10 films that let Vancouver be Vancouver

This is a researched feature, separate from Nick Atwal’s personal film reviews.

Vancouver is famous for pretending. Most lists of Vancouver films are about disguise: the city as San Francisco, Seattle or an unnamed American metropolis. This one runs the other way. Here Vancouver plays itself, under its own name, from National Film Board documentaries that walk the Downtown Eastside, Chinatown and the North Shore mudflats to fiction features built around specific neighbourhoods. Each entry looks at the film, the city it records, where the NFB or the wider industry stood, and the people who made it.

The rule: the film has to identify Vancouver, or a named Vancouver-area community, as its subject or setting. Three entries are fiction features, and one, The Vancouver Asahi, rebuilds the city on a set in Japan. NFB details come from the NFB’s own listings unless stated otherwise. Where a film has a page on nfb.ca, the entry says so; whether you can stream it free depends on where you are.

1. Vancouver’s Chinatown (1954)

   1954 · Directed by Bernard Devlin · On the Spot, hosted by Fred Davis

   Fifteen minutes in Chinatown, 1954. In this report from the NFB’s On the Spot series, directed and produced by Bernard Devlin, host Fred Davis visits Vancouver’s Chinese community. He talks history and culture with W. Foon Sien, president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Harvey Lowe tours an importing company’s showrooms, and Jack Lin Eng shows the typesetting room of the Chinese Times. The NFB singles out the ceremonial lion dance as the highlight.

   Vancouver in 1954

   The film catches Chinatown a few years after a turning point. The 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, which had left the community largely made up of aging men unable to bring in new arrivals, was repealed in 1947. The city’s 2009 application for national historic designation credits Wong Foon Sien, an advocate for Chinese Canadian war veterans, with a central role in that campaign; the Chinese Canadian Museum emphasizes a wider coalition that included labour, religious and women’s rights groups. British Columbia restored the provincial vote to Chinese Canadians the same year, though family reunification stayed restricted.

   The neighbourhood was changing around the camera. After repeal, the neon signs of clubs such as Ming’s and the Bamboo Terrace, and restaurants such as Foo’s Ho Ho, announced a new identity built on nightlife. The city didn’t hire its first Chinese employee until 1952; the Vancouver Real Estate Board abolished racially restrictive housing covenants only in 1956. A 1955 NFB photo story called the district thirteen square blocks holding the heaviest concentration of Canada’s 30,000 Chinese-speaking citizens.

   The NFB in 1954

   On the Spot, the NFB’s first series made for television, began on CBC on October 6, 1953, as 15-minute documentary reports on Canadian life. Staff found that too short, and the CBC agreed to a 30-minute slot the next season; by 1954 there was a French counterpart, Sur le vif. Davis hosted most of the reports and later joined the CBC, where he became moderator of Front Page Challenge. The same year, the NFB also filmed the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver.

   Devlin in 1954

   Devlin was one of the few French Canadians at the NFB when he joined after the Second World War. When the Board created a studio for French-language films in 1951, he ran it in practice, without a formal title. He originated On the Spot, produced Sur le vif, and later directed Les Brûlés for the NFB, a drama about settlers in Abitibi during the Depression.

   Why it matters

   It’s the oldest film here and among the NFB’s first made for television, and it names a Vancouver neighbourhood and the people who ran its institutions. Sixty years later, Everything Will Be brought the NFB’s camera back to the same streets at another turning point. Same Chinatown. Different fight.

2. Through a Blue Lens (1999)

   1999 · Directed by Veronica Alice Mannix · Downtown Eastside

   Veronica Alice Mannix’s documentary walks the Downtown Eastside beat with Constable Al Arsenault and six other police officers, and meets the people living with substance use disorder they see there. The real subject is the relationships those people build with the officers. The NFB produced it with the participation of the Odd Squad Productions Society; it runs about 52 minutes.

