Toronto Reel Asian 2024 KCrush Interview With ‘Exclusion: Beyond The Silence’ Filmmaker Keira Loughran
On July 1st, 1923, the Mackenzie King, the current Prime Minister of Canada signed into law the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, otherwise known as the Chinese Exclusion Act for the way the law separated Canadian born Chinese citizens from the rest of the predominately white population of the time. In her debut feature film and documentary Exclusion: Breaking the Silence, director and film subject Keira Loughran with no artifice, looks at this dark and not at all too distant part of Canadian history to reveal the traumatic and long-lasting impact of this exclusionary at on Chinese Canadians, their families back in China, and Canada’s present.
Seclusion: Breaking the Silence, premiered at the 2024 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, in the Features program. Keira who is an award winning actress, playwright, dramaturge, and stage director and producer, through wanting to know more about the history of her grandmother Jean Lumb, a celebrated Toronto activist and advocate for the rights of Chinese Canadian citizens and Immigrants and the first Chinese Canadian to be awarded the prestigious Order of Canada, had to delve into the history of the Chinese diaspora in Canada to their arrivals in 1788 to the country’s shores on the Pacific North-Western territories of the First Nations peoples.
As Canada began to rapidly develop in the late 1700, the need for manpower grew exponentially and as a result immigrants from across China were welcomed. Physically fit men and women from the rural areas of far-reaching towns such as Guangdong where Jean’s husband was from. Chinese men and women flocked to the country in the thousands to seek better opportunities for themselves, their children, and families they sent money back home to support and hopefully send for. But almost overnight after the famed Canadian Transnational Railway that these men who broke their bodies – and even lost their lives in many cases – building was completed, they became the target of a concerted effort to strip away their rights as citizens and human beings. Created out of the racist “White Canada forever” movement (sounds familiar?), the Chinese Immigration Act was born. It became the first and to date, only Canadian legislation that targeted a specific racial group to deprive them of their rights of citizenship, and relegate them to the status of immigrants, considered to be a lower social and legal status, then and unfortunately even now.
Under this act inspired by the one signed into United States federal law in in 1882 and ended in 1943, Chinese Canadians both naturalized citizens and immigrants, of all ages were legally required to provide documentation with photo ID to present upon request wherever they went. Husbands were unable to send for the wives and children waiting back in China, separating many for 20 years or more, and even for the remainder of their lives. Women born in Canada lost their citizenship because the law said the immigrant status of their husbands took precedence. This is exactly what happened to Jean. The Act not only created these unfair situations for those already in Canada, for 24 years, it completely barred any Chinese person from entering the country.
As Keira dug into the past of her own family and community, she began to see yuánfèn, ‘The Red Thread of Fate’ begin to emerge. In Chinese mythology, The Red Thread of Fate is considered to be an invisible thread that binds the fate and destiny of people together throughout time. While many may not believe in it, the revelations of Keira’s connections to the life of Foon Hay Lum and that of her granddaughter Helen Lee, would be enough to convince many to consider it.
On April 24, 2020, at 111 years-old and the old living Canadian, Foon Hay Lum died from medical complications caused by the COVID-19 virus. For much of her life, Foon hay worked as an activist to educate people about the ‘Chinese Head Tax’ that had been levied against Chinese male immigrating to Canada until the repeal of the Exclusion Act in 1947. This tax which increased from a few dollars to $500 – an exorbitant amount of money at that time – was demanded for entry. Because of this, most of those allowed into the country were teenagers and young men traveling alone, leading to the creating of an overwhelmingly large population of single men who were forced to live decades without direct familial relations. It is disturbingly ironic that Foon Hay spent her life speaking up for the rights of Chinese Canadians and whose activism directly lead to the repeal of the Act, was ultimately killed by a virus whom many white people in Canada (and in America) blamed on China and Chinese people.
Just as the white population and white led government turned against Chinese Canadians and Immigrants once they believed them to no longer be of use, so too did the descendants of those bigots in 2020.
In researching Foon Hay’s life and the impact she made on Canadian society, Keira began to see the similarities to her and her own grandmother Jean. The more Keira and Helen dug into their pasts the more of the Red Thread began to be revealed until it led them back to Helen’s ancestral homes, and the burial plots of both of their ancestors…just over a small hill from each other in the same grave yard.
Seclusion: Breaking the Silence is a terrific documentary that shows how unpredictable and beautiful life can be by showing how people can be connected to each other in the most extraordinary ways. Keira highlights the resilience of immigrants, and the strength required to uproot your entire life to travel to a completely new country with people who not only don’t look like you or speak the same language, but who hold prejudice against you for simply being different. People who themselves are immigrants and the descendants of immigrants who violently took the land from the Indigenous people, rather than work with them.
The documentary shows that for all its marketing as a land of tolerance and friendliness, the reality is that Canada is a country built by colonialism, and the hands of the same people it betrayed and disenfranchised in the past and intent on doing the same today. By the end of the film, the audience may be inclined to ask if perhaps this is Canada’s own Red Thread of Fate.
In my interview with Keira at York University where she is Sessional Assistant Professor of Theatre, we spoke about how Keira’s own path to making the documentary seemed destined to be, how the two years she spent making the film and discovering her own history changed the way she looked at Canada as a country and immigration, and how filmmaking is a way of breaking the silence foisted upon our ancestors.
Carolyn Hinds
Freelance Film Critic, Journalist, Podcaster & YouTuber
African American Film Critics Association Member, Tomatometer-Approved Critic
Host & Producer Carolyn Talks…, and So Here’s What Happened! Podcast
Bylines at Authory.com/CarolynHinds
Twitter & Instagram: @CarrieCnh12
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