converSalón with Keith Lock
Saturday January 13 6pm 2023
680 Queen’s Quay West, Toronto
Relics of Love and War (40 minutes 2023)
Keith Lock, the first Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, returns with a new movie, Relics of Love and War (40 minutes), a family thriller that was kept under wraps for decades, until the Official Secrets Act allowed these true stories to be told. Using a suite of stunning 35mm photographs, Lock brings to life intimate details of his father’s Second World War forays in Operation Oblivion, along with the anti-Chinese racism that was behind the passage of more than a hundred laws that expelled Chinese workers, stopped families from reuniting, assigned seating on public transport and theatres. Here, the smallest gestures carry a nation-wide significance.
Introduction
I think without Keith Lock it’s hard to imagine that many of us would be making movies at all. It’s not just because he’s the first Chinese-Canadian filmmaker in the country, but he showed me that you could be a filmmaker and still be a very sweet and shy, soft spoken guy melting into the background. Keith was an invitation, a door opening in a city that was built without doors.
In 1954 his father opened Tom Luck Drugs in the old Chinatown on Dundas between Bay and Elizabeth. He gave Keith a camera to make photos when he was a kid – the drugstore had a dark room he could use – and this led him to make movies in high school with his best pal Jim Anderson. On Wednesday evenings they would go to Three Schools, a small art school at Bloor and Bathurst, to study film, and they borrowed a super 8 camera to make “Flights of Frenzy,” a snappily cut anti-war short that won the award for best super 8 film at a festival in Amsterdam. Their win was a sensation, written up in all the papers. The two teenagers were commissioned to make a film for the Red Cross, and Keith made his debut on national TV as a guest on the show “Drop In.”
In 1969 they made a short drama that looked like a documentary, set in Dad’s drug store of course, featuring a drug store worker named Arnold. A couple of years later, with the same actor, they made Work, Bike and Eat, a 40-minute movie that feels like it’s being filmed while life is happening. Verité scenes from the drug store mix with staged encounters. It managed to be both casual and precise, a revelation.
In the 70s, which in Canada was really the 60s, Keith joined an artists’ commune at Buck Lake. He went to Gwartzman’s Art Supply which is still there on Spadina and bought a roll of canvas to build a tipi that he lived in. For the next 3 years he shot little bits of everyday this and thats with his wind-up Bolex, and made a feature-length, impressionistic, nearly wordless diary masterpiece called Everything Everywhere Again Alive that has appeared in various poobah’s greatest Canadian movies of all times lists.
He went on to make dramatic shorts and features like The Ache (based on the Shakespearean family life of Toronto poet Louise Bak) and Small Pleasures about a couple of young students who come to Canada from China). Small Pleasures was the first Chinese-Canadian feature made by a Chinese-Canadian, and it was made in 1993. That’s not a glass ceiling, it’s concrete.
Tonight, we’re going to watch Keith’s latest film, Relics of Love and War. It’s 40 minutes long and premiered at the Reel Asian Festival a few months ago. When it’s over I hope he will grace us with more of his masterful storytelling.