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| Vancouver filmmaker Baljit Sangra and her mom in a still from her documentary 'Many Rivers Home'. Handout/Vancouver Desi |
October 25, 2014: When Vancouver filmmaker Baljit Sangra’s mother suddenly died after being struck by a car, Sangra was so devastated that she wanted to give up entirely on the project she had been working on.
She had just finished shooting and was set to begin editing her second documentary, which was centred around a seniors’ residence in Surrey, called Many Rivers Home.
The film’s initial intent was to look at the older generation — South Asian pioneers — and tell their diasporic stories, while also taking a deeper look at seniors’ care and the challenges they face, like isolation, a lack of community services and the fact that children don’t often visit.
This storyline was already “a bit of an eye-opener.”
“I started thinking about my own parents,” said Sangra, adding that she watched the characters battle their slowly declining health. “It’s just heartbreaking — it makes you want to go hug your own parents.”
It was just as Sangra wrapped shooting in March 2012 that she got the dreaded text from a family member. There had been an accident when her mother, in her early 70s, was out walking the dog. She was hit by a car and didn’t survive.
“It was so unexpected — earlier that day we had lunch together. I’d taken her to the doctor and she was fine,” said Sangra. “It was very, very hard.”
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| A still from Vancouver filmmaker Baljit Sangra's documentary 'Many Rivers Home'. Handout/Vancouver Desi Click for more |
“It was really hard to finish the film … it was just too heavy — I lost my mom and the way I lost her.”
“I would rather do anything else than (work on the film.)”
Sangra took a couple of months off, in which she got calls from the subjects in her film, who were checking in on her. And then it finally “seemed clear,” that her personal experience had to make its way into the film as a narrative. So she did a second round of filming and now Many Rivers Home is finally set to première at the second annual Sikh Film Festival in Toronto this weekend.
“That just really sort of changed me,” Sangra said of her mother’s passing. “I wasn’t looking at the footage and putting it together with the same eyes anymore.”
As she filtered through the clips and listened to the subjects’ stories of loss — losing a spouse, friend, even children — she realized, “that applies to me.”
“When it happens to you, where you deal with the weight of it — the heaviness of it — when I went back and we looked at the footage, it actually spoke to me in a different way,” said Sangra.
And while she returned to the film because it was an important story to tell — the subjects’ lives born under colonial rule and their struggles to immigrate — she changed the angle, anchoring it around the love for her mother, which made completing the film almost therapeutic.
“Through the seniors I was able to learn and accept a little bit better about life and death,” said Sangra. “Seniors are very frank about that.”
“You learn that every day is a gift, every day is a blessing, because really — life can just change like that. But you’ve got to keep moving forward.”
Many Rivers Home, which premières Sunday, is the only B.C. film on the Sikh Film Festival’s national and international roster. It will also air on OMNI TV at a yet to be determined date. For more information on the film festival visit sifftoronto.com and for more information on Sangra’s documentary visit vivamantra.ca
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