by MICHAEL CITROME

You don’t usually associate the National Film Board of Canada with Chinese movies, but 25-year-old local director Yung Chang is breaking the mould. His recent NFB-produced film Earth to Mouth was shot entirely in Cantonese. It dazzled audiences at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire festival and Chang walked away with the People’s Choice Award.

The film is a documentary about a farm in the Toronto boonies that grows Chinese vegetables for local markets and restaurants. The story follows the produce from seed to table. It’s told by the owner’s mother, who helps him run the farm, who’s referred to throughout simply as “Ma.” It’s a simple story, told in a straightforward fashion, that’s rich and beautiful in its detail.

“Ma is an elderly woman from Guangzhou in mainland China. Her son had left for Canada and by the time Ma had emigrated in 1995 he had a farm in Newcastle,” says Chang. “She was managing the farm, working with the Mexican migrant workers. She’s been through so much - to end up on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Ontario is something she works out in her own philosophy.”

Chang is looking forward to the film’s Toronto premiere at the Hot Docs festival in May. In the meantime, the intrepid filmmaker is off to China to finish a film called Up Your Yangtze, about a group of American and U.K. tourists on a slow cruise up the Yangtze River, much of which has already been shot.

And much of his footage, Chang says, borders on the surreal. “The good thing about being on that boat is I could shoot what I wanted. I have shots of people going crazy over these relics, even though they’re fakes, because the real ones were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. You have 150 tourists suntanning on the third deck on this muddy river that’s eventually going to be flooded with the Three Gorges Dam project, eating a continental breakfast.” :

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