Three Canadian immigration story films at TIFF 2022 reveal similarities in experiences and film form: Riceboy Sleeps, Coyote, and So Much Tenderness.
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Riceboy Sleeps, Coyote, So Much Tenderness
Most years, TIFF programs Canadian films that explore the (usually traumatic) immigration experience in Canada. They don’t tend to celebrate some Canadian alternative to the American Dream so much as confront institutionalized racism and alienation. Highlights in recent years have included Mina Shum’s Ninth Floor (2015) and Meditation Park (2017), Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses (2016), and Sanja Zivkovic’s Easy Land (2019).
At TIFF 2022, there are three Canadian films about being an immigrant in Canada: Riceboy Sleeps, Coyote, and So Much Tenderness. All of them specifically deal with language and assimilation, care work, and the sense of displacement that is a byproduct of the immigration experience. Although these themes were present in earlier Canadian films at TIFF, it’s welcome that all three films feature the characters speaking regularly in their mother tongues. The direction is also designed to make us feel the displacement and alienation of the characters, using techniques similar to Shum’s work in Ninth Floor. It feels like a renaissance of finally telling the many stories of our so-called multicultural country that have usually been pushed to the side — in the film industry and more generally.
The opening of So Much Tenderness: getting judged by immigration
Lina Rodriguez’s So Much Tenderness begins with an illegal entry into Canada. The transportation sequence lasts nearly twenty minutes. It’s not until she’s safely in Canada that we even discover that our protagonist is Aurora (Noëlle Schönwald), a Colombian refugee crossing the US border into Canada. It’s a strong but slow opening. Aurora paces back and forth in front of a still camera waiting for someone. A white woman, Nancy (Deragh Campbell of Anne at 13,000 ft, MS Slavic 7, Point and Line in Plane), shows up and gestures to Aurora to enter the car.
They don’t seem to know each other, and they don’t share a language. They go to Nancy’s house where she picks up Nancy’s husband (Kazik Radwanski, director of Anne at 13,000 ft) and baby, and puts Aurora in the trunk. No words are exchanged, but we figure out what’s happening. It’s a harrowing, tense sequence, if a languorous one, including their encounters at customs which could be very dangerous for Aurora.
The next day, Aurora presents herself to immigration as a refugee. Rodriguez shoots her in closeup, with a still camera, as if she’s performing for us — and the immigration agent. She explains who she is and why she needs asylum. The camera rarely leaves her. She makes her case in Spanish, with a translator sitting beside her. She told Nancy she doesn’t speak English, but it isn’t clear in this scene. Still, survival comes down to how she presents herself in a cold institutional setting where one white Canadian is making a snap judgment about her. She’s only temporarily safe.
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The opening of Katherine Jerkovic’s film Coyote: a job interview
Like So Much Tenderness, both Katherine Jerkovic’s film Coyote (her follow-up to Roads to February, 2018) and Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps feature similar intimidating interview scenes, shot largely in closeup on the protagonist. In Coyote and Riceboy Sleeps, the immigrant protagonist must speak a Canadian official language instead of their own, and the stakes aren’t life or death. In these two films, these encounters are just part of a slow, ongoing process of whittling away their self-worth and identity.
Coyote opens with an interview sequence, but it’s in French, and the protagonist has no translator. Mexican immigrant Camilo (Jorge Martinez Colorado) has been living in Montreal for years. The opening is a job interview for a position at a restaurant. The camera stays on him, centre frame, looking into the lens; we never see the interviewer. It’s not until later that we learn why this job interview matters so much to him, how much he’s lost of himself due to the very family — his daughter — he likely moved to Canada for. He speaks Spanish-accented French. But as a middle-aged man without even a suit, we feel he might be doomed from the start.
Who is judging whom in the films So Much Tenderness and Coyote
The interview scenes in both So Much Tenderness and Coyote reminded me of the approach Mina Shum used for interviews in Ninth Floor, a creative nonfiction documentary. In my interview with Shum, featured in the ebook Subjective realities, Shum talks about interviewing her subjects discussing their experience with racism. She noted that “I very deliberately have each character look into the lens at one point — look at us — so that suddenly we’re watched, and the tables are turned. I really wanted to bring that tension to the table. How does it feel to be watched? How does it feel to watch? When we’re watching, what are we looking for? What is that all about?”
While the characters in the films So Much Tenderness and Coyote never break the fourth wall, I did find myself aware of the fact that the camera put me in the position to judge them, and that they are making their own calculations here, too. For them, it was about how to get the best possible outcome from this tense interaction.
