17 Oct 2023
Posted by Kelly Fleck 
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Written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown, Seagrass is an exploration of racial identity, loss of culture, and intergenerational trauma. Photo courtesy: Pender PR.
TORONTO — Vancouver-based director Meredith Hama-Brown’s first feature film, Seagrass, made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this September with incredible success, taking home the prestigious International Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize.
Through a family in crisis, Seagrass explores racial identity, the severance and loss of culture, and the intergenerational trauma that remains from the Japanese Canadian incarceration.
“It’s a huge honour to premiere at TIFF because it is just such an incredible festival. I did really hope that [Seagrass] would be screened somewhere in Canada or the U.S., where Japanese Canadians and Americans went through the incarceration. I did feel like it would resonate, especially in those places, so that was important to me,” Hama-Brown tells Nikkei Voice in an interview.
Luke Roberts, Remy Marthaller, Nyha Breitkreuz, and Ally Maki star in Meredith Hama-Brown’s feature film, Seagrass. Photo credit: Pender PR.
Set in the mid-90s, Judith (Ally Maki) is a Japanese Canadian woman struggling with her mother’s recent death and her eroding relationship with Steve (Luke Roberts), her privileged, white husband. She brings her family to a remote self-development retreat on the B.C. coast, where the couple befriends another interracial couple with a seemingly perfect marriage, which spotlights how her marriage is failing. They bring along their children, Emmy (Remy Marthaller), six, who is timid, dependent on her sister, and fixated on an eerie seaside cave, rumoured to be haunted. Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz), 11, headstrong and impressionable, befriends an enigmatic girl with a mean streak, leaving her sister to fend for herself.
Filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown on set. Seagrass was filmed predominately on Gabriola Island, B.C. Photo credit: Pender PR.
Shot predominately on Gabriola Island, B.C., with a few additional days in Tofino and Ucluelet, the beautiful yet isolating landscape mimics each family member’s growing isolation. When the parents’ distressed relationship begins to rock the children’s emotional security, the family is forever changed.
Written and directed by Hama-Brown, the film explores themes close to the Japanese Canadian director’s heart. She began writing around key childhood memories, particularly her parents’ divorce and the anxiety and uncertainty she experienced.
“What I really wanted to look at in this film wasn’t so much a story about divorce, but a story about all of the characters feeling really uncertain and feeling a sense of insecurity within themselves. It is talking about divorce as well, but the central question to me was really looking at these internal crises,” says Hama-Brown.
Instead of focusing on whether the family will break apart, she examines how the tumultuous parental relationship creates an uneasy and unstable foundation for the three female characters, Judith, Emmy, and Stephanie. Seagrass is an exploration of grief, shame, loss of culture, motherhood, and the deep bond between sisters. Tying these themes together is a looming sense of fear and anxiety, which hovers over viewers as they watch a family break apart.
When Emmy is shown an oceanside cave, which the other children tell her is haunted, she becomes obsessed, certain the ghost of her grandmother has followed her out. Using clever camerawork, the perspective floats above the characters, moving ghostlike from room to room, which only Emmy can sense, evoking a sense of anxiety in the pit of viewers’ stomachs.
“I’m someone who has a great deal of anxiety, and so when I started writing this film, I think I just had a natural inclination as I started to look at themes that what would tie them all together is the theme of fear and all of the different ways that life is unsettling,” says Hama-Brown. “Of course, it isn’t a horror film, but sometimes the things that happen in life are even worse than actual horror films, or they can evoke a similar feeling of stress.”
Remy Marthaller as Emmy in Seagrass. Photo credit: Pender PR.
While sparked by memories of her parents’ divorce, that’s where the similarities to her parents end, says Hama-Brown. She reiterates that her father is nothing like Steve, and her parents never fought in front of her the way the parents did in the film. A more direct inspiration for Hama-Brown was exploring the loss of cultural identity and family history.