   The city it documents

   The film was made in a crisis. In July 1997, the activist Bud Osborn set out 1,000 crosses in Oppenheimer Park to mark drug-user deaths across B.C. over the previous four years. That September, Vancouver’s medical health officer, Dr. John Blatherwick, declared a public health emergency over HIV and overdoses in the Downtown Eastside, as The Tyee later recounted. That year’s Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study found roughly 90 per cent of participants had hepatitis C and more than one in five were HIV-positive, nearer one in three in the Downtown Eastside itself.

   The film stays inside that neighbourhood and names it. The NFB flags its mature subject matter and lists it for viewers aged 13 to 17, with classroom questions about drug stereotypes and why teenagers turn to drugs. That treats the neighbourhood as something to understand, not a backdrop.

   The NFB in 1999

   Gillian Darling Kovanic produced, Graydon McCrea was executive producer, Michelle Bjornson wrote the script, Daniel C. Mannix shot it and Shelly Hamer edited. A New York Times review in November drew interest from American networks, Playback reported, with HBO among the buyers; the film debuted on CBC in December. Its honours include a 2000 Japan Prize from the international educational program contest in Tokyo, a Chris Award in the social issues category and a youth jury award at the Reel to Real festival. The film has a page on nfb.ca.

   Mannix and the Odd Squad

   The film is a collaboration between Mannix and seven Vancouver police officers who called themselves the Odd Squad. Convinced that the steady stream of drug arrests was doing little to ease the misery, they spent about 18 months filming the lives of people with addictions in the Downtown Eastside, and about 22 of the film’s 52 minutes are their footage. Mannix shaped that record into a film for an audience outside the neighbourhood.

   Why it matters

   Few films on this list are as specific about place. Through a Blue Lens names the neighbourhood, the officers and the problem, and keeps the people the officers meet at the centre. It’s also unusual in who held the camera. The people sent to police these streets shot much of the film themselves.

3. Everything Will Be (2014)

   2014 · Directed by Julia Kwan · Vancouver’s Chinatown

   Above Vancouver’s Chinatown, a neon art installation shows the phrase “everything is going to be alright,” day and night. Julia Kwan’s title echoes it. Her feature-length NFB documentary spends a year in the neighbourhood as condos and new, non-Chinese businesses arrive, following people such as a 90-year-old who sells Chinese-language newspapers on the street and a second-generation tea shop owner.

   It premiered at Hot Docs in 2014. Its honours include a Canadian Screen Award for best cinematography in a feature-length documentary and a best new talent award at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal.

   The city it documents

   The NFB describes the film as capturing a significant moment for a community in flux. Kwan’s method is patience, not argument: a year with residents and business owners while the change happens around them.

   Off screen, that change was a civic fight. A 2011 city review of building heights in the historic area drew a long public hearing, with business groups including the Chinese Benevolent Association in favour and low-income residents and housing advocates opposed. In September 2014, the year the film premiered, a developer filed a rezoning application for a 13-storey building at 105 Keefer Street. Opponents argued it would speed gentrification and push out low-income seniors. Council rejected a 12-storey version 8–3 in June 2017; the city’s development permit board conditionally approved a nine-storey version in 2023.

   The NFB in 2014

   The NFB announced the film’s Vancity Theatre run, November 28 to December 1, in a Government of Canada news release dated November 17, 2014, and built a mini-lesson and study guide around it for students aged 14 to 18. The film has a page on nfb.ca, where the NFB offers Kwan’s films for online viewing.

   Kwan in 2014

   Kwan was filming her own city. Raised in Vancouver by Chinese immigrant parents, she studied film at Ryerson in Toronto. Her first feature, Eve & the Fire Horse (2005), set in 1970s Vancouver, won a Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it was the only Canadian film in the international competition. A report at the time said its $2 million budget was raised largely privately after the larger Canadian funding agencies declined to support it. The big funders passed. Sundance gave it a prize. According to the NFB, her NFB animated short The Zoo (2018) drew its inspiration from Everything Will Be.

   Why it matters

   Everything Will Be records Chinatown at a turning point, made by a local filmmaker for the national public producer, and treats the neighbourhood’s residents as the authorities on what is changing. The sign promises everything will be alright. The film makes no promises. It listens.

