A Chinese-Canadian painter, photographer and filmmaker based in Toronto, Weiye Su has directed two shorts for the National Film Board of Canada: Jia (2020) and A Passage Beyond Fortune (2022). 

Jia focuses on a young Chinese family who visit their native region of Wuhan, the epicentre of the COVID outbreak. Opening with a meta-cinematic sequence (reminiscent of Beverly Shaffer’s 1977 film I’ll Find a Way), and incorporating pictures taken in China and Canada in the middle of the global pandemic, the film beautifully embodies some of the experiences that so many young immigrant families had during COVID.  

A Passage Beyond Fortune also makes use of testimonies, photographs and documents to tell its story. The filmmaker explores an intimate episode in the life of the Chow family, who live in Moose Jaw, home to a popular but untrue tale about the city’s underground tunnels, and to an anti-Chinese immigration policy that fractured their family’s settlement in the city. The film follows the Chows as they reflect on this harmful myth and the entanglement of their family’s overlapping roots in the city, which date back to the 1880s.