Julia Kwan had to work hard to earn the trust of many of the people who appear in her debut documentary, Everything Will Be.
The Vancouverite was already an award-winning filmmaker when she started production on Everything Will Be two years ago. She’d won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for 2005’s Eve and the Fire Horse, and the Claude Jutra Award for best feature film by a first-time film director in Canada.
But Eve and the Fire Horse was a work of fiction. What Kwan wanted to do with Everything Will Be was stay firmly rooted in reality. The intention was a documentary that presented several perspectives on the shifting landscape in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown.
She wouldn’t write the characters. Instead, she’d feature people who lived and worked in Chinatown: artists, shopkeepers, herbalists, senior citizens, and more.
But getting these people on camera was easier said than done.
“We had a lot of doors close on us. We had this one herbalist who actually pulled the gate on us because we came too many times,” says Kwan in a recent phone interview. “It was a challenge trying to get people’s trust in the community, because they didn’t know us and my Cantonese is a little suspect.”
Kwan persevered, and the result is a feature-length documentary that follows more than a dozen of Chinatown’s stakeholders – including real estate consultant Bob Rennie, whose art collection occupies the oldest building in Chinatown – as their neighbourhood braces for change.
The film is named for the neon sign that Rennie chose to hang on the side of his building that reads, “Everything is going to be alright.”
“It’s interesting to me how [Rennie] pays homage to the Chinese history, like growing poppies to pay homage to the opium trade. I know some people might not think positively about that, but he’s very passionate about preserving the community,” says Kwan. “Is this the best way to do it? Is there another way that we could preserve it so we don’t turn the entire Chinatown into a museum? He makes a lot of thought-provoking statements.”
Kwan’s fascination with Vancouver’s Chinatown began in her youth, when her father waited tables at Ho Ho and Ming’s, and her mother worked at a laundry factory on Georgia Street.
“My siblings and I spent a lot of time in Chinatown over the weekends. It was very vibrant, and bustling, and we could never find parking,” she says. “It just came alive, and I found my parents came alive. My mom was in her element in Chinatown. She spoke the language, and we addressed everybody as aunts and uncles. It was a really rich sense of community.”
But the busy Chinatown of Kwan’s childhood no longer exists. Storefronts sit empty. Restaurants and shops shutter by 6pm. The once bustling neighbourhood is transforming into something else, but precisely what that will look like in five or ten years remains to be seen, according to Kwan.
“There are 60 heritage buildings in Chinatown, but what does that mean? You can put a plaque on something and say, ‘This is heritage,’ and then gut it,” says Kwan. “I don’t want to see it become ornamental. I want it to continue to be a place where people live and work and is self-sustaining.”
Everything Will Be screens October 1 at SFU Woodwards and October 3 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas.
