Interview with Mina Shum director of The Ninth Floor by Claudia Edwards Canadian independent filmmaker Mina Shum’s career spans many short films and features. Her first feature Double Happiness won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Torino International Festival of Young Cinema, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Shum was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, BC. She often works around the themes of home, identity, and the pursuit of joy. Claudia Edwards : So I’m wondering if you could give u s a brief summary of the incidents of racism and the events following that took place in 1968 at Concordia University (then known as Sir George Williams), which are covered in your film, The Ninth Floor? Mina Shum : Well it all started with six students charging racism against a professor in the biology department and the administration ignored, mishandled, didn’t have a mechanism in place to deal with such a human rights complaint, so it just got delayed for ten months, and finally the students had it, and it ended up becoming an occupation. A meeting took place in H110 that led to the occupation of the ninth floor computer center, where an entire floor housed a computer that was worth two million dollars. The students effectively had the support of many other student politicos from various campuses, as well as their own university; Black, White, Chinese, all walks of life. A thousand people ended up shutting down the school at one point, then four hundred of them ended up in the ninth floor for about two weeks, until a fire broke out. This ended up causing two million dollars in damages and ninety-seven arrests, with people on the ground screaming “burn nigger burn”. So it’s not a great moment in terms of our
Canadian history, but at the same time, looking at it now, forty-five years later, it was really a pivotal point for talking about race and human rights violations in our own country. CE : I often feel like the problem of racism in Canada is really about eracism; it’s interesting to note how certain histories and heritages in Canada are totally evaded. For example, a lot of the black student complainants during this uprising were of Caribbean descent. I am as well. Yet, while reviewing Concordia’s course offerings, there’s a total dearth of Caribbean content, just about one literature class. The filming for this documentary started in 2014, but prior to this you have produced feature films, so I wonder what prompted you to begin working on a documentary, and on this topic? MS : Selwyn Jacob is actually the producer at the National Film Board of Canada who brought me the project. He is Trinidadian. There’s a big Trinidad connection to the Sir George Williams Affair. He was a student at University of Alberta at the time, so he felt the repercussions of it all the way across the country. He told me two things: six black students charged racism, and that they were under surveillance. Immediately when he told me that, I thought, these guys are my heroes! I hadn’t even spoken to them yet. You were talking about erasure; it’s really easy to discount when a person of colour says ‘I’m not sure if that joke is off-colour or not – I’m not sure if your demonizing a culture when you say such a thing in the press’. It’s hard for people to bring that up today without being negated. So it was amazing to me that in ’69 these new immigrants, and there were not a lot of black immigrants in Montreal at that time, actually stood up and said ‘hey man, I’m calling that for what I
think it is and you guys have to answer to it’. I thought that was really brave, so I wanted to talk about and actually investigate the people further. What gave you the confidence to actually say that? And on top of that is the fact that they were under surveillance, which to me is about one person having the power over another person, for whatever reason. This is often tied to how we see and wha we look at other people. I really wanted to ask those questions in the film because it just isn’t enough to think, ‘wow, here’s a racist situation that happened forty-five years ago, gosh, aren’t we all against racism’. I want everyone to take personal responsibility for how they see, how they judge, and why they judge. Every time you dismiss somebody else, why? What is that about? CE : Indeed. One of the complainants said something in the film that really resonated with me; ‘it would seem to me that Canadians are racist but that they like to apologize for their racism’. So, what was the experience like to actually go and meet these students, forty-five years later? MS : It was one of the most cherished experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve done a lot of filming, and I’ve worked with fabulous movie stars. These people trusted me with their story, they needed to tell their story, and I felt really honoured to be able to take part in that process, to help draw that out for them. I had a friend recently see the film, as it just premiered at Vancouver International Film Festival, and before that at Toronto International Film Festival, who said, ‘Mina, this film is the justice’. That the students actually got to have their story heard for the first time in the film is kind of mind blowing to me. When we screen in Montreal for the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma it will be in room H110, where the original meeting took place that lead to the ninth floor occupation. I’m actually going to sit there, in the film, watching the space that we are watching in the film! One of the themes in the movie for me is about the watched and the watcher, so putting this into the space of the original committee meeting, where the students were not heard, and yet, will be heard because this film is screening there – there’s something really beautiful about it. I’ve always felt that some projects are blessed, and this one was blessed from the beginning because I think it needed to be told.
CE : Yes, very timely. You’re also pre-empting a question I had already, which is, are you hoping to prompt some internal change and reflection within the educational institution? And given that the same institution is hosting the event, says something. It has screened so far in Vancouver and Toronto, I’m wondering what the response from the audience has been like? MS : Well our first premiere was at TIFF; that was the first time I sat with an audience and watched it. It wasn’t until the lights came up and I was called to the stage when suddenly, people started standing up; the people in the film were getting a standing ovation. In Vancouver, it really did open a dialogue; people watched the film together, and by the end of the movie, when Redemption Song (Bob Marley) is playing and we see portraits of the participants in the protest, I make a vow to try to do better, in terms of the way I treat my fellow human. I really saw evidence of that when an older white gentlemen stood up crying at my screening here at VIFF, saying, “we have to stop hating each other,” and the whole room just went silent. This was supposed to be a Q&A, but it was almost like the solidarity – just the essence of being together – made itself sharply resonant in that room. For changes to education, I think all change starts with the individual, and if the individual makes a better choice tomorrow, then that better choice will reverberate, and then that will affect the education system. I’ve got a lot of hope for us. It isn’t about the policy-maker watching my film and taking another meeting, it’s about the policy-maker taking a deep vow to the people who are in the film to do better next time. The Ninth Floor can be streamed via the National Film Board Website. Trailer : https://www.nfb.ca/film/ninth_floor/trailer/ninth_ floor_trailer Concordia students can also loan or stream previously screened Cinema Politica films through the Concordia Library’s Cinema Politica Selections http://library.concordia.ca/guides/sociology/ newvideos.php?guid=cinemapolitica