GRANT’S DESI ACHIEVER
At the intersection of real and reel lives
Award-winning documentary maker Ali Kazimi.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
Ali Kazimi was pulled aside for questioning when he landed in Canada for the first time in 1983 as a 22-year-old graduate student from Delhi who had been offered scholarships through an exchange program with York University.
Though a professor was waiting to receive him at the arrivals gate, the immigration officer questioned the veracity of his documents.
He eventually let him go, mainly because he “spoke such good English” and said he would thank him for this some day.
And thirty-seven years later Kazimi does, as he celebrates being selected as one of eight artists in the country to receive a Governor General’s Award for lifetime achievement in Visual and Media Arts, the first time an Indo-Canadian or even a South Asian Canadian artist has received this honour.
Not facetiously, but because it opened up a path for him to explore for the rest of his life what power was and how it impacted our lives, says the documentary filmmaker and associate professor at the department of Film and Media Art at York University.
But did he even process it as racism at the time? With zero prior experience of it, what did he make of the not-so-nice man?
“We were taught the seminal story of Gandhi being tossed out of a train,” he says. “We know racism when we encounter it.”
He still remembers that office, that feeling of helplessness. The experience triggered his sense of wanting to understand how race, immigration and social justice are linked and informs much of his work to-date.
“It’s been a little surreal,” he admits, of the accolades that have been piling up. “I was driving when I received the call. I was honoured to be nominated for the award, the last thing I was expecting was to be selected! Normally, people are nominated several times before they make the cut. It is enormously validating as one is selected by a jury of peers. But there I was at Rideau Hall – there’s considerable pomp and ceremony at the awards – and I found myself standing under a massive portrait of Queen Victoria, looking out at the Canadian art world. Yes, it was surreal at many levels.”
Before that, when UBC bestowed a Doctor of Letters, honoris, on Kazimi – most honorary doctorates are Doctor of Laws, the D.Litt. is given specifically to scholars – he was moved to tears.
His critically acclaimed documentaries Narmada: A Valley Rises, Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas, Continuous Journey, Random Acts of Legacy and others have been shown at festivals around the world. They have picked up several prestigious international honours and awards including a Gemini.
He founded the internationally- recognized Stereoscopic 3D Lab at York University and describes it as an invigorating collaboration with scientists.
His Stereoscopic 3D Installation Fair Play, was exhibited at the GG Award winners show at the National Gallery of Canada.
Many Canadians only became aware of the infamous Komagata Maru incident through watching Kazimi’s Continuous Journey.
It has created a massive spurt in academic research on the subject.
But has that changed things on the ground?
“People think that you make a film and change happens,” he says.
“I believe that a doc contributes to a dialogue, to an ongoing conversation. I’ve been lucky that there’s recognition of my work, so that’s one way of judging impact, but I think things have changed slowly, incrementally. The issues I deal with are deep, systemic. There remain huge inequities across racial lines.
“There is more visibility, more access for people of colour, but the struggle to be noticed continues. Unless the decision-making significantly changes to reflect the demographics of 2020, the struggle to have your issues taken seriously and not dismissed as ‘other’ issues will continue. You have to have diversity in positions of power. We’ve achieved some, but also gotten very good at tokenism and window dressing. We need to move beyond that.”
Kazimi, who doesn’t pull any punches, addressed some of this in his video speech for the GG Awards. And also in his convocation address at UBS.
“There’s always a price to pay for this. When you name race, people get uncomfortable. They don’t know how to engage with you. I am deeply grateful and feel fortunate to be in Canada. But you shouldn’t let gratitude mute you. I see it as my basic civic duty to speak up. To hold the government to account. For me, the right to dissent has always been an essential part of a vibrant democratic process. It requires engagement.”
The stories he tells have come to him either through personal connections or lived experience.
In his film class, they had to pitch an idea anonymously which the professor then read out and the class voted on each. In Canada for barely a few months at the time, Kazimi wrote about making a film on a manufacturer in King City who was making ultra light aircraft. His idea got the most votes, but there was a collective gasp when his name was read out. It was really surprising, said a fellow student, that someone from the third world would come up with such a first world idea.
Stereotypes are deeply embedded, says Kazimi.
“One of the most irritating questions I am asked – often – is if I’d seen Peter Sellers in The Party. And before I can give my take, it is invariably followed by, ‘Indians get very defensive when we talk about this film, but it’s great!’”
He was also mistaken for a courier when he dressed up to go meet potential funders for his documentaries. “Are you dropping off or picking up?” the receptionist would ask when he entered a building.
The documentaries were incredibly hard to make, he says.
In spite of the Narmada issue being known to everyone in the environmental world, it was virtually impossible to arrange funding. Canadian broadcasters turned it down saying it fell outside their sphere of interest.
But throughout the process, there were also those whom Kazimi calls angels. The Social Justice Department of the United Church of Canada was one of the first to support the project, after he had a frank conversation about their expectations and their policies in India. It was a no-strings attached grant. Kazimi cobbled the rest of the funding together to make his film and when it premiered to a standing ovation, things started to change.
“A little bit,” says Kazimi. Now they wanted more such films from Kazimi. He chose to make Shooting Indians. “I feel deeply implicated as an immigrant. We immigrate to the Canadian state, that makes us signatories to the treaties Canada signed with Indigenous people. Shooting Canadians was me as an Indian looking at the work of the ‘Indian’ photographer Jeffrey Thomas.”
It remains the first and only film that looks at the Indian experience through the eyes of someone from India and is used widely in universities across the country.
Thomas received the GG’s Award the same year as Kazimi did. “What are the chances?” marvels Kazimi. “He was a struggling photographer, I was a student from India, and now so many years alter, we are together at the awards.”
He chose to stay and work in Canada, to start from scratch, because he believed in the fairness of the processes in the country.
“I started from scratch, I knew it would be very difficult and it was – I lived extremely frugally for the first 20 years of my career and only found financial stability after I began teaching. But I knew arts councils judge on merit, not on your connections. Canada Council for the Arts has been absolutely central to my growth, as have the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.”
Kazimi is married to ceramic artist Heidi McKenzie and enjoys cooking and gardening in his free time.
“One of the best ways for immigrants to connect with the land, literally, is to go out and see what grows when and how. I find gardening immensely calming. Our yard is filled with trees.”
He also suggests volunteering as a way of getting to know the community intimately.
“Volunteering on boards of film festivals and at volunteer artist-run centres allowed me to understand the Canadian context in my area of interest. The nucleus of my friends’ circle comes from that. Otherwise you risk getting stuck in this paradox of having come with your qualifications but not being able to break in because of lack of Canadian experience.
“A technician I met at my clinic recently is a highly-trained surgeon from Bangladesh, but it was either this or working in a department store or as a security guard he said. We all make trade-offs in terms of how far we’re willing to deprive ourselves of material things to achieve our goals in life. It’s a personal choice that we have to confront with clarity. My challenges continue, but I have no regrets about the choices I made.”
Kazimi is working on a long-standing project of his on his grandfather, SM Hadi, India’s first Olympian and one of two Indians who represented the country in both tennis as well as cricket.
His lifetime achievement award speaks to a career devoted to bringing compelling stories to life, but there’s more to come.
“I’d love to live in a world where racial issues, injustice and marginalization didn’t exist, but that would be a Utopian world. There are always going to be stories to tell.”