About the DocuAsia Forum

Entering its third year, the DocuAsia Forum is the first annual film event in Metro Vancouver focusing on sensitive and relevant social issues concerning contemporary Asia. 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.

DocuAsia Forum tells stories about Asia in ways that brief news clips and often-polarized popular commentary simply cannot. Discussion in public spaces, initiated through interaction with thoughtful independent documentary film, provides a powerful opportunity for substantive reflection and communication that will nurture deeper intercultural understanding through a sense of shared purpose.

This event is free and open to the public.

 
Premiere Event Partner

DocuAsia Forum 2011: Seeking a Sustainable Future (July 16-18)

DocuAsia 2011 will screen two new documentaries that raise fundamental questions about the sustainability of our current civilizational trajectory: consumerism, unbridled development, infinite economic expansion with finite resources and the ecological ruin that accompany them.

Featured Films

Ashes to Honey: Searching a Sustainable Future
Hitomi Kamanaka / Japan / 2010 / 116 min / Japanese w/ English narration

Dragon Boat
Cao Dan / China / 2009 / 84 min / Cantonese w/ English and Chinese subtitles

Guest Filmmaker & Musician: Shing02 alias Vector Omega (director of the soundtrack of Ashes to Honey)

Shing02 is a MC activist, rapper-songwriter, producer, peace advocate. As the director of the soundtrack of Ashes to Honey, he has been passionately and actively involved in the anti-nuclear energy movement. Born in Tokyo 1975, raised in Tanzania, England, and Japan, Shing02 landed in California at the age of 15, and soon thereafter got involved in creating art, which was the first love. After a move to Berkeley for schooling he became immersed in the local scene which also nurtured dozens of creative hiphop acts. Eventually in ’96, Shing02′s music made its way back to Japan, partnered with Mr. Higo of Mary Joy Recordings, garnering tremendous support in his homeland. Currently touring in support of new Japanese album “Y-Kyoku”, he’s envisioning new music as member of Kosmic Renaissance trio and the inventor of the Vestax Faderboard. website

Shing02 will attend the screenings at both the SFU Forum on July 16 and Richmond Forum on July 17.

Special Media Artworks

3/11 Tsunami Photo Project (The artwork will be shown at the beginning of the film screenings.)

Supported by

Schedule / Venues / Program

Vancouver Event

This year we are pleased to welcome SFU’s Institute for the Humanities as a co-SFU sponsor of DocuAsia in Vancouver. The Institute founded in 1983 seeks to facilitate the development of attitudes that lead toward active engagement in society. In taking such a role, the Institute hopes to contribute reflective, contemplative, and critical public points of view on the conflicts and contentious issues of our time. Both the David Lam Centre and the Institute for the Humanities at SFU actively seek ways to foster interaction between the University and the community and to provide ongoing links between these two constituencies.

Guest Speakers

Dr. Timothy Takaro (BS, Biology Yale College, MD/MPH, Epidemiology, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, MSc, Toxicology, U. Washington)

Dr. Takaro is Associate Dean of Reasearch in the Faculty of health Sociences at SFU. He is a physician-scientist whose work is directed primarily toward determining if linkages exist between occupational or environmental exposures and disease and finding public health based preventive solutions where such hazards exist. His practice includes nuclear weapons workers with beryllium and other pulmonary exposures, and children and adults with asthma and other chemically related illness. Additional interests include health effects of climate change, impacts of globalization on occupational and environmental health, biological effects of low-level radiation and mutagenic effects of pesticides.

Dr. Samir Gandesha BA (UBC), MA, PhD (York)

Dr. Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanites at SFU and is Director of the Institute for the Humanities and is Director of SFU’s Prague Field School. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books.

Dr. Paul Crowe BA, MA (Calgary), MA, PhD (UBC)

Dr. Crowe is Assistant Professor (Associate Professor as of June 30, I hope) in the Department of Humanities and is Director of the David Lam Centre. His publications are in the areas of Chinese religions and intellectual history. His, research is split between work on Song (960-1279) and Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) religious interactions and contemporary Chinese religious communities in Canada and their connections to Hong Kong and Guangdong, PRC. He is also interested in fostering intercultural dialogue related to both ecology and the arts.

Richmond Events

Richmond Event Co-Presenter

We are very pleased to welcome Richmond Food Security Society to be the co-presenter of the Forum at Richmond. The mandate of the RFSS is “That all people in the community, at all times, have access to nutritious, safe, personally acceptable and culturally appropriate foods, produced in ways that are environmentally sound and socially just.”