This piece was published in the Spirit of Place section of the Septmeber 2004. Montage Magazine -The Journal of the Directors Guild of Canada (edited by Marc Glassman)

SPIRIT OF PLACE
Absence and Presence

By Ali Kazimi

A few years ago I was pushed by a radio interviewer to explain why I made the films I did. He was insistent: why these subjects? Why this style? Why this approach? What emerged was an epiphany. "I want to understand how I fit in the Canadian landscape," I blurted out, "Through my process, perhaps others in the audience will reflect on their own sense of place."

I came to Canada in 1983 as a film student at York University and decided to stay on. From that point, my perspective could not be simply Canadian or Indian. It was, like my life and experience, a hybrid of Canada and India.

I want the audience to be aware of this hybridity, so some of my films are framed with a first person voice over. I used this device in my first feature documentary Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994). The film starts with the words, "Seven years after moving to Canada, I returned to India, where I was born, to document a turning point in this struggle."

The struggle was for the survival of the Narmada valley and its people. Six thousand people were marching 200 kilometres to stage a peaceful protest at a dam, the Sardar Sarovar, that was expected to drown vast tracts of the valley. The result would displace hundreds of thousands of people, many of them indigenous to the region.

How I approached the events was shaped not only by my familiarity with India but also through events and experiences in Canada. I had been deeply affected by the position of aboriginal people in Canada, the Oka crisis, federal/ provincial relations, the often furious debates on race and representation in the eighties and my frustration with how so called Third World Peoples were portrayed in the Canadian media.

But where would this film fit in the nationalist framework of film production? In 1994 Narmada: A Valley Rises premiered as part of Perspective Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Ironically, in the same year, India was highlighted in TIFF's National Cinema programme. In 1996, the Jury Chair of the Mumbai International Film Festival spoke at some length about an insightful film made on India by a foreigner - and then announced my name. He was right in part.

In the three and half years it had taken to make Narmada, I had chosen to become a Canadian citizen. A few months later a programmer at the Freiburg film festival included Narmada in a programme that highlighted fifty years of Indian documentaries. She was adamant that it was an Indian film.

Shortly afterwards, I revived a documentary that I had started in film school and had been unable to finish. The film had started with my naïve newcomer's inquiry into the "Red Indians" of North America. It evolved into Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffery Thomas (1997)

Shooting Indians is an essay film, a portrait of Iroquois photographer Jeffrey Thomas during which he struggles to find his voice and matures personally and professionally. It is also a record of the dialogue between an aboriginal man and the legacy of American photographer Edward S. Curtis who over thirty years made tens of thousands of images of the North America Indian. Some of these images have become iconic, for some they represent the "authentic Indian". (I was trying to understand their absence in the Canadian landscape.)

Irony runs through Shooting Indians, a film made by an Indian about "Indians",because in the film, I included my responses about making it and personal recollections of conversations with Jeff. I found this a difficult and challenging process not only because I had to make myself vulnerable but because I was trying to put into words a filmmaking process that was largely intutive. I discovered that sometimes irony does not translate well. When Shooting Indians screened at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), there were a lot of bemused Europeans who could not understand why an "Indian" filmmaker would want to make a film about native Indians. The film's Canadianess was puzzling to those who still saw Canada as a "white country," albeit with an indigenous Indian population.

But how could they be blamed when the vast majority of Canadian films reflected a Canada that was not far from their perceptions? This took me back to another bothersome question. Canada saw itself as a fair and just country, so why was it until very recently a country largely made up of people of European origin?

The question took me to a place where the histories of Canada and India intersect. It was place that I had to explore, to really understand that my presence in this land is based on a tragic absence. The first immigrants to Canada from British India arrived in 1904. By 1908 there were six thousand "Hindus" as we were known then. That year Canada created a regulation to stop this flow, a seemingly neutral policy requiring all immigrants to come by "continuous journey" from their country of nationality.

At the same time, Canadian Pacific was forced to shut down its service to and from India. The regulation was then applied only to Asian, primarily Indian, immigrants. The Canadian legislation was a success. Immigration from India came to a halt. Then on May 23,1914 a ship, the Komagata Maru, arrived in Vancouver harbour carrying 376 immigrants from India. It was an event that would define Canadian immigration policy till 1948 and shake the British Empire.

In Continuous Journey I once again used a first person narration, framing the story with my experience, directly engaging with history. I laid bare my motivation in the narration.

"I realize my interest in what happened to them has become an obsession. The more that I dig through the records the more fascinated I become. Maybe because here the history of Canada and India violently collide. Maybe because few know that people like me were shut out for decades. Maybe because I see this harbour as a crime scene haunted by its ghosts. And maybe because I'm trying to understand how I fit in."

While revealing far more about myself than I did in the previous films, I used the first few minutes of film I ever shot--Super 8 footage of my friends and family. In the eight years it took to piece the film together, I spent a lot of time in the National Archives looking at documents, photographs and film footage. Coming across repeated references to notions of a "white Canada" in documents and newspaper articles, I was struck by the almost complete absence of people of Asian and African descent in photographs and films.

I persisted in my research, driven by a belief that the events of July 23 1914 were far too dramatic to not have been filmed--even though film technology was barely two decades old. A Canadian warship was brought alongside the Komagata Maru that day, with its guns aimed at the passengers. Hundreds of militia were ready on shore with fixed bayonets. Tens of thousands of people on the B.C. shore watched the drama unfold.
Though no shots were fired by the Canadian military, the effect couldn't have been more deadly. The ship was forced to sail back to India to face a hostile British administration. Troops opened fire on the passengers after they landed. Dozens were killed and most of the survivors arrested.

Archivists all around the world told me that any footage of the ship in Vancouver had been lost or destroyed or simply did not exist. I was coming to accept this when randomly intercut handheld shots jumped out at me in a reel about the Governor General's visit to Victoria. There it was: the Komagata Maru and its Indian passengers! One of the very few turning points in early twentieth century Canadian history had, indeed, been documented on film.

Continuous Journey is, on one level, a film about absence. But, as a film, it is made whole with the presence of those who were not allowed to become part of the Canadian landscape. Like me, those would-be immigrants were from South Asia. Making this film was a process of truly feeling comfortable in this, my adopted country. Next year I will stand at a crossroad, having spent half my life in India and half in Canada. My time in both countries will continue to mould my work.

A line from an annonymous Indian immigrant poet written around 1914, used in the theme song for Continuous Journey, resonates with me:
"We strangers have no place to call our own."

Yet I end the film with the words,
"Canada is home now. I never forget that I am here because of earlier struggles."

For me, in this tension of being a stranger and yet belonging, lies the spirit of place.