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.

Kei Joe Koizumi was born in

Osaka during the Second World War. His own father died of tuberculosis when he was only one. The family was taken in by an orphanage, where his mother found work as a caretaker. He eventually immigrated to Canada and raised four children in Temple, a neighbourhood in Calgary’s northeast. When he died eight years ago, his daughter was enlisted to write her father’s eulogy.

“I was working through a lot of sadness,” Koizumi says. “That whole writing process made me reflect on who he was as a person, but also my relationship with him. As I was reflecting on my relationship with him, I just realized there were so many parts of our relationship that I never got a chance to speak to him about. There was so much shame I carried about who he was as a person, as a Japanese immigrant, as a janitor at the school I attended. Along with that, there was so much regret in terms of not realizing his full story, not really telling him how I felt about him then but also now and acknowledging what he did for our family.”

In the Shadow of the Pines chronicles Kei Joe Koizumi’s early years, much of which was gleaned from interviews his daughter conducted in Japan with his brothers, sister-in-law and an official who ran the orphanage where he grew up. Snippets of those interviews appear in the film alongside family photos. The film also visits some of the filmmaker’s own childhood memories, including foraging for rare Matsutake mushrooms in British Columbia’s interior where the family took camping vacations. It was a family activity that took on new symbolism for Koizumi.

“It was about being rare and elusive and a delicacy and the act of searching for that thing,” she says. “There were different ways of looking at it, but for me it was me searching for who I am; searching for that identity and searching for that rare thing and my father is the one leading me.”