4. Whistling Smith (1975)

   1975 · Directed by Michael Scott and Marrin Canell · Vancouver’s Eastside

   Sergeant Bernie “Whistling” Smith walked the beat on foot on Vancouver’s Eastside, and this 27-minute portrait walks with him. The NFB presents him as an unorthodox officer: to many of the drug users, petty thieves and sex workers in an economically depressed area, he was a counsellor and friend as well as the law. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary short subject, which, the NFB says, led to sales to television networks in Iran and the United Kingdom.

   The city it documents

   In the NFB’s description, the film’s Eastside is the hangout of petty criminals, down-and-outs and a variety of characters. Reaction when it aired was split: some viewers called it very well made, others biased, and most of those who responded objected to its coarse language.

   The neighbourhood was being renamed as the film was made. For decades it had been known as Skid Road, a term used for the city’s more run-down blocks by the 1960s. In 1973, residents including Bruce Eriksen, Libby Davies and Jean Swanson formed the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, whose first order of business, by Chuck Davis’s account of Vancouver history, was a new name: the Downtown Eastside. Whistling Smith catches the place between the label it was given and the one its residents chose.

   The NFB in 1975

   Whistling Smith was the second instalment of Pacificanada, eight half-hour NFB documentaries about British Columbia that began airing on the full CBC network in January 1975. By then the NFB had a Vancouver studio, in 1969 one of only two NFB production studios alongside Montreal, and local filmmakers made five of the series’ eight segments. The NFB has made the film available to watch on nfb.ca.

   The people behind it

   Michael Scott and Marrin Canell share the directing credit; Canell also edited, and Donald Brittain wrote and narrated. Scott, who produced the film with Barrie Howells, had joined the NFB in 1966, and Whistling Smith is one of his two Oscar nominations; the other is the animated short The Big Snit. Smith himself died in 2012 at the age of 89, according to the NFB’s blog.

   Why it matters

   Whistling Smith shows the Eastside through one officer’s working day, at walking pace, and its Oscar nomination took that Vancouver beat to an international audience. Beside Through a Blue Lens, made 24 years later, it shows two generations of police on the same streets, each trying to be more than the law.

5. Writing the Land (2007)

   2007 · Directed by Kevin Lee Burton · Musqueam elder Larry Grant

   In about seven minutes, Kevin Lee Burton’s NFB short follows Larry Grant, a Musqueam elder, as he relearns his language and traditions in the city of Vancouver, near where the Musqueam people have lived for thousands of years. Burton wrote and directed; Selwyn Jacob produced.

   Burton combines the language of film with hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ words (spelled Hunkamenum in the NFB listing) to retell Grant’s experience. His roaming camera moves across towers, greenery and birds in flight, and the city it finds feels unsettled.

   The city it documents

   The film holds the modern city and Musqueam land in the same frame. Grant was born and raised in Musqueam territory by a hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking family and worked about four decades in the trades. Then, in 1998, his return to the language began, when he enrolled in the First Nations Languages Program at the University of British Columbia.

   UBC and the Musqueam had been building that relationship for a decade. The languages program began in 1996 and in 1997 formed a partnership with the Musqueam Indian Band to promote the development and use of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓; UBC and Musqueam formalized their wider relationship with a memorandum of affiliation in 2006, the year before the film. Grant went from student to teacher, co-teaching the introductory hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ course as an adjunct professor and serving as Elder-in-Residence at UBC’s First Nations House of Learning.

   Recognition and use

   The film won best Manitoban film at the Aboriginal Film and Video Festival in Winnipeg in 2008. NFB education materials suggest using it to discuss First Nations languages, their links to land and spirituality, and the effects of urban growth on First Nations communities. The film has a page on nfb.ca.

   Burton in 2007

   Burton is a Winnipeg-based Swampy Cree artist and filmmaker who grew up in God’s Lake Narrows First Nation in northern Manitoba, and much of his work is made in Cree. Around the time of Writing the Land, his experimental short Nikamowin (Song) won awards at the imagineNATIVE festival in Toronto and made the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s Top 10 list for 2008. He later made God’s Lake Narrows, an NFB interactive visual essay about reserve life. Writing the Land is a Cree filmmaker’s portrait of a Musqueam elder finding his way back to his language, built around the words themselves.

