I am honoured this year to have my one minute film in the Toronto Urban Film Festival this year (TUFF).
Vượt Biên: Voyage of a Diaspora is a metaphorical depiction of the Vietnamese Boat People’s journey for freedom, using photos from the United Nations’ Photo Library and a few from my past.
[December 2011 edit: I'm allowed to share it now that the festival is over]
It’s been a few days since the passing of New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton as I write this, and the tributes are still pouring in. Thousands have come to Ottawa to say goodbye in person as his body laid in state. Impromptu memory walks and memorials have been set up across the country by people he’s never met. Public reactions from the famous to the infamous to the nonfamous are still pouring in. People are still updating their Twitter and Facebook accounts with more tweets and statuses about Jack days after the fact. They’re talking about it all over the place, too, not just online. It’s a really heart felt national tragedy, one that has overshadowed plane crashes and other tragedies that have also gone on during this time.
While thinking about all this, though, I had another thought.
Would Canadians be mourning as much if Stephen Harper had died the other day instead of Jack Layton?
This song started out in version 1 as a rowdy and ruckus song about my opinionated self, for all the opinionated people out there. However, something happened on the way to finishing it over about 4.5 years and 5 versions. I got reflective and basically doubled the length of the song while halving its tempo to end up with a hippie sing-along that might well be good for kindergarten to teach children some good behaviour in life. 
The song started down Positively 4th Street and ended up Where Have All the Flowers Gone, to put it bluntly.
