A film dedicated to telling the untold histories of BC will be coming to Courtenay.
Unarchived is a documentary written and directed by Hayley Gray and Elad Tzadok, focusing on sharing the stories and histories of several communities through archives.
Gray says the idea came to them while travelling to Cumberland.
“We saw the Hayashi Studios photos at the Cumberland Museum & Archive, and that was a big ah-hah moment for both of us,” said Gray.
“We’re able to finally see racialized communities documented by racialized people in the 1910’s, 20’s, and 30’s in a way that we haven’t seen in BC or Canada before.”
Gray says the visit also made them think about how there’s so many other places that had Japanese, Chinese, black, and South Asian communities but they weren’t seen or represented.
She adds getting this film done was quite the process.
“It was a year and a half of pre-interviews, trying to figure out which people and which community were interested and open to speaking on a larger platform about their histories and their archiving of their histories,” said Gray.
“People were really gracious with their time and invited us to places, like the South Asian Studies Institute, the Nanaimo Museum, and the Chinese Canadian Museum. We got to not only have those sit-down interviews but also have those subjects walk us through their archives and museums, so we can really see and feel what was so important about those spaces and those histories.”
The 84-minute film will be played in the Stan Hagen Theatre at North Island College as part of this year’s World Community Film Festival.
Admission is by donation, with the film set for Wednesday at 7 pm.
“We’ll listen to interviews, especially with Elders of racialized communities where the first thing and the last thing they say is I don’t why you’d want to listen to me, I’m not important, and I think we really need to change that narrative.”
