Dhvani Ramanujam (DR) speaks to filmmaker Sahar Golshan (SG) about her short film KAR, which was produced as part of the Unsung Voices Shorts programme at the 23rd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.
This in conversation with is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative, a collaborative program between Reel Asian and TACLA.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
DR: Why did you choose to tell this story?
SG: For the longest time, I’ve been obsessed with the beauty of truth-telling through storytelling. I’m obsessed with true stories and looked towards my family for stories to tell. My father’s been a taxi driver, driving instructor, a pizza delivery man — all professions many immigrants have that are tied to a car. I really wanted to think about the contemporary shift in technology, where people are using technologies of convenience, like Uber, Airbnb, food apps, and tell the story of the debate between technology and traditional industries like the taxi industry, and the impact this shift has on people and their families.
DR: I really enjoy the way you use autobiography to open up this broader conversation about ongoing technological changes and their impacts, specifically on immigrant communities. The one thing I picked up in your film is this real sense of loss of place, space and erasure. Not just loss in relation to your dad and his work, but loss of convenience to mobility especially living in Scarborough, a place of suburban sprawl. There is personal loss, but your film is also about a city that’s evolving and changing very rapidly because of the forces of creative destruction and gentrification.
Why do you think those particular themes in our current socio-political moment, are relevant to talk about?
SG: I really wanted the film to have more than two characters. If you read the logline, it’s a father-daughter story, but I really see the third character as Scarborough. Scarborough right now is going through a very big change. It’s happening throughout the city, but especially in the East End, because there’s this huge construction with the LRT that’s going to connect the big metropolis of Toronto to Scarborough. I wanted to juxtapose this change happening to my city, to changes happening to the individual, with my father as the main subject. He is a man, and men in society are ascribed a lot of responsibility to take care of their families. I wanted to think about him as an individual, how he’s been impacted by these changes, and how that labour impacts gender, the capacity to have a livelihood, and supports a family. Situating the film becomes important because Scarborough also has a really poor transit system. Downtown, you can make do without a car, but here, that capacity to support a family is diminished when you don’t have access to a car. Scarborough had to figure into that question.
DR: This is such a personal story with your father at the heart of it. It requires him to be intensely vulnerable about a subject — work, the loss of it and unemployment—especially as an immigrant father, where those expectations of being a breadwinner can be so culturally ingrained.
How did you get him to trust you, and what was the process of getting him to reveal a story that can be quite uncomfortable to talk about?
SG: In fact, the preparation has been one of over 30 years. I think my dad has always been comfortable in cars, and having conversations in cars. A taxi driver’s purpose, if you think about it, is to get someone from point A to point B, but in many cases, it’s also to engage in the arts of conversing with someone. But since the majority of his career has also been as a driving instructor, I’ve grown up having conversations with my dad in the car because I’ve often been the child being babysat, while my dad has been instructing someone. All this creates the comfort we have within a car’s setting. I simply asked him if he wanted to be a part of the film.
There are stories about taxi drivers, but I haven’t seen one from a personal perspective. The start of the film is a closeup of him looking at the rearview mirror, at me.
I wanted that double consciousness of what it looks like to be a taxi driver as a father, and how a daughter perceives her father as a taxi driver, and have that duality.
DR: In the film, there’s this beautiful poem you wrote that you recite to your dad. Your film also has a very strong visual aesthetic and coherency. There’s this mix of aesthetics, with the contrast of the voiceover, to the archival footage of your dad when he was younger.
How did you come to choose these particular aesthetics? What were the challenges in translating your ideas into visual form?
SG: First and foremost, I identify as a writer. I’ve always been obsessed with language. I was lucky to grow up in a bilingual household, and was always curious about communication and storytelling. Even before making this film, I’d written a fictional short story about a son who after finishing university and is unable to find work, decides to become an Uber driver while his father is a taxi driver. I also always had this intersection in my mind of St Clair and Victoria Park, and written stories about this intersection. So I knew I wanted to bring this intersection that I pass by every day in real life into the film. This intersection used to be bustling, there’d be dozens of taxi drivers in this No Frills parking lot, and men sharing smokes and food in between clients and customers. This story in my mind really influenced this documentary.
