What Came Before

A filmmaker travels to South Korea to document the rising feminist movement responding to brutal patriarchal norms and a spy cam epidemic. Leading up to the protest of December 22, 2018 in Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, the filmmaker journeys throughout rural and urban areas of the country, interviewing women of different generations and backgrounds: their private and public lives.

ghosts of cambie blends visual music, collage and documentary. It focuses on the neighbourhoods of South Cambie and Fairview that lie on the unceded, traditional, ancestral territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lo and S.’lílw.taʔ/ Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwm.θkw.y’.m (Musqueam) Nations (known by some as Vancouver, BC, Canada). Shot on 16mm colour reversal film and cut with archival found footage, the film explores the emotional friction within a neighbourhood of changing communities, shopkeepers, settlers and lives. While Hong Kong migrants in the 1980s were a major force in shaping the architectural and cultural landscape of the community, evidence of these lives are disappearing due to rapid gentrification and erasure of history. Remnants are left behind.