Working through the grief

Filmmaker reconnects with her dad’s memory

MONTREAL — In her new documentary, In the Shadow of the Pines, Anne Koizumi recreates one of her strongest childhood memories using puppets and stop-motion animation.

It might sound cute, but the memory was also one of her most painful.

When she was in the second grade at Calgary's Guy Weadick School, a classmate got sick and threw up on the floor. Koizumi's father was called over the intercom to come clean up the mess. He was the school janitor at the time, a cheerful immigrant from Osaka who had a habit of loudly calling out his daughter's Japanese name, Ma-yu, whenever he came across her in the halls or classrooms.

It was mortifying for young Anne.

So, when she knew her father was en route to Room B12 with a bucket and mop, she pushed a pencil to the floor and hid under her desk until he was gone. She was terrified the other kids would find out he was her father.

“That image of me hiding under the desk is really a visual metaphor of my shame,” says Koizumi, in an interview from her home in Montreal. “It's me disguising my identity, my social class. But making this film is really me coming out from under the desk and reclaiming that identity and just connecting with my father.”

At less than 10 minutes long, In the Shadow of the Pines is a lyrical gem filled with depth, sadness and loss. Much of it is based on a fictional conversation Koizumi constructs between her and her father. Produced by CBC Docs and accepted into Hot Docs 2020, the film was the culmination of an eight-year journey through grief for the filmmaker. In 2016, she began creating the puppets and sets for the film but also travelled to her father's native Japan to interview relatives about his life. She finished the film last February.