Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, 2014.MIKE TJIOE
Anita Lee is a multi-award-winning producer, current executive producer for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and founder of the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival. She has produced some of the most memorable and inventive works in NFB history, including Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012).
But in the mid 1990s, she was just getting her career off the ground.
She had produced her own independent short films and was working on getting an independent feature made. “I was trying to produce an adaptation of an award-winning novel. We developed a script and shopped it around, but we couldn’t get it financed because people thought then there wasn’t an audience for a film with an all-Asian cast.”
In 1997, after Anita toured the Asian-American film festival circuit, she felt buoyed by the community spirit of the audiences she saw and her fellow Asian filmmakers. She realized there was nothing like it in Canada, so she returned to Toronto to found the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival. In its first year, the festival screened only films by American and Canadian filmmakers.
Reel Asian audience, 2009.Terry Ting/Supplied
The festival has grown from a single weekend to a ten day event with thousands of attendees in Toronto, and found an even bigger audience when it pivoted online during the pandemic. And while the festival has been a powerful vehicle for boosting films made by the Asian diaspora, Ms. Lee says that Asian-Canadian filmmakers, especially ones further along in their careers, still struggle to find the support to make the work they want to.
That’s precisely why the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival is launching the Fire Horse Award, part of its 25th anniversary celebration. Recipients can be filmmakers, performers, producers, organizers, programmers or other individuals who model the best of Asian creativity and excellence, and have made a significant contribution to film, television, media arts and other screen-based sectors.
Reel Asian audience, 2019.Connie Tsang/Supplied
While Ms. Lee notes that funding and support for diverse people in film tends to be focused around new and emerging recipients, the Fire Horse Award is meant to give recognition to those more senior in their careers.
“The industry tends to overlook talent in diverse communities that have been working in this space, who need next-level support to step up as creative leaders and create agency for their communities. This is how sustainable change will happen,” Ms. Lee explains. “We joke about it often in the racialized film community, that we ‘emerge’ right into retirement.”
The award was named in honour of Ms. Lee, who was born in the Asian zodiac year of the fire horse. “The fire horse represents transformation and independence,” she explains. “They’re attributes I embrace and aspire to embody but traditionally it was considered the most unlucky sign for a woman to be born into.” In fact, her parents actually “changed” the year of her birth as a result, and for many years, Ms. Lee thought she was born in the year of the sheep. “It was only when I was in my late twenties that I accidentally discovered that I was, in fact, a year older than I thought.” Reclaiming her identity as a fire horse—independent, revolutionary, iconoclastic—has been her life’s work.
Anita Lee, festival founder.LUDWIG DUARTE
These are also attributes that the award committee will look for when choosing its recipient. “We would like to celebrate leaders in our community who are trailblazers, who reinvented, re-envisioned or reimagined the status quo,” says Ms. Lee. “The Fire Horse is someone who has created new opportunities, new spaces, or has imagined telling stories in new ways.”
Recent television productions like Kim’s Convenience and the feature films Minari and Crazy Rich Asians have proven that there is, in fact, an audience for commercial, mainstream films with Asian casts. “And not necessarily just an Asian-American audience,” says Ms. Lee, hinting that people of all backgrounds have a desire to watch Asian films. “These are positive changes that we’re starting to see.”
The Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival has been a significant part of bringing films from the Asian diaspora to the forefront, and the hope is that the festival’s new Fire Horse Award can be another way to help propel careers to the next level. “There’s a vast pool of Asian-Canadian filmmakers, writers and directors in Canada, but the reality is that it’s difficult for them to move up,” says Ms. Lee. “The objective of this award, as the highest recognition to an individual annually by an independent jury of key Asian Canadians in the media, will serve as both acknowledgement within Asian Canadian communities as well as amplifying the recipient’s profile in the industry at large.” Another unique element of the Fire Horse Award is that members of the public can donate funds towards the prize awarded to the recipient. “You can really make a difference in terms of building a more inclusive film industry here in Canada by contributing to this award,” says Ms. Lee.
Whether you want to see more Asian-Canadian films being produced, or you’re acknowledging that diverse people in film still face barriers in getting their stories told, contributing to the Fire Horse Award shows your support for the Asian-Canadian film community.
“We believe that this recognition can play a key role in developing careers for the future,” says Ms Lee. “We hope this award will catapult individuals to become key leaders in the industry, to support and bring along the next generation of Asian-Canadian storytellers”
If you would like to support the Fire Horse Award, or learn more about the Reel Asian Film Festival, visit reelasian.com/firehorseaward.
Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with the Reel Asian Film Festival. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.