I'll get something.” He did send me the footage, which was a relief, but the footage was badly damaged. That little detail I didn't know and that prevented me from scanning it. It took me about seven years to find someone who would scan it. And then I tracked down the daughter.
Am Johal 40:13
I remember you saying something last time, which is the secret to cleaning up the film, you have to mention that because it's, sort of, there’s, there's technical expertise and things, but there's also all sorts of workarounds you can do.
Ali Kazimi 40:24
There’s all sorts of work arounds. So, there were two things happening with the film. One was—it was water damage. Second was that it had been sitting in, probably, a place that was too warm or, or too hot—in a room that was hot. So the film was warped, the emulsion was, was—and it had shrunk. In many cases, the emulsion was, was coming off. So the frames were disappearing. And it was degrading. So, when, when 16 millimeter film starts—it's made out of acetate. Acetate, when it—when it's oxidized, turns into acetic acid, which is the vinegar. So you have this thing called the vinegar syndrome, when you open a can of film that is gyrating, it is like, you know, you’re getting hit by this overpowering vinegar smell.
So this retired engineer came to us at York and said, you know, he's developed this way of, of scanning films, I said, “My film, my no one is able to scan this. Can you scan it?” He, he took on the challenge, and he managed to scan it. So I said to him, “How did you do this?” He said, "Oh, I I soaked it in a, in a pale of WD-40." Which, which seemed like a completely odd thing. It made no sense to me, it seemed so peculiar and so left field. But later, I was talking to a film conservator, and he said, "Oh, yeah, we used to use that." Because WD-40 was initial use was to, was to, it was invented to ensure that rubber retained its elasticity. So we would, if film was starting to get warped or it was too dry, we would treat with WD-40 and to, to bring back it's, it's elasticity. But that, that saved me. So, in a way, all those imperfections, I fully embrace them. So from that point on, it was like, okay, bring on the imperfections and let's, let's work with them.
Am Johal 42:31
So, you have the film, you are able to access the footage. And so begins the process of the documentarian slash private investigator to piece this story together. And where did it, where did it lead you?
Ali Kazimi 42:46
Well, I mentioned that the Chinese American museum had done this commemoration of Silas Fung. And they had invited his daughter. So I called the curator and she was very, she was very protective. She said, you know, “Irina is is is in her 70s. Who are you?” It seemed like this, out of the blue, there's this guy from Canada, who's originally from India, wanting to talk to Silas Fung's daughter. There was. So she put me—finally I spoke to Irina and the daughter. And so we—in these home movies, we watched the family unit, which is Silas, his wife, and the two offspring. Irina and her younger brother, Daniel. And Irina revealed to me she's the only survivor, that Danny had passed away. And so she said to me, if you want, if you want to know who those Chinese looking people are, you better come right now. I'm 79, you know.
[laughs]
And the idea of then became—again, I was doing this on a very small budget. I would show that—I would screen the film for her, as I had done to Jeff in, in Shooting Indians when I had screened him the rough cut. So, I drew from that experience. And I would get her to narrate what we were seeing. And that's what we did. And she was the one who pieced together the family story and it's a story that's completely outside the experience of the known Chinese, Canadian and American experiences, of working outside professions and, having modest lifestyles, at best. This family was—became incredibly wealthy because Silas, Silas' wife became an insurance agent, one of only two insurance agents for a Canadian insurance company and sold insurance to the Chinese community, because they trusted her, she could speak to them in Cantonese and Toisanese. And she got very wealthy and the family eventually moved to the wealthiest area of Chicago. And Irina revealed to me, one of the neighbours were the Rumsfelds, as in Donald Rumsfeld. So that's, that's the kind of level of economic success they—the family achieved.
Am Johal 45:00
Now, the film that you screened last year at Doxa, Beyond Extinction: A Sinixt Resurgence. Once again, this was a film that you started in the 90s. And, you know, fast forward almost, you know, 15, 17 years.
Ali Kazimi 45:13
27 years.
Am Johal 45:14
Yeah, 27. Sorry, yes, 27 years, my numbers are off. And I think if I remember correctly from last year, that, you know, after you had won the Governor General's Award, you would run into some people together, and you had reseen the footage, and you came back to it once again, which seems to be a recurring theme in your process of filmmaking.
