A prescient economist inspired Desiree Lim's character-driven psychological drama, The House, which premieres Nov. 6 at the 15th annual Vancouver Asian Film Festival.
Lim couldn't forget the story of Nomi Prins, a Wall Street investment banker turned journalist and whistle-blower who she'd recruited for a current affairs show in Japan when she was a director with its national broadcaster NHK.
"She was actually one of the very few economists who were warning everyone about the impending financial meltdown way before it happened," Lim said.
Lim had wanted to write a story about a woman trapped in a house with ghosts so she combined both the Prins-inspired character with her more visceral notions.
Lim wrote, produced and directed the film, which centres on an investment banker who quits her Wall Street job, and after a soul-searching journey around the world returns to Vancouver where she camps out in an empty home owned by a friend's rich family who never lived there to write her travelogue. The quiet space seems idyllic at first, but the woman soon finds herself entwined in a mass of secrets and lies with the tormented souls that haunt the house.
The film is a bit of a departure for Lim who's well known in the city's filmmaking community and particularly within the queer community.
The second-generation Chinese filmmaker grew up in Malaysia, studied journalism in Japan, and then worked in broadcasting on news and documentaries for NHK. She moved onto narrative drama in 2000 with Sugar Sweet, her debut Japanese TV feature that subsequently secured distribution by a company in San Francisco. Art imitated life in the film. Sugar Sweet focuses on a filmmaker who's trying to make lesbian porn from her perspective and gets slammed by her producers who don't think it will sell. At the same time, she's working on an episode of a matchmaking reality TV show, where she gets entangled in a love triangle with two women participants. The storyline was partially inspired by Lim's experience making an erotic film for a payper-view channel in Japan.
"The company that put up the money was actually a porn company, so I was dealing with these sleazy guys and so I kind of spun it around and made it into a film about them," Lim said. "They didn't really care as long as there was a lot of skin."
Lim says she turned her 20-something angst and anger with "the very patriarchal, homogenous culture in Japan" into a young, fun pop comedy that tackles sex head on, and played at more than 50 North American film festivals.
Lim immigrated to Vancouver in 2002 and says her first English-language TV feature, Floored by Love, which she created for what was then CHUM TV in 2005, grew from a mellower version of herself. "It's more laid back. It's a family comedy," she said.
Lim wrote the script when Canada legalized same-sex marriage. One of the storylines centres on a lesbian couple in which one partner wants to get married while the other has yet to come out to her family. Floored by Love opened to sold-out audiences at major lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans film festivals around the world.
Now Lim hopes to capture imaginations with a layered, mixed-genre ghost story.
The 39-year-old and most of the cast of The House will appear at the screening and Lim will also participate on Nov. 5 panel that spotlights North American Asian women in Hollywood.
In addition to the venerated features and short films that fill the festival's schedule, Barbara Lee, the independent filmmaker and writer who founded the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, recommends the documentary Resident Aliens (Nov. 5).
Made by the producer of The King of Kong, a documentary that follows the exploits of the two best Donkey Kong players in the U.S., Ross Tuttle documents the true story of three Cambodian refugees who grew up in the U.S. but were deported to the country they fled as children because they'd been involved in gangs and were found guilty of felony charges.
"There's that big debate on [whether] we should deport people who haven't become Canadian citizens yet," Lee said. "It has some relevance." Tuttle will attend the screening.
The festival runs Nov. 3 to 6 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas. For more information, see vaff.org.
crossi@vancourier.com Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
