Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100 .5 FM in the lower mainland. In today's episode, Lorraine Chisholm speaks with local filmmakers Haley Gray and Elad Sadok about their new film, Unarchived.
Speaker: In the new feature documentary, Unarchived, co -directors Hailey Gray and Alad Sadak highlight community archives across British Columbia. Their film reveals just some of what has been erased from the official record. These community -based archives tell stories of people building connection through work, play, protest, family, and tradition.
Speaker: In doing so, they challenge larger institutions to re -examine and address older narratives that no longer reflect the totality of our shared experience. The National Film Board documentary Unarchived has its world premiere next week at the VIF Vancouver International Film Festival. And I'm joined this morning by Haley Gray and Alad Sadak. Hi, Haley. Hi, how's it going? Good. Alad, hello.
Speaker: Hi. I had the opportunity to see the film this week, and it's a real pleasure to get a chance to talk with you about it. Before we dig into the themes of the film, tell us a bit about the four community archives that are the subjects of the film.
Speaker: Absolutely. So we start with the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, which is over 40 years old now, and Ron Dutton, their archivist, and how he's gone through collecting for decades gay and lesbian history. And then we move to the South Asian Canadian Legacy Project, which is just online as of this year and is Canada's largest digital archive of South Asian history.
Speaker: And then the last two stories that we follow are the Chinese -Canadian Museum and their journey and how they're kind of looking to document and highlight Chinese -Canadian history and the Taotan archive that has just been starting up this past year after the forest fires in 2018.
Speaker: Now, these are obviously not the only four community archives in British Columbia. How did you land on these four stories? Oh, my goodness. We started with 20 stories because we're a little ambitious. And then we kind of looked at each of them and each of those communities. And I think the biggest piece of it was the archive and the community at a place where they had something that they wanted to speak to.
Speaker: in a larger conversation and it was safe and helpful for them to do so within the documentary.
Speaker: The project also morphed quite a bit. I think initially when we pitched it, we were thinking something that was going to be a web series with all these various stories and all these nice little personal stories of people who are collecting stuff in their own homes, in their own communities. And then over the pandemic, the project evolved and the story evolved and we really kind of had to focus it in and narrow it down to what ended up being these four stories.
Speaker: That's interesting because you sort of preempted my next question because what I found was that