However, I always meditate on the fact that language — and when I say language, I mean words — are often inadequate at expressing the human condition fully. So although I wanted to include the poem I had at the end of the film, and include voiceover, I needed to have visuals be a strong element. To fill this void, this inexpressibility, this place of wordlessness, to be painted through shots, through visual aesthetics. So yes, these choices were deliberate.
DR: How do you condense and translate the subtext into visuals, and deal with the pain of leaving what’s on the cutting floor, especially with a story that is essentially a bio-mythographic tale?
SG: The most challenging part in such a personal and archival family story, was balancing how things were shot and captured with actual human memory. In many ways, the film is presented as a walk down memory lane. We go back to sites of labour, return to this ghostly parking lot, this ghostly plaza, what used to be a Caribbean restaurant, a driving instruction school. Having to balance what I remember as a child with fatherhood, family income, and labour, and also representing Scarborough as a place of childhood and growing up, with what is actually captured on-screen, while letting the footage speak, and not interrupting that.
DR: I also remember a remark from another filmmaker in the Q&A for Unsung Voices. She mentioned that every director chosen for the program this year was a woman, and that the experience of working with an all-women crew when that’s such a rarity in the industry was really interesting. I was curious about what the impact might be for young women in the industry to start their careers being surrounded and working with an all-women crew.
Did you feel that experience had any particular impact on your work and process, and in thinking about your future [career]?
SG: 100 percent. This was the first year in eight years where the entire cohort identified as women, and not only that, but everyone identified as coming from Asia. So not only did we have an all-women crew, but an all-racialized crew. Previous to writing and filmmaking, I’ve worked in the community sector, for eight years, and often these nonprofits are run entirely with women’s labour. I love working with women and realize I’ve had the privilege of that because of the sectors I’ve worked in. So I think what really contributed to the crew work was a sense of compassion; we were each other’s sound people, directors of photography, assistant directors. There’s a sense of care and trust that we were constantly exchanging and negotiating with each other. Just the level of trust and allowing for creativity that happened, I don’t know if this really exists on male-dominated sets.
DR: I was also curious about your bilinguality and how that affects your work, because in the Q&A you mentioned a bilingual writer whose practice inspires you.
Could you expand on that, and generally, how your identity shapes your artistic practice?
SG: The author I mentioned in the Q&A is Kim Thúy, and she’s from Vietnam, but she migrated with the exodus of the boat people in the 70s and 80s to Quebec. All her books have titles that have meaning both in Vietnamese and French. Her first book, and most popular, is called Ru, which means “street” in French and “lullaby” in Vietnamese. She’s a writer who really influences me, because she writes vignettes, fragments, and family stories, and that’s very much my genre. There are many ways racialized writers and filmmakers can be successful. Some use identity as a big theme of work; some don’t. I think all forms of storytelling — identity-based or not — are legitimate for racialized artists, but it is super important that identity plays a role in my art, because I really believe that the public sphere is a physical one, and there is far too much space-taking by white male dominant narratives.
Placing our bodies, stories, culture, language and taking space to diversify storytelling is a key political project as well as an artistic project.
That’s why it was 100% important for my film to have a Persian name, and really important for me to centre my culture because the different jobs my dad has also had in his career are also very racialized professions.
DR: On this question of identity, and the relationship to politics and art as activism, I found something interesting that another filmmaker, Samuel Lee, director of Gyopo, said in his Q&A, in relation to a question of who his film is made for. He said, “I’m a Gyopo, and I made this film about the Korean diaspora, and it is for the Korean diaspora.” I found it interesting, his refusal to basically say I’m not going to pander to make my film more digestible or palatable to a “broader” (read: white) audience. Artists of colour can sometimes feel pressure to give a cultural or historical primer for their work because of the notion that their work is too “specific” for other people to understand unless explained.
Have you thought about the struggle between marketability and authenticity? When you’re thinking about where you’re going in your career, is that a pressure you worry will affect you?