   Why it matters

   Writing the Land is the shortest film here, and one of the most direct about the people who have lived on this land since long before the city. Seven minutes. Thousands of years.

6. The Third Heaven (1998)

   1998 · Directed by Georges Payrastre · Vancouver’s Hong Kong Chinese

   Influential but little-known: that’s how the NFB describes Vancouver’s Hong Kong Chinese community, and Georges Payrastre’s 48-minute NFB documentary goes inside it through one family. The Lams came to British Columbia in 1991, one of many families that left Hong Kong ahead of its 1997 return to China. Yves Bisaillon produced; Kirk Tougas and Paul Préfontaine shot it, Cathy Gulkin edited and Philippe Lapointe wrote the music.

   The city it documents

   The Lams were one family in a big wave. According to BC Stats, Hong Kong was the top source of immigrants to both Canada and British Columbia from 1987, peaking in 1994, when more than 48,000 people from Hong Kong landed in Canada and more than 16,000 in B.C., a third of the province’s immigrants that year. Almost all of them settled in Metro Vancouver: in the first three quarters of 1993, 96.2 per cent of new arrivals from Hong Kong to B.C. settled in the Vancouver census metropolitan area. BC Stats linked the flow to uncertainty over the 1997 transfer, deepened by the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Some later returned; a 2016 CBC analysis noted that Canada’s Hong Kong-born population fell from 241,000 in 1996 to 209,000 in 2011.

   Through the Lams, the film looks at the community’s daily life and its role in the Canadian and world economy. The NFB says prejudices fall away as viewers discover how the community lives, and a 2018 NFB blog post recommended it as a reminder of the significant role the Chinese population has played in Canada.

   The NFB in 1998

   The film came out the year after the handover the Lams had seen coming. NFB teaching notes for students aged 15 to 18 suggest a research project on Hong Kong’s history, presented as a four-page illustrated booklet. The film has a page on nfb.ca, with rental and purchase options where free viewing isn’t available.

   Why it matters

   The Third Heaven shows Vancouver as a destination in a migration shaped by world events, and it gives that move a family’s face. Statistics count the arrivals. The film introduces you to one family.

7. Mudflats Living (1972)

   1972 · Directed by Robert Fresco and Kris Paterson · Maplewood mudflats

   Robert Fresco and Kris Paterson’s 28-minute NFB documentary visits the squatter community on the North Vancouver mudflats, called the Maplewood mudflats in some sources and the Dollarton mudflats in others. The NFB describes an artists’ community that rejected drugs and mainstream values and lived by a philosophy of love for the universe. Around 25 people were involved, and the District of North Vancouver wanted them removed to make way for a planned shopping centre. Interviewees include Paul Spong, Leonard George and Ron Andrews, then the District’s mayor; Peter Jones produced. The NFB dates the film 1972, but it was shot in summer 1971, and notes that it contains nudity.

   The city it documents

   The film casts the mayor as the face of mainstream values, and Spong says on camera that the community was a vexation to him. The settlement didn’t outlast the year it was filmed. On Saturday, December 18, 1971, the shacks were burned as evicted residents, including children, watched. The municipality argued that living in the shacks without basic services was a serious health hazard.

   The NFB and the filmmakers

   Fresco and Paterson made two NFB documentaries that summer. The other, Pleasure Faire, directed by Paterson with Fresco among its cinematographers, spends a day at a B.C. youth festival modelled on medieval folk fairs. Fresco went on to a long career as a cinematographer and documentary maker: his Steady as She Goes (1981), an NFB portrait of a retired craftsman who builds ships in bottles, won the Bijou Award for best cinematography in a documentary, and his video for The Parachute Club’s “Rise Up” was a Juno nominee for video of the year in 1984. The North Shore News later reported a screening of Mudflats Living at The Cinematheque with one of the filmmakers attending. The film has a page on nfb.ca.

   Why it matters

   Mudflats Living is now the record of a place that no longer exists, made months before it was destroyed, and it shows the North Shore arguing with itself about what land is for. The shacks burned that December. The film kept them.

