Through the eyes of a young family, a B.C. filmmaker examines how trauma for multiple generations of Japanese-Canadians can be inherited.
While writer and director Meredith Hama-Brown’s feature film Seagrass takes place on a fictional island, the director believed it was historically significant to set it along B.C.’s coast. The film was predominantly shot on Gabriola Island with some locations in Tofino and Ucluelet as well.
“I also grew up between Qualicum Beach, Nanoose Bay and Parksville. So, it’s also an area that is significant to me,” Hama-Brown said.
Seagrass, set in the mid-’90s, follows a Japanese-Canadian woman and her family as they attend a self-development retreat shortly after the death of the woman’s mother.
While at the retreat, the woman befriends another interracial couple who seem to have the perfect marriage and begins to recognize how irreparably fractured her own relationship is, while their young daughters are plunged into a destabilizing world under the constant stress of their parents’ crumbling relationship, noted a release for the film.
The title of the film refers to a deleted scene where one of the daughters discusses how she overcame her fear of swimming in seagrass – which Hama-Brown decided to keep because of its fitting metaphor and strong ocean motif.
“Going into the project, what I was trying to capture was the the instability that all humans experience and a sense of ungroundedness,” the director said. “Some of that is played out through the relationship with the mother and her daughters … but I think the film also follows the three female characters as they all have their own separate stories that intertwine.”
The film also looks at womanhood in its different stages and experiences as portrayed by the six-year-old and 11-year-old daughters, the woman in her 40s, and the deceased grandmother whose stories are told.
“I haven’t seen a narrative film that looks at Japanese-Canadian identity in this way before,” Hama-Brown said. “I think a lot of Japanese-Canadian people will relate – in terms of what has been lost as a result of trauma from incarceration … There are a lot of people who don’t know these stories, even a lot of people who have family members who went through that time period because it wasn’t something that was spoken about.”
Hama-Brown added that the trauma includes not only a loss of information but a loss of culture through fractured communities.
As a Japanese-Canadian herself, the director said that while the themes in Seagrass are personal, the story is fictional and the family depicted is very different from her own. She said the characters could be viewed as entering the initial stages of healing, but the film doesn’t attempt to answer all the questions or remedy everything that happens within the week the story takes place.
“I don’t think it’s realistic that these things have a simple answer,” Hama-Brown said. “And to me, that would actually be doing an injustice to the story because it oversimplifies the situation.”
Seagrass debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September and won the FIPRESCI Prize. It has since shown in B.C. on Sept. 29 and Oct. 1 during the Vancouver International Film Festival, and will show at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, screening on Oct. 9 and 15. Hama-Brown said she is also planning for screenings in other countries as well as a yet-to-be-determined theatrical release.
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