Everything Will Be

Everything Will Be (2014)

Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan’s documentary Everything Will Be captures the subtle nuances of a culturally diverse neighbourhood—Vancouver’s once thriving Chinatown—in the midst of transformation. The community’s oldest and newest members offer their intimate perspectives on the shifting landscape as they reflect on change, memory and legacy. Night and day, a neon sign that reads "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" looms over Chinatown. Everything is going to be alright, indeed, but the big question is for whom?

Date of release
2014-04-28
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Julia Kwan

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Vancouver

Everything Will Be is a 2014 documentary film about the changing face of Vancouver's Chinatown, directed by Julia Kwan and produced by David Christensen for the National Film Board of Canada. Everything Will Be was the first documentary film for Kwan, whose first feature Eve and the Fire Horse was a fictional comic account of growing up Chinese in Vancouver.

Production

Kwan and Christensen had initially explored the idea of making a film that contrasted Vancouver’s fading Chinatown with the thriving Golden Village in nearby Richmond, until Kwan realized her passion was in documenting Chinatown’s historic sites and businesses before they disappeared: "One day I was walking down Pender Street and within a two-block radius I counted like 20 shuttered shops … herbalists and knick-knack shops and green grocers.

Kwan has described the film as "an observational, immersive documentary, inspired by Frederick Wiseman," and prepared for the film by walking the streets of Chinatown with her cinematographer. Since she characterizes her own command of Cantonese as "highly suspect," Kwan had a researcher and translator with her much of the time.

Area residents featured in Everything Will Be include an elderly newspaper seller known as Granny Kwan, and a security guard who's worked in the area for 20 years, who helped the filmmaker convince doubtful area residents to participate in the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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