8. Waiting for Caroline (1967)

   1967 · Directed by Ron Kelly · Vancouver and Quebec

   Two cities, two languages, two men. In this feature drama starring Alexandra Stewart, François Tassé and William Needles, the heroine is caught between the English-speaking Vancouver where she grew up and the French-speaking Quebec where the film opens, and between a man from Vancouver who wants her to come home and one in Quebec content to keep their pleasant but unresolved affair going. The NFB lists it at 1 hour 24 minutes, with Walford Hewitson producing, Robert Allen as executive producer and a script credited to George C. Robertson.

   Screening it in a 2019 series on the history of film in British Columbia, The Cinematheque read it as an allegory of Canada’s two solitudes and a self-conscious homage to François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

   The city in the story

   Vancouver is the English-Canadian pole of the story: home, and the place one suitor wants Caroline to return to. That makes it unusual on this list. The city doesn’t play another city here. It stands for half a country.

   The NFB and CBC in 1967

   Described as the first joint production of the NFB and CBC, the film went substantially over budget, which led to an uproar in the Senate. According to The Cinematheque’s program note, one senator called it “indecent, immoral and repulsive.” Not the pull quote anyone was hoping for. It was first shown on CBC Television’s anthology series Festival on November 29, 1967, before theatrical release, with United Artists handling international distribution. It was nominated for best feature film at the 20th Canadian Film Awards in 1968, and Denis Gillson’s colour cinematography won a Canadian Film Award. The film has a page on nfb.ca.

   Kelly and Stewart in 1967

   Ron Kelly was born in Vancouver in 1929. He began at the CBC film unit, making shorts and documentaries from 1952 to 1964, and The Cinematheque counts him a key contributor to local television drama and documentary at CBC Vancouver in the 1950s. An arts fellowship took him to Pinewood Studios in England from 1959 to 1962. The year after Waiting for Caroline, he was directing in Hollywood for Twentieth Century Fox and Disney.

   His lead had already crossed the language divide the film is about. Alexandra Stewart, born in Montreal in 1939, moved to Paris in 1958 to study art and made her film debut within a year. She went on to work with French New Wave directors including Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose The Bride Wore Black (1968) she made around the same time. The star of a Truffaut homage was busy working for Truffaut.

   Why it matters

   A Vancouver-born director made a national drama with his home city as half the argument. The film let Vancouver play itself. The next year he was directing in Hollywood, for the industry that keeps casting Vancouver as somewhere else.

9. Meditation Park (2017)

   2017 · Directed by Mina Shum · Renfrew and Hastings, East Vancouver

   Maria (Cheng Pei-pei), a devoted wife, mother and grandmother, is sure of her marriage until she finds an orange thong in her husband’s laundry. Bing, the workaholic accountant husband, is played by Tzi Ma; Sandra Oh plays their daughter, who supports her mother’s new independence and even teaches her to ride a bicycle; and Don McKellar is a prickly neighbour. Along the way Maria falls in with a group of Chinese widows who sell parking spaces in their backyards, and learns that other people’s lives are more complicated than Bing has let her believe.

   The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017, played festivals including Calgary that year and CAAMFest in 2018, and opened in selected theatres on March 9, 2018.

   The city it documents

   The film barely leaves the neighbourhood, and that’s the point. Cinema Scope noted that it stays within a few blocks of Renfrew and Hastings in East Vancouver, an area where long-settled Asian immigrants make up most of the residents, and the Georgia Straight places the family’s home on the city’s East Side. Shum made it in her own neighbourhood, the North Shore News reported, and Vancouver Magazine called it a big-screen ode to the resiliency of Chinese women. A few blocks, a few households and a backyard parking economy, all playing themselves.

   Shum in 2017

   Shum was born in Hong Kong in 1966, moved to Vancouver with her family at the age of one, and studied theatre and film production at the University of British Columbia. Her first feature, Double Happiness (1994), starred Sandra Oh as a young Chinese Canadian actor caught between her family’s expectations and her own life, and Oh won the Genie for best actress. Meditation Park reunited them, this time with Oh as the daughter backing her mother’s independence. Just before it, Shum made her first feature-length documentary, Ninth Floor (2015), for the NFB, about the 1969 student occupation at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University.