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An encounter with the principal in Riceboy Sleeps
In Anthony Shim’s feature debut Riceboy Sleeps, the story of Korean immigrant single mother So-young (Choi Seung-yoon) and her son, Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang as a child, and Ethan Hwang as a teenager), somewhere in Canada (I’ll circle back to the film’s problematic placelessness later), the equivalent scene happens in the school principal’s office. Her young son has been facing daily bullying at the hands of her classmates, and her advice to him to retaliate by physically punching back has backfired, and landed him in trouble.
So-young’s English is fairly rudimentary, but she makes absolutely correct accusations that her son being the only one in trouble is racism. He may have been physically violent, but his classmates incited it with emotional violence. As Shum told me, “I’m a Chinese Canadian immigrant from Hong Kong. Even though the kids were calling me all sorts of names on the playground, as soon as I walked into a classroom, it was like, ‘We’re a mosaic! We’re all inclusive!’” Shim pretty much nails this experience in Riceboy Sleeps.
In the principal’s office, Shim keeps the focus on So-young, though in profile, only very rarely panning over to the white principal so that we, too, can directly look at him and judge his unreasonable and unfeeling behaviour. It’s not that physical violence should go unpunished, but he’s entirely refusing to empathize with the situation in front of him. This choice to keep us focused on the immigrant character in pain makes the institution feel faceless, meaning the filmmakers avoid having the audience empathise with the people in power. It also makes us feel aware of how impossible it is to fight someone who can’t even see you as human.
Language loss and retention in the immigration experience
As the films progress, it’s heartening to watch the characters in all three films keep their language while still learning English. The language barrier is the least difficult in So Much Tenderness, which is almost entirely in English after those first few scenes — the benefit of being highly educated immigrants who probably already spoke English quite well. Language doesn’t really get in the way of Camilo’s life in Coyote, but the language of his interactions tells us a lot about these relationships. His work life and anything to do with ambitions for employment happen in French. His close friendships happen in Spanish. But when his estranged daughter turns up with a son he didn’t know she had, their language is French. She grew up here. It means that not only have time and betrayal alienated him from his daughter, but language always will.
Language barriers in Riceboy Sleeps
For So-young in Riceboy Sleeps, though, language is a constant problem. In the beginning, she has to advocate for her son in English institutions without fully speaking the language while also navigating culture shock. Since the film takes place in two time periods, a decade apart, her English improves. She and her son Dong-hyun speak Korean together. Still, most of her friends speak Korean. In an early scene, Dong-hyun’s teacher, who can’t pronounce his name, informs So-young that she must choose an English name for him, instead. It’s just one of a million little paper cuts in which her culture and language are disrespected and undervalued.
Ten years later, there’s a heartbreaking scene in which she gets a cancer diagnosis couched in gentle language. We don’t see the doctor here either, just So-young in profile, trying to understand what’s happening. She calmly asks questions and consults her Korean-English dictionary. At one moment, she furiously looks up the word “terminal” before the doctor decides to actually explain what’s happening to her.
Care work in the films Riceboy Sleeps and Coyote
Aurora’s daughter in So Much Tenderness is already a teenager in the beginning, but So-young and Camilo must care for small children. I love the way both Riceboy Sleeps and Coyote show us the constant, loving care work they must do to make their children’s lives function. In Riceboy Sleeps, every scene of Dong-hyun playing or relaxing features his mother in the background. She’s quietly folding laundry or vacuuming or doing the majority of the kitchen cleanup after he wipes the table. She also works hard to make him the Korean food that’s part of her identity, which his experiences at school cause him to reject, further dividing them.
In Coyote, Camilo gets asked to care for his grandson while his daughter does a stint in rehab. Reluctant, at first, Jerkovic shows him unpacking her old toys, cleaning up the sofa bed, doing laundry — all that exhausting care and prep work that is part of raising children but largely goes unacknowledged. Kelly Reichardt has been drawing attention to it for years, especially in films like Meek’s Cutoff, and last year’s Full Time was a great examination of the hundreds of duties of a single mom.
What’s unique about Coyote is that it’s a man silently doing this work, uncomplainingly. He has his issues with his daughter, who stole from him and forced him to close his restaurant, but he won’t take that out on his grandson he still doesn’t know. I keep thinking back to the scene where he sits on the toilet seat in the bathroom while his grandson has a shower. He’s exhausted and quiet, uncertain how to connect with the boy, but he’s there, doing the caring work all the same.
Kelly Reichardt’s films are also concerned with often invisible care work
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Displacement and Toronto in So Much Tenderness
Although language disconnects and tense interactions with institutions are a major part of what makes the characters feel displaced as immigrants, Jerkovic and Shim also build this notion into how they shoot the places and spaces. By contrast, after the first thirty-ish minutes of So Much Tenderness, the film shifts away from being one about the jarring disorientation and displacement of the immigration experience. The rest of the film is a less successful mumblecore look at the love lives and friendships of mother and daughter.
