Johnny Ma wants you to swoon over movies of 1990s
TORONTO: Filmmaker Johnny Ma is obsessed with Chinese movies from the 1990s.
And he hopes moviegoers will catch the same obsession.
Recalling the words of an uncle, he said: “I was told that to succeed as a filmmaker, I had to learn how to explore the “inbetween” of the two cultures I was from. I thought about it for a moment and asked my uncle if he knew this because he also had some psychic powers based on where he worked. He replied plainly, no.”
Ma had spent most of his formative years in Vancouver and Toronto. But his knowledge about his Chinese roots appear to be vague.
Conceded Ma: “I am still often asked, “Yeah, but where are you from originally?” For many years I told people both answers, to the point where I didn’t really know.”
Ma had started by working on short films in Australia ( The Robbery), the United States ( Play), and even Brazil ( O Genio de Quintino).
While working on these projects, he often thought about his dubious heritage — a Chinese largely brought up in Canada.
Reckoned Ma: “It was perhaps this lack of belonging that led me to pursue a career in filmmaking, where you often end up planted across the world for months at a time. I set Old Stone, my first feature in a small, dusty third-tier city in China. It is a story about a Chinese taxi driver who commits a good deed to save another person’s life, but then is punished for it to the point of turning evil. I wanted to make a
I was also just deeply afraid. Afraid of facing a world and people painfully familiar to me who I still felt alienated from. My worst nightmare would be if I was not able to make the film as well as a local Chinese filmmaker would. Johnny Ma, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker
cautionary tale of how difficult it is to stay empathetic in a world where self-interest has become the number one motivating factor for how we all behave.”
Ma knew that since China was such a hot topic in the West, he didn’t want that to be the main discussion over the story’s universal theme.
But he admitted having to wrestle with his indecisiveness and cultural ambiguity.
Admitted Ma: “I was also just deeply afraid. Afraid of facing a world and people painfully familiar to me who I still felt alienated from. My worst nightmare would be if I was not able to make the film as well as a local Chinese filmmaker would.
“In many ways, the journey to where I am now, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker with one finished feature under his belt (getting ready for his second), really began with a decision back in 2012 when I was still a film student.”