Through three generations of Japanese Canadian women, Hama-Brown explores the trauma of the Japanese Canadian incarceration. Through Judith, a Sansei Japanese Canadian, Hama-Brown searches for why lineage and culture were lost in her family. Initially, it seems like Judith is struggling with the recent death of her mother, but this loss triggers an internal crisis, where she experiences shame, anger, and longing that comes with losing touch with one’s history.
“Something that I noticed growing up—which I think a lot of Japanese Canadians relate to—is that there was so much history lost, so much culture lost. When I started to think about the main character, Judith, losing her mother, I was also thinking about how that could be her last connection to a whole side of her identity,” says Hama-Brown.
Like Judith, Hama-Brown’s mother is one of six children. She grew up in the B.C. interior in a predominantly white community, where her family ended up because of the forced uprooting, displacement, and internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
“Our grandparents’ generation were basically told that they were wrong and that they did not belong. And then, of course, the whole Japanese Canadian community [became] so fractured,” says Hama-Brown. “My mother’s generation and all my aunts and uncles, they therefore then grew up in communities where they had no connection, or not a big connection, to the Japanese Canadian culture that they would have had, had the community not been broken up, and I think it’s just all part of the traumatic event of the incarceration of Japanese Canadians.”
At the same time, Judith struggles with feelings of shame around her cultural identity as a Japanese Canadian, often trying to hide parts of herself from her husband, who doesn’t understand her experience as a Japanese Canadian. Judith contrasts the character of Pat, a Chinese Australian. While Judith has spent much of her life suppressing her Asian identity, Pat is confident in himself and his identity.
Chris Pang as Pat. Photo courtesy: Pender PR.
While Judith’s mother passed away six months earlier, her spirit looms throughout the film. Not only in the grief Judith feels for her mother, but her spirit seems to hover over the family. The grandmother’s spirit is most acutely felt by Emmy, who first encounters her in the caves. Initially, Emmy fears her grandmother’s ghost, but when it matters most, the spirit also protects her.
“I think there is something interesting in that Emmy initially fears her grandmother’s ghost, and maybe that could be symbolic of her kind of not knowing how to process the past or not knowing how to process grief,” says Hama-Brown. “I also thought there was something kind of interesting about Judith’s mother almost haunting them, not because she’s someone we should be afraid of, but because she represents this past, and this trauma that they’re all having a relationship to, and it’s almost like our past, and the things that happen to us kind of create who we are in the present.”
Judith’s mother appears in the story in other ways, like a blanket brought on the trip. Wrapped up with Emmy under the blanket, Judith shares how her mother unravelled old wool sweaters and knitted them into this blanket. These are small but significant nods to Japanese Canadian culture, such as the concept of mottainai, “too good to waste,” and the postwar mentality to reuse and repurpose.
“My grandmother was very similar. Nothing was wasted, nothing was thrown away, and I think everything was repurposed. I know something that is a really significant object in my own life are these pillowcases made from rice sacks,” says Hama-Brown. “My grandmother bleached them and made them look nice, but I was kind of thinking of those pillowcases when I was writing that [blanket] into the script,” says Hama-Brown.
Filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown on set. Photo credit: Pender PR.
Themes around the internment linger throughout the film without being fully explained in complete historical detail. Instead, bits and pieces are revealed throughout the story, not unlike how family histories are shared in many Japanese Canadian families.
“For me, speaking about the experience in an authentic way meant not trying to push all of the facts into the story. Because, honestly, if I tried to put more facts into the story, it could never fully explain what happened. I would have to make a documentary for that,” says Hama-Brown.
For the film to be recognized with the International Critics Prize, it was a reassurance that people understood the story, whether or not they had a connection to Japanese Canadian incarceration.
“I hope there will be a curiosity around the history talked about in the film. And I hope that people will feel a connection to every part of the film or different parts of the film for different people,” says Hama-Brown. “I think that there are a lot of universal things in the film, and then there are some things that are much more specific to being a mother or sisterhood, siblinghood, or Japanese Canadian identity, and I hope that people will just feel some sort of connection when they watch the film.”
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