The DocuAsia Forum is an annual Metro Vancouver event for exploring Asia-Canada relations as they develop. By bringing together filmmakers, artists, academics, community representatives and the general public, DocuAsia provides a platform for informed dialogue concerning the current cultural and economic development in Asia, and global implications for the future.
Extremely timely in light of recent backlash against the China-Canada FIPPA agreement and the presence of Chinese miners in Northern BC, the upcoming 4th DocuAsia Forum attempts to highlight the human stories behind broader social, political and economic shifts and envision a different kind of globalization – one that would move away from a model of cultural fragmentation to one of mutual understanding through discourse grounded in life and death concerns shared by all of us. This year’s program features Extraction, a bilingual (English and Mandarin) documentary-style play by Theatre Conspiracy. Extraction, winner of the Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, delves deep into the heart of intertwined cultural phenomena: China’s rise as an economic power and oil extraction in Alberta by mining the biographies of non-actor performers.
This year’s DocuAsia program does not confront ecological challenges directly. Rather, it raises questions about the troubling broader context of inter-cultural and inter-national miscommunication and the kind of impatience and aggression this so often yields.