[laughs]
Ali Kazimi 45:34
Well, you know, I realized that I've got my own archive. And I've at times documented people that, you know, who I found interesting and important. And it comes from my own experience of, of recognizing the value of moving image documentation. You know, I did an interview with my maternal grandmother's, just a year before she passed, and that, that's such a precious artifact for the family. So my friend, Zool Suleman, who's a, who's a lawyer, immigration and refugee lawyer, had—in Vancouver—had revealed to me that—and he had just started his practice then in—and he said, "You know, I have this interesting case. There's a guy who's going to be deported." And I said, "Okay, that's not new. This is what you do, this is part of your work, is to stop deportations for refugees and, and other people." And he said, "No, no, but he says that you can't deport me because I'm Indigenous." And the immigration authorities in response, said to him, "That might be so but your people were declared extinct. So therefore, you cannot be an Indigenous—recognized as an Aboriginal person of Canada. And you're American, so you have to go back."
So, it was such a—again, a bizarre and chilling story. The chilling part was this idea of extinction, that the government actually had an official declaration of extinction for the Sinixts in 1956. So, Zool, who was again very professional and very protective about his clients, finally put me in touch with Marilyn James, who was their spokesperson, who—with whom I spoke for several months, I had conversations with her. I hadn't finished Shooting Indians, I hadn't hadn't restarted Shooting Indians with Jeff. So, but I still had this deep understanding of the experience, both from Shooting Indians and from my experience with Forgotten Warriors, shooting this film for Loretta Todd. And Marilyn said, “Look, if you're really committed, come to our Thanksgiving gathering.”
So, I went to the National Film Board in Toronto, they gave me some money and I said to them, you know, I—and it was for an initially investigative stage that normally you just do a little written, written report for—to convince them there's a story. So I said, I wanted to shoot this. So we, this was the days of beta camp tape, and each tape costs, I don’t know, $60. So, we didn't have the money, so I got old tapes. Decided not to fly to Castlegar from Vancouver, drove with a young sound recordist from Vancouver. Spent four days there, which were again, just a turning point, a transformative point in my life.
I was received with—because of my connection with Zool and my—the trust that had won with, with Marilyn, I was just, I was just received with complete warmth and such love and generosity, it was amazing. And that experience—the film—I couldn't, couldn't get the money to finish the film or move ahead with the film, but again, like with Shooting Indians, I held on to the footage. When I got the GG in 2019, it comes with a cash award. So I thought, okay, I'm going to put the money off the crown, to push back against the crown. And that's how I restarted the project, then got a completion grant from the Canada Council and the film was finished.
Am Johal 49:05
And you had a chance to do a screening back in the community.
Ali Kazimi 49:09
Well, the commitment I had made to myself—so part of the way I work, I call it relational filmmaking. And I do two things as part of the process. One, I show people, when I'm in the final stages of edit, I'll show them to get feedback. And the second thing I do is, is to try and take, take the film back to the community. So, we did that with Jeff. We took the film back to Six Nations. And I told Marilyn that as soon as it premieres a Doxa, we will come to the Sinixts, the moolah, Sinixt's traditional territory. And we did five screenings, starting in this tiny community called Nakusp, which is on the top of the Arrow Lakes, to—we screened in Nelson, Castlegar, Trail and Vulcan.
And the issue of the Sinixts is so contentious and fraught in that region, that it gave an opportunity for Marilyn to show the settler communities, even those who were supporters and non-supporters, really the the counter narrative to the narrative they've been fed, and because the elders that I had filmed in 95 have all passed away, so for people who had only recently come on side with the Sinixt, or who were curious and want to know more, it came as a shock to them, that these—the struggle of the Sinixts goes back to the late 80s and that Eva Orr, who was the matriarch who started the, the protest, and the resurgence of the Sinixts, had also done an interview with me that in was completely unambiguous in terms of how the history of the movement started.
Am Johal 50:52
In the film, there's also this archival footage about the movement of a burial ground in the States that relates to the nation. I’m wondering if you can describe that piece as well, it very poignant in the, in the film.
Ali Kazimi 51:08
Yeah, so again, archive becomes really important in a film like this. And, again, so I started searching for archive. There was any anyone who had made films in that region. I looked through the public archives, there was nothing and then of course, YouTube has become such a incredible repository. And so what happened was that the—in the 40s, the US constructed a large dam on the Columbia River. The Columbia River starts in Sinixt's territory, in the Arrow Lakes. And the Columbia River is central to, not just the Sinixts, but a number of inner-Salish communities that, for them, the river was, was where they got their food from. They were salmon people, and [it] was sacred to them. So all the region around the, the Columbia are traditional village sites, and with traditional village sites, there are burial grounds, and the US recognized that these village sites and, and more importantly, the burial grounds were going to be submerged because of this large—the Grand Coulee Dam.