SG: Similar to Samuel Lee, I want my audience to be my community. I really want to make stories that my family resonates with, that people from Scarborough resonate with. It’s interesting that my film has a bilingual title, because I think when you are making things from your community, you almost have to push back on this whole idea of “translation”. You’re talking about this idea of digestibility, like this needs to be understood through the dominant lens, or an “English” perspective, whatever it is. But I want this film to be seen by residents of Scarborough, or children of taxi drivers. We are not an imagined minority —
DR: As in you don’t see your work as “minority” —
SG: No, and I also know the statistics. In Toronto specifically, over 50% of the population are racialized people. I strive with a specific audience in my mind when I make my art, and I think a lot about my family having that diasporic identity. I want the children of immigrants, but also their parents, to consume this work —
DR: So you want an intergenerational dialogue, as well?
SG: Entirely. But it’s hard sometimes because in some cases, many of our parents come from a working-class background, or not from the creative arts. So sometimes they struggle to make sense of our artwork, and what this is, and why they should care.
DR: But I think that’s why your film so affected me. It was about you having this deeply personal conversation across generations, a kind of conversation so many of us as children of immigrant parents would like to be able to have with our parents.
SG: Yeah, I know that I hope to continue making films and writing stories about labour.
I feel like it’s impossible for me to separate racialization and labour. But I always want to present those stories with dignity. I don’t want it to be the so-called “immigrant sad story.”
DR: There have been conversations in our communities about resisting the narrative of bleakness, and in our everyday lives as immigrants, there’s joy and laughter, which is a form of resistance, too. Again, that question of marketability — the culture we live in likes to consume racialized people’s pain. But there is something about it that is exploitative.
SG: The joy that is derived from art — so I share that poem at the end of the film — that life force of creativity, is also deeply cultural. Persian poetry is a big life force as far as the language — and I wanted to shape the story not through suffering and stereotypes.
DR: What do you hope to do with this film now that it’s done screening at Reel Asian, and what are your hopes in where it might be further seen, distributed or used? And what are other upcoming ideas or projects that may be on the horizon?
SG: A welcome surprise was that my film was chosen for the Air Canada Short Film Awards*. This year it was awarded to nine short films at the festival and will be available for viewing in May on Air Canada flights, in honour of Asian Heritage Month. I was completely shocked since it’s the first time at a festival I’m presenting a film. I’m also in the process of submitting to other festivals, ones that focus on documentary, ones that focus on labour. As far as my future projects, I don’t have a specific concept in mind, but I know I want to focus on work. This time my approach to labour and work was very direct, as far as interrogating the taxi industry, interrogating Uber. but I think it would be neat to do a documentary on unpaid, gendered labour, about the ways many women and non-binary folks service the world, in an informal way. I’m so curious about the invisible nature of that work, but also the unseen, intangible work that isn’t tied to an institution or hasn’t been given sufficient language.
DR: The last thing I’ll ask, what was the best thing about this opportunity at Reel Asian?
SG: It’s hard to say. Although the program is focused on filmmaking, and producing this tangible product that you’re able to bring to the festival, perhaps to other festivals, and growing your career, it’s the notion of developing a stronger sense of belonging for myself, for me personally. I feel deeply connected to the young, emerging Asian filmmaking community, already. From the conversations, the jokes, sitting in the theatre together, I feel this growing sense of belonging, and I think it’s quite moving.
DR: Thank you, Sahar. I’m so excited to share your words and see what you do next.
*This interview was completed pre-COVID. For updates on how to see KAR, please follow Sahar on Twitter!
Sahar Golshan 杜秀秀 سحر گلشن is a Teochew Chinese and Persian writer living as a guest on Turtle Island. She is a passionate language learner and communicates in Teochew, Farsi, Spanish, French, and English. Sahar is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and co-host of the Speakeasy Reading Series. She is a current participant of the Diaspora Dialogues GTA Long Form Mentorship. Sahar is the director of the 2019 short documentary KAR and the recipient of the Air Canada Short Film Award presented by the Shorts Jury of the 23rd Annual Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. KAR will be available for viewing on Air Canada flights in May 2020 during Asian Heritage Month. Follow Sahar on Twitter @SaharGolshan.
Dhvani Ramanujam (She/Her) is a South Asian, kink-friendly emerging writer and curator. She is particularly interested in critical explorations of diasporic film and art. She is currently completing a Performance Curation mentorship through the support of the AMY Project and SummerWorks Performance Festival. In the fall of 2020, she will begin her Masters at Ryerson University in the Communication and Culture program, focusing on the curation of diaspora cinema in community-based film festivals.
