The power of memory: Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden. - movie review

TAKE ONE, May, 2002 by Cynthia Amsden

"How do we learn about things that have happened before us? And what about memories? Are these memories always real? And what about what we dream or wish for? Can they become real one day?" Linda Ohama, director of Obaachan's Garden

Traumatic historical events carry with them a buffer that proffers, immediately after said event, a certain protection. News reports cover the facts, but the psychological and emotional impact of these events cannot be told for years. Several reasons prevent immediate close inspection: the ripple effect of these traumas cannot be seen without the perspective of time; the facts rewrite themselves in favour of the victors so that certain stories are lost or at least buried in the passage of time; and when anecdotal histories finally begin to surface, the atrocities take on a politically correct posture, holding victims up as sacrificial lambs, compelling their stories to include cries of injustice and outrage. If in doubt, see Scott Hicks's Snow Falling on Cedars, which plays paint--by--numbers with emotional cliches.

Now, five plus decades after the Second World War, there are stories that need to be told while the individuals who participated in the events are still alive to bear witness. Fifty years seems to be establishing itself as a watershed point after which histories that could not be told before now must be told. In the case of Linda Ohama's NFB documentary. Obaachan's Garden, there was indeed an urgency. The subject of this film, indeed, the inspiration and heart of this film, Asayo Murakami, her grandmother -- obaachan being the Japanese word for grandmother -- was approaching her 100th birthday.

It is the purely organic nature of Obaachan's Garden that sets it apart from other documentaries. The project began in 1991 when Ohama, an established documentary filmmaker, began to visit her grandmother in a nursing home, conducting on--camera interviews. This went on for three years as an independent project. There was a wealth of material to cover, as audiences see it laid out in the film: Murakami's childhood in Japan; her arrival in Canada in 1923 as a "picture bride"; her rejection of her prospective husband--to--be; her eventual marriage and raising her family in Steveston, British Columbia. The biography pivots with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the years of internment and exploitation during the Second World War and how Murakami settled after the socio--political tornado of the war.

Although in the film itself Ohama presents Murakami's life in a chronological through line, the genesis of Obaachan's Garden was hardly such a straightforward process. "I was doing other films in the area where my grandmother was staying," Ohama explains from Vancouver, "These interviews were like a notebook. I knew one day I'd probably want to do piece on her, something about her because she's such an interesting woman. Around 1996, I actively started to focus on her as a subject of a film." It was then, after Ohama had invested her own resources on the project, that the NFB came on line and ramped up the project budget.

At this point, the material seemed tidily wrapped up with Murakami's 100th birthday celebration, which made for a pleasant and satisfying ending. But the celebrant didn't appear at the party. It's at this juncture that the subject became the auteur. "My grandmother was very smart at letting off just a little bit of information at a time, and she did this over a period of five years. Living in a nursing home is not exactly the most exciting thing, sitting in the hallways, looking at your watch, waiting for breakfast, waiting for lunch and waiting for bedtime. She extended this out for five years, asking me questions, having my camera crew hang around, getting attention," Ohama recalls with the humour of hindsight. "It wasn't until 1998 that she told me her secret." The secret was that she had two children she left behind in Tokyo when she came to Canada.

Hook, line and sinker -- this would be a fair characterization of Ohama's reaction. But it wasn't a scam. Murakami was 100 years old, wheelchair bound and while she was finally old enough to not fear the reprisal of revealing that she had another husband and another family, she also had to cope with the fact that some people would relegate this "secret" to the dementia of her old age. "I first heard about this secret when I was handed a photograph of two small children," Ohama explains. Her first thought was not of how this would change the course of the documentary, but rather an overwhelming revision of how she viewed her grandmother. "I remember seeing the two little girls and seeing my grandmother as a young mother, a woman, more like me. I could really relate to that. I never thought of her so much as a mother, even as being my mother's mother. But when I saw the two little children, she stopped being just my grandmother. She was, in my mind, a woman who had this deep, deep love and deep, deep loss that she was sharing with another woman."