And what they had done was they commissioned the Department of Interior that was building the dam, they came up with this idea—someone came up with this idea, let's call an undertaker to—who has the—who knows how to deal with that with bodies and the bones and get them to move that, move the burial grounds to a height, to basically save the remains. And this undertaker, then in turn—must have been a huge lucrative contract—commissioned someone to do a film about this. And in the film you see members of the Colville Confederated Tribes, which includes the Sinixts, whose communities were—whose burial grounds were being submerged, the elders were the ones who told the undertaker, the funeral home director, where the sites were, and they sat and watched as the bones were removed, and then put into new coffins to be reburied.
You know, when I came across that footage was just like—this was—it was just so powerful. And it just in a way visually showed what many of these fights are about, you know. Oka started because of a burial ground, if you remember. And we reached out to the, the person who had made the film, who's still alive, but unfortunately, they don't have the six—it was shot on 16 millimeter. So, in those days, transferring it to video was the end goal. And then people often got rid of the—got rid of the 16 millimeter. So we had this very degraded copy, but it's good enough. So for me, you know, I embrace imperfection, because it's just, it's a patina. And it shows where the film or the photograph has been, how it's been handled or mishandled, not looked after, or looked after or conserved. All those things, also telegraph to the audience a different subtext.
Yeah, so I'm glad you asked me—you remember that moment, because a number of people have said to me that's, that it stays with them. You know, a thing in cinema, one of the favorite axioms about cinema is that, the cinema is the reaction of the reaction shot. And so in this—the sequence that you see in the film, you have these elders sitting there, intercut with the skeletal remains being taken out, then laid out on the ground next to the new coffins. And then the coffins being piled up. It says everything about colonial relationships. And, and it comes—often comes as a surprise to people that the Americans did this and the Canadians did not.
Am Johal 55:10
Ali, teaching at York, and I'm also based out of the School for Contemporary Arts, where we have a film program, I'm wondering what your advice to students is, these days in terms of how to maintain a kind of persistence as a filmmaker, given the challenges of financing, the durational quality of making work? And also, I guess, how does an artist, documentary filmmaker maintain their autonomy under the conditions that you're working in, you, certainly in your film, you have an autonomous bravery and audacity in how you're working and how the story gets told. And it's something that's hard to teach people but I'm wondering how you think that through or how you try to transmit that to future filmmakers?
Ali Kazimi 56:00
Well, it's very kind of you to say—this bravery. Well it, you know, I think you can only teach—I can talk about it, but they have to live it, I think, or they have to feel it in the work that’s screened for them. A choice that I made very early on was that, that autonomy was very important to me. You know, making Continuous Journey was, was a nightmare, because of that position. And you, know, after—I told you—after I found that footage, I said the film has to be made. So I'd got grants from the Arts Councils, which are, in the nature of filmmaking there, it's very small money, particularly in the, in the early 2000s or earlier. So I went to TVO, so TVO came came on board. And they came on board very reluctantly. The commissioning editor—or in fact, he was the director of documentary programming then, a man called Rudy Buttignol, who then became the CEO of Knowledge Network. And then a couple of years ago, he was let go because of the lack of representation. And that's an important aspect in my exchange with him. He was very reluctant to film—I had gone to him for, I think, six years, the seventh year when I went to him, he said, “I've been asked by the CEO to diversify, so we're doing history now. So yeah, your project is—I am interested in this project.” So he'd been compelled to do this project. But the discussions were very tough and, in a way, traumatizing for me. And it took a toll.
One of the things I do in the film is speak about the resonance of this, of this past, how it manifests in the present, and one of the ways the Continuous Journey Regulation continues to manifest to this day, is through the Safe Third Country Agreement. The Continuous Journey Regulation, which did not mention race, but was applied only to South Asians, says that to come to Canada as an immigrant, you had to come from your country of birth or nationality. So there was a ship, Canadian Pacific ran a ship between Calcutta and Vancouver, it was a very lucrative line for them. The feds forced Canadian Pacific to stop that line, right. So now it became impossible for South Asians to come by continuous journey. They would have to go to either Hong Kong, Shanghai—no, basically Hong Kong or Japan to come to Canada. They were not coming by continuous journey, hence they were barred. The word race was not used.
Today, Safe Third Country Agreement requires refugee claimants to come directly to Canada if they want to have claimed refugee status. If they come by the US, which is considered a Safe Third Country, they have to seek asylum in the US. Now, I hadn't made this connection. It was Audrey Macklin, who I interview in the film, who's one of Canada's foremost refugee scholars. And she, she poses the question, you know, I said about the Continuous Journey Regulation is, and I say exactly what I've just shared with you, and then Audrey comes on and says, you know, one has to wonder what the reasons for the Safe Third Country Agreement are and I would—and she urges the audience to think through about the similarities and differences between the two.
