Reel Asian Roundtable (with Chop Suey Nation and A Sweet & Sour Christmas)

Get Tickets Canada 2019 70:00 English Documentary

How do food stories speak to a convoluted history of multiculturalism? What does it take to trace back the stories of diasporic community to its roots? If and when we do arrive, what next? This multimedia program explores this question through an excerpt reading of Chop Suey Nation and a screening of A Sweet and Sour Christmas.

In 2016, Journalist Ann Hui drove across Canada seeking answers to two questions: Why is there a Chinese restaurant in every small town? Who are the families who run them? Meeting with owners and eating at their restaurants, Hui shares stories of diasporic Chinese communities in her book Chop Suey Nation, while unexpectedly, uncovering her own family history – revealing the importance of these restaurants to Canada’s history.

In A Sweet and Sour Christmas, director Aram Siu Wai Collier and producer Betty Xie follow two types of holiday meals at the King Wok Restaurant: the deep-fried take-out Chinese Canadian food staples delivered to families across Kitchener and the traditional Cantonese meal for a family sharing a rare Christmas celebration. This film is a CBC Short Doc to be released on CBC Gem and the CBC Short Docs Channel in December 2019.

– KL

Panelists:

	Ann Hui, author of Chop Suey Nation Raised in a Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver, Ann Hui grew up in a food-obsessed household to parents who always knew where the freshest Cantonese seafood or barbecued duck could be found. Since 2015, Hui has been The Globe’s national food reporter. She has a Masters of Journalism from Ryerson University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia.
	Aram Siu Wai Collier, director of A Sweet & Sour Christmas Aram Siu Wai Collier is a Toronto-based filmmaker, educator, and film festival programmer. He edited the feature documentary Refugee and directed the short doc Who I Became, nationally broadcasted on PBS. His omnibus live music and film project, Suite Suite Chinatown (‘11-’14), toured Canada, Asia, and the USA. His Telefilm Canada-funded feature, Stand Up Man (‘17) premiered at multiple international film festivals. Collier is a mixed-race Asian Canadian/American who has a BFA and MFA in Film Production from the University of California at Santa Cruz and York University respectively.
	Betty Xie, producer of A Sweet & Sour Christmas Betty Xie is a Chinese Canadian filmmaker and a festival curator. Her short documentary, The Home Promised (‘14), won the Air Canada Best Short Film at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and played at various international film festivals. She produced the Telefilm Canada funded-feature, Stand Up Man (‘17), which premiered at multiple international film festivals. Her short doc, Chado: A Way of Tea, was selected as a top 10 finalist of the 2018 TVO ShortDoc Contest. She was also a 2019 Doc Institute Canada Breakthrough Fellow.
	Shellie Zhang, moderator Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and Gallery 44 (Toronto). She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. In 2017, she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, a feminist research and writing group. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang’s work deconstructs notions of tradition, gender, identity, the diaspora, and popular culture while calling attention to these subjects in the context and construction of a multicultural society. She is interested in exploring how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, how this relates to lived experiences, and how culture is learned, relearned and sustained.