Locating Family: Asian-Canadian Historical Revisioning in Linda Ohama’s Obaachan’s Garden and Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

Abstract

This essay analyzes the family portrait documentary projects of two Asian Canadian filmmakers, Linda Ohama’s Obaachan’s Garden (2001) and Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003) as projects that make family stories important sources for Asian Canadian historical revisioning. These documentaries blend private stories and public histories to rework historical inscriptions of Asian Canadian subjects, introducing them into the nation’s political and social records, inviting us to rethink the ways in which national histories have been articulated. The discussion of these documentary films focusses on the ways Ohama and Fleming use family stories—and the possibilities offered by film imagery—to recover and recreate the past, and to claim for their forebears and, by extension, for themselves, a place in Canada’s historical and cultural narrative of itself.