Well, this was unacceptable to Rudy. His directive to me was, keep the past in the past. Don't—you cannot bring it to the present. Not even, don't bring it to the present. You cannot bring it to the present. And when I said this was non-negotiable, that this was a point of view documentary, and the point of view documentary is uniquely recognized in Canada as a genre for funding. And the slot I was making this film for, called The View from Here for TVO, was created specifically for point of view documentaries. And I always say that one of the reasons I use voice over in my film, is that people will understand where I, where I stand. I don't want to use—I don't want to take the position many filmmakers do. I'm a fly on the wall. I just, you know, document things as they unfolding. It's utter bullshit. By pointing a camera at someone with a particular kind of lens, you've made several choices, right. Which is entirely—literally your point of view through the camera, right there and then it begins.
So when I didn't, when I refused to, to make these changes to the film, TVO pushed it out of the regular schedule so that nobody could find it. But before they did that, they had an option, which they exercised with all white filmmakers, I have to say, is that they would show the film—they would show the feature length version of the film, and, and they would often have discussions afterwards with the filmmaker and experts, and there would be a call in from the audience.
You know, this is the mandate of public broadcasters like TVO and Knowledge. The CEO of TVO, at that time was, was a huge supporter of the film, And, you know, I just felt, I'm back on the ship. Like the, the journey continues with my experience. I can, I can get to this highly prestigious slot, but not really. I am not allowed to, to screen as everybody else has. And I'm shut off from the audience of the film, in a deliberate act of sabotage. Simply to—because the film makes a lot of white people very uncomfortable, very, very uncomfortable, even to this day. And the only letter that, that was sent to me, by Rudy, there was a—there's a white supremacist group around immigration. Of course, they railed against the film. So he sent—forwarded me that email and said, "You have to respond to this." I said, "No. No. I know who these people are. They're white supremacists." I was just—jaw dropping that—it's one thing to share, saying that, you know, we've received this comment, but it's another thing to demand a response to an overtly white supremacist email.
So, in terms of keeping my autonomy, I've decided that working with broadcasters is very, very difficult. And it's, it's, you know, TVO, and then I had a similar experience with CBC. It pushed me into recognizing that this was taking a massive toll on me. The stress and everything associated with it was too much. That's when I chose to, to go into academia.
But I also chose to make films on very small budgets. So, I make films with the Arts Council. So the Canada Council has been central in my work. Their funding has been absolutely essential, not only allowing me to create the work, but to literally retain my voice, right. And, and yes, have complete autonomy. And it's, it's a system that at times can be—it's not that—I've also been turned—like for the current film that I'm working on, I've been turned down three times. I was also turned down after I won the Governor General's Award. So it's not that, that anything is guaranteed. You're being judged by a jury of your peers, you're being judged in a pool that you don't know what, what you're up against. I've been on jury, so I know that.
But it's, it's not a single gatekeeper, right. It's not—so when you have power invested in gatekeepers, they become exactly the same as—they exercise and they enact the tyranny of immigration officers [laughs], who are the gatekeepers to the country. Yeah, I could go on on that issue, but, but it's to, it's to just bypass that kind of gatekeeping that I've chosen to—this, this path of, of working with small budgets and retaining full control.
Am Johal 1:04:27
Ali, is there anything you'd like to add or maybe share about projects you're working on now?
Ali Kazimi 1:04:34
I've been trying to make a film about my, my maternal grandfather, who was—understand I'm going to my own personal history, who was one of India's first Olympians. And he represented India in tennis in the 1924 Paris Olympics. He was one of eight Olympians who represented India for the first time, separate from a British Empire team. It was a British India team. And he'd gone on scholarship to Cambridge where, on a sports scholarship, which was this unique rare thing. But he had interesting experiences around race. And I am privy to this, not because of family stories, because nobody knows these stories. When I was 17, I had asked my, my grandmother for his scrapbook. And even as a 17 year old, I was fascinated with historical artifacts. And that's in that scrapbook, in the cuttings, I found a story that he was, that he'd been denied the captaincy of the Cambridge tennis team, because Cambridge said, “Gentleman of colour simply cannot lead.” And he had pushed back against it. So, I'm trying to explore that chapter and flesh out what it meant to be an athlete in colonial times and then in post colonial India, what, what happened to him.
Am Johal 1:05:58
Ali, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. I feel like I could talk to you for another hour or so. But thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Ali Kazimi 1:06:08
Always a pleasure. It really is a treat to talk to you and thank you for having me on the show.
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Kathy Feng 1:06:17
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Ali Kazimi! Head to the show notes to learn more about the films and resources mentioned in the show. You can follow us on social media at sfu_voce to keep up to date on new podcast releases. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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