VIFF 2022: Riceboy Sleeps and Motherhood find new complexity in maternal bonds
An immigrant mother’s moving struggle to raise her son in suburban Vancouver, and the fractured relationship between parent and child in Japan
In the Vancouver-shot Riceboy Sleeps, a Korean single mother struggles to raise her son in Canada.
VIFF presents Riceboy Sleeps on September 30 at 9 pm and at the Rio Theatre on October 3 at 6:15 pm; and Motherhood at the Vancouver Playhouse on October 5 at 6 pm and at The Cinematheque on October 7 at 9:15 pm
IT’S A SEQUENCE without much dialogue, but like so many small moments in the new film Riceboy Sleeps, it speaks volumes about the relationship between an immigrant mother and her son.
Young, bespectacled Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) gets mocked in his suburban Vancouver school cafeteria over the smell of the gimbap he brought for lunch. Cut to a scene of him dumping it into the bathroom garbage can. That night, over dinner with his single mother, So-young, he asks her if she can make him “not Korean food” for lunch tomorrow. So-young sits frozen in silence before finally agreeing.
“That moment represents the first separation between her and her son,” explains actor Choi Seung-yoon, who hands in a revelatory, quietly moving performance as the strong and stoic mother. “She grew up in Korea, so for her, that food is Korea. Every time she feeds her son, she tries to make it as good as she can; Korean food is the best way of showing her love to her son.”
The complex bonds and divisions between mother and child, how maternal love is shown and not shown: those are ideas two strong new films showing at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival explore with extraordinary yet subtle complexity.
In the case of the Lower Mainland-set Riceboy Sleeps, Vancouver filmmaker Anthony Shim tells the moving story of a Korean mother struggling to raise a son alone in Canada. Shim, who wrote and directed the deeply affecting, beautifully shot film, shows how external hardships can both put strains on a mother’s relationship with her child, and yet reinforce their bond. (The film recently earned TIFF’s prestigious $20,000 Platform Prize.)
In the movie, So-young has been forced to leave Korea due to her parents’ shame that she’s had a baby out of wedlock, and to try to escape the grief over the death of Dong-hyun’s biological father. But in Canada, she lives an isolated existence, between factory work and trying to raise a son who’s having trouble fitting in—both of them constantly confronting the subtle and not-so-subtle racism that pervades 1990s suburbia, where the film is set.
“The main thing that I was really wanting to explore was generational trauma and undealt-with grief, showing that these two people from two different generations are dealing with the same immediate challenges as immigrants—the cultural and racial challenges,” Shim says on the same call. “How are they able to navigate that all? Ultimately they are really dealing with the same issues.”
What becomes clear is that, even though a rift grows between So-young and her increasingly westernized son, she’ll fight for him. In fact, she’s willing to sacrifice everything for Dong-hyun so he’ll have a better life than she had.
“For me it was really important to take on the role not as a victim,” explains Korea-based actor Choi. “Once she is thinking of herself as a victim or a stranger in foreign country or as a single mom, then her life is just going to be so miserable. What So-young makes special is how she carries her life, even though she has so many difficulties in her life. That's what makes So-young so strong.”
Facing that adversity and not-so-subtle racism reinforces the fact that this mother and son only really have each other.
In the film’s latter half, the now teenage Dong-hyun (Ethan Hwang), who wears dyed-blonde hair and blue contact lenses, starts to question where he comes from—further straining his relationship with his mother. So-young takes him home to the ricefields in Korea where she grew up—in real life, a home that dates back an incredible 13 generations in Shim’s family. (It is the only house left standing after the Korean war in this northeastern part of the country.) The filmmaker and his crew had only four days to complete the shoot on the other side of the Pacific.
Shim spent much of his youth travelling back to that region—but that’s far from the only part of the film that draws from his own experiences as a kid. The filmmaker also had plenty of time to learn what Canadian schoolkids thought of the lunch his mother made for him.
“I moved around a lot—I went to eight different schools when I was growing up—and I was often the only Korean student at school,” he explains. “I felt that I was the only one who experienced that—and now I’ve found out it’s quite amazing how common that experience was!”
In Motherhood, Hanae (Mao Daichi) has an uneasy bond with her daughter, Rumiko (Erika Toda).
The ties that unbind
The Japanese film Motherhood, which has its world premiere at VIFF, takes a starkly different but equally complex look at maternal instincts and the way they may be shaped by generational trauma. Where Shim’s film often embraces you like a warm blanket, Ryuichi Hiroki’s meticulously crafted domestic story builds a world of beautiful, cold surfaces that contrast the troubled psychological tensions of the characters.
Based on a Japanese novel, Ryuichi Hiroki’s film tells the story unconventionally, replaying certain events from the differing points of view of a mother, Hanae (Mao Daichi), and her daughter, Rumiko (Erika Toda).
“The daughter has a certain idea of her truth and the mother also has her ideas of her truth, so that to the audience may decide that both of them might be true, or that only one is true,” Hiroki hints through a translator. The acclaimed director, who has had six previous features selected for VIFF, is speaking to Stir via Zoom from Tokyo before arriving here for his film’s debut.
The filmmaker says he was first drawn to the story of the daughter, and the way she longs to be loved by a mother who finds herself strangely unable to show affection for her child—due at least in part to her lasting tie to her own, caring mother. It’s almost as if she’s unable to sever the bond with her own parent, or to transfer that same love to her daughter—and a tragic event on the night of a typhoon fully fractures her relationship with her child.
Their scenes together have a distance and aloofness—requiring extreme nuance and restraint, from both the director and the actors who have to make their characters sympathetic at the same time.
“I didn't really direct them specifically; I told them to act naturally within that very different relationship,” the director explains, then stresses: “If you overact this peculiar relationship, it can become horror. But I wanted it to look quite normal.”
There is one more, very different maternal figure in the film—a near-monstrous mother-in-law who treats the hardworking Hanae as little more than a servant in the family compound. Ironically, though, the old battleaxe shows more affection to Rumiko than her own mother, further complicating the fraught relationship the girl has with Hanae.
It’s an intricate psychological portrait, set amid homes that the VIFF program describes perfectly as “ordered, brittle beauty”—as hard yet fragile as Mao Daichi’s masterful portrayal of Hanae herself.
“It was designed to be the house that the daughter might dream of as a perfect home, or that the mother might want to create as this beautiful home,” Hiroki explains.
That perfection belies, or tries to compensate for, the imperfections in the family that lives in it.
Children may grow up, people may die, but the maternal bond, with all its flaws, lives on. As Hiroki says of his film’s main message, “To put simply, the relationship between the mother and the child basically never ends.”
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