   Cheng in 2017

   Cheng was a martial arts star long before Maria. Her breakthrough was King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966), as the swordswoman Golden Swallow, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) brought her back to international attention as the villain Jade Fox, a role that won her the Hong Kong Film Award for best supporting actress. CBC’s q framed Meditation Park as her second act, a quiet dramatic lead far from the sword fights. She died in 2024 at the age of 78.

   Why it matters

   Meditation Park lets East Vancouver be itself, in a story told by a director from the neighbourhood and carried by a star whose career began with a sword in her hand. Here the adventure is a bicycle and a few blocks of the East Side. Small stakes on paper. Not to Maria.

10. The Vancouver Asahi (2014)

    2014 · Directed by Yuya Ishii · Japantown, rebuilt in Japan

    Yuya Ishii’s Toho production, written by Satoko Okudera, is based on the true story of the Vancouver Asahi, the Japanese Canadian baseball team founded in 1914. Satoshi Tsumabuki plays Reji “Reggie” Kasahara, a fictional player, and Kazuya Kamenashi the team’s ace pitcher; apart from Tsumabuki, the actors cast as Asahi players were experienced ballplayers in Japan. Vancouver saw it first, at the Vancouver International Film Festival on September 29, 2014, ahead of its Japanese theatrical release on December 20. The Globe and Mail noted that it compresses the team’s timeline and sets its story nearer the end of the team’s existence.

    The city in the story

    The real Asahi was a team of Vancouver’s Nikkei community, formed in 1914 out of an earlier club, the Nippons. From 1918 it played Euro-Canadian clubs in the city’s International League and won with “brain ball,” a game of bunting and speed on the bases, taking the Terminal League title in 1926 and many championships after it. The team ended with the wartime uprooting of Japanese Canadians from the coast. The Canadian Encyclopedia dates its breakup to 1942, the year of the mass internment; the BC Sports Hall of Fame says it disbanded in 1941. It was never re-formed. Recognition came decades later: the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003, the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 2005, and a Parks Canada designation as a national historic event in 2008.

    Vancouver, rebuilt

    Here’s the twist: the Vancouver in the film was largely built in Japan. The production recreated 1930s Japantown on a large open-air set in Ashikaga, in rural Tochigi Prefecture north of Tokyo, modelled on period photographs and drawings. VIFF programmer Tony Rayns argued that little of 1930s Vancouver survives and that no real location would pass for the era without heavy changes. Ishii said documentation of the neighbourhood was thin, so the crew combined a sense of the real town with imagination, aiming for a Japantown that no one has seen.

    The premiere

    The VIFF premiere brought Japanese stars and a special Nikkei guest, according to the Georgia Straight, and the Vancity Theatre later brought the film back over the holidays. In comments published by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Ishii said that having filmed almost entirely in Japan made the Vancouver debut nerve-wracking. Fair enough. He was showing a rebuilt Vancouver to people who live in the real one.

    Ishii in 2014

    Ishii came to the project after The Great Passage (2013), an adaptation of Shion Miura’s novel about dictionary editors, which Japan selected as its submission for the foreign language film Academy Award; at 30 he was the youngest director chosen to represent Japan in that category. The Vancouver Asahi took him from dictionary editors to ballplayers.

    Why it matters

    The Vancouver Asahi flips the usual story. Instead of Vancouver standing in for somewhere else, another country built Vancouver, to tell a story about the city’s own past. The city is used to playing other places. This time, another place played Vancouver.

What the list adds up to

These films pass a different test from the familiar “shot in Vancouver” roundup: the city is part of who the film is. Together they map neighbourhoods the blockbusters usually dress over, from the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown to East Vancouver, Musqueam territory and the North Shore mudflats.

They also show how much of that record comes from the National Film Board. Its documentaries, many of them listed on nfb.ca, are where Vancouver most often appears as itself, made by filmmakers who named the streets, the people and the arguments of their time. Hollywood borrows Vancouver’s streets. These films ask who lives on them.

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