Vancouver Historical Society presents Karin Lee's film  “Comrade Dad”

It's
been a great pleasure getting to know film maker Karin Lee during the
Head Tax redress movement.  She is an astute historian and story
teller.  She won a Gemini award for the documentary Made in China – the Story of Adopted Chinese Children in Canada.  Canadian Steel: Chinese Grit, is a historical documentary about the Chinese who helped build the CPR.

Vancouver Historical Society

Thursday, April 26, 2007, 7:30 pm
Comrade Dad: A Father and a Vancouver Bookstore
Speaker: Karin Lee

Vancouver Museum, located at 1100 Chestnut Street at 7.30 pm.�

All meetings are FREE and open to the public and visitors are welcome.

The story of Comrade Dad
is a quintessentially Vancouver story. Presented as a half hour DVD
followed by an engaging talk and discussion, Karin Lee presents the
story of a Chinese-Canadian family's journey through a particular
period in time, the late 60s to the early 80s. It is a story about
conflicted family which, with equal amounts of idealism and
stubbornness, marginalized itself within the greater society of the
time.

Writer/director
Karin Lee reflects on her father Wally Lee and the communist bookstore
that he ran on Vancouver's Skid Row from the mid-1960s until the early
1980s.

This
experimental biography of archival documentary photographs and footage,
explores both the person and the effect that his ideological beliefs
had on his family, set within the political landscapes of Canada and
China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. It is also a little known
story about how a segment of Vancouver's Chinese community embraced
Chinese socialism and how their idealism was affected by a changing
political climate in China. This work is not only about memory and the
filmmaker's relationship with her father, but also about questioning
his place within a divided political community as well as her own
ideals and identity.

Karin
Lee is a Canadian Academy Award (Gemini) winning filmmaker. She has
directed films and videos, both fiction and documentaries about the
effects of global displacement, feminism and the Chinese diaspora in
North America. Her other films include Oyster and Chocolate; the Gemini award winning documentary Made in China – the Story of Adopted Chinese Children in Canada; Canadian Steel: Chinese Grit – a historical documentary about the Chinese who helped build the CPR; Songs of the Phoenix about contemporary feminists in China; and My Sweet Peony a short drama about cultural identity and sexuality.