Still, So Much Tenderness is grounded in the specificity of Toronto, where intercultural connections are the norm. Mother-and-daughter clearly live in the Annex, or just a bit west, even if there’s no way they could afford their home. We see Aurora ride the subway (a Yonge car on the Bloor line, as Torontonians will quibble) and walk in High Park. The film and the characters make use of the spaces of their new home, which is probably why they feel less adrift in their spaces than the characters in Coyote or Riceboy Sleeps.
Displacement and Montreal in Coyote
In Coyote, Jerkovic places the film solidly in Montreal, with its scenes of Camilo riding the metro and recognizable Montreal architecture. Yet we don’t see major city landmarks. If you know Montreal, you know they’re in Montreal. As Camilo now works at night as janitorial staff, he has become disjointed from the place where he lives. We get a sense that when he ran his own restaurant, the name of which gives the film its title, he felt more integrated. Still, he tends to frequent Mexican restaurants, and he cooks Mexican food. That’s partly because he’s a chef, but also because food is such an important staple of culture.
Since the film is an intimate story about a family, Jerkovic does give us an excellent sense of place in Camilo’s apartment and his apartment complex. We know his furniture and his cupboards. We know his kitchen. There are details in production design to show that he’s lived there for some time, but maybe only moved there after his wife died. It’s both an oasis for him — clean and his — and yet not that lived in. When he gets a job offer to work far away to do what he loves, cooking, we understand why he wouldn’t feel he’s leaving much behind. At least, that’s true until his grandson enters the picture.
Displacement, Korea, and vague Canadian settings in Riceboy Sleeps
The disconnect between both mother and son in this unfamiliar place, and thus their disconnect from the place itself, is a major subject of Riceboy Sleeps. Shim’s camera is always wandering. He keeps us at a distance when showing close domestic scenes between So-young and six-year-old Dong-hyun, like when they’re lying on the couch reading a book together. He also uses a lot of pans.
That traumatic scene in the principal’s office that stays mostly on So-young, occasionally shows us the principal, but only through a long pan across the room. It works to show us how far away So-young feels from the people around her, but it does grow tiresome as a directorial strategy for every scene, losing its power as the film goes on. But the wandering camera, and the blocking that places mother and son in the same scene but at opposite ends of the frame (one in focus and one not), does succeed in making us feel like they are having wholly disconnected experiences despite being in the same place.
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Why place matters
I have mixed feelings about the fact that Shim never really tells us where Riceboy Sleeps is set in Canada, aside from that it’s somewhere in the suburbs. On the one hand, when there’s such a disconnect with the land you’re on, it doesn’t really matter where it’s set. On the other hand, as the other immigration stories at TIFF show us, place has an enormous effect on the immigration experience.
This Place, also screening at TIFF, especially, is a film that is both very recognizably Toronto, about the inter-cultural exchange that only happens in Toronto, and yet is still just “this place” to the people who have moved there. Even So Much Tenderness becomes a film less about displacement because of its Toronto setting — where so many people share that experience. The rampant xenophobia in Quebec isn’t the subject of Coyote, but it does help to explain why Camilo’s life is still focused within his immigrant community. So there’s a missed opportunity in Riceboy Sleeps to address how the immigrant experience would be shaped by the specific place, which it undoubtedly would be. It might be just as traumatic, but the film lacks specificity.
The tendency for vague settings in Canadian film
At the same time, cynically, it’s easy to attribute the film’s vagueness about setting so it could be a stand-in for not just anywhere in Canada but also the US. From Degrassi students suddenly getting interested in taking the SATs (which basically only rich people in Canada take), to even great films like Giant Little Ones being vaguely set in small town somewhere (it’s obviously Sault-Saint Marie, but it never draws attention to it), this is a long-standing Canadian film industry tradition. I think it makes for worse movies. If a Torontonian Canadian like me can connect with Oslo, August 31st, despite never having even been to Norway, it’s because of the film’s specificity to place. It makes it feel more real and lived in.
The flipside to the placelessness of Riceboy Sleeps when depicting the immigration experience
The flipside to the placelessness of Riceboy Sleeps during the Canada segment of the film is that the final third of the film is set in Korea. It’s the first return home for both characters. And it makes the rural Korean setting seem particularly magical. Cinematographer Christopher Lew captures the rice fields, forests, and farmlands of Korea in rich yellows, greens, and blues. The wides and drones shots must be an exquisite big screen experience.
The trouble, for me, at least, is that by the time we get to Korea, Shim hasn’t told us much about the characters, in part by refusing to show us how they react to their environment. So-young’s struggles are more vivid and complex, but Dong-hyun has basically just played with toys as a six-year-old and gotten high on weed with his friends as a sixteen-year-old with bleached blonde hair. The scenes I’ve described earlier that were so powerful are meant to stand in for all the other things the film never fills out.
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