Author name: Aiko Hamamoto

Detours Ahead is featured in the shorts program The Journeys That Shape Us. We join director Esther Cheung here in conversation with curator Aiko Hamamoto.   Can you speak about your background in animation? I graduated with a bachelor of animation from Sheridan College in 2019. To be honest with you, I chose to do schooling in animation because it had the most job opportunities at the time. My thinking was, that if I went into illustration, I wasn’t going to know how to animate. But if I went into animation, I’d still know how to draw, so I could illustrate on the side. It was a business decision because  I didn’t want to be a starving artist. And it turns out I really like it…after the first few years at least.   Animating was my least favourite part of the process at the beginning. It was a really tough learning curve because it’s difficult and tedious and you’re drawing the same thing with just the slightest bit of difference between each frame. But over time, I learned that there’s an art to it. It’s meditative and fun. I really enjoy it now.   What was the process for making this short? The short stemmed from two road trips I took during a summer that were vastly different. Each trip was about 3000 km long. I took the first trip from Vancouver to Toronto by myself. And in that same summer, I drove back with my dad. This was a very different drive overall, I believe, because of the way we were being perceived and thus treated in Canada. It was very interesting because both were in the same summer, in the same year, and on Highway 1. It was essentially the same road trip, the only isolating factor, being an ‘us’ instead of just me.  The catalyst for the film became that difference.  I kept on wondering why my experience alone was so different from my experience with my dad. It was fun trying to figure out what the story was and how to keep it grounded in that road trip that it was seeded from. It’s challenging to tell a traditional road trip story in an interesting way while staying true to how I remembered and felt everything to be. I’m a little bit of a perfectionist and like to do everything myself. The only person on the whole project that I hired was Ambrose, a sound designer who is amazing. This type of workflow is non-traditional. I don’t often get to touch parts of the pipeline such as compositing or script-writing in my day job.  Writing, in particular, was an interesting part of the process. Drawing is my usual medium; my way to process and communicate. The grant process flips my personal creative process backward as I am required to write and explain myself before drawing. I am thankful for my journalism degree as it definitely helped me learn how to process through words a little bit better than in the past.    How did you navigate working through grief while working on this project?  It hit me like a truck when I realized the stark difference between how I can move through the world versus how I could move when me and my dad were together. It’s tough to pinpoint because I have few people to verify this experience with. My ‘code-switching’ creates the unique opportunity to live the world on either side of the coin: as someone culturally accepted, as well as someone othered. It’s quite a bizarre experience and one that is quite prevalent in North America as a child of immigrants.   Throughout the film, I was trying to wrestle with those questions: Why were people treating us so differently? How am I being perceived when I’m one way and how are we being perceived in a group or when I’m with my dad who has an accent?  I realize that I am so privileged because of my cultural fluency and it’s ridiculous because my dad has been in Canada longer than I have. So what does it mean to be Canadian? What does it mean to be Chinese-Canadian?  How does perception create identity and how does it own and limit your own understanding of yourself? That was my grief.    Has your view on grief or those moments changed since making the film? It’s a work in progress. It’s hard to put fact onto memory because memory is so faulty. I can only be as honest as possible through my experience of either side of the coin. This is especially so since my dad only has his experience to go off of, and nothing to compare it too. “This is just what I live. I don’t know any different. This is just how it goes.” But I’ve experienced both sides, And it feels a little bit lonely in that regard because there are not many people who can vet what I’ve said. I can’t fact-check my memories.  It wouldn’t be honest if I tried to prove something about the greater state of the world or the country. There’s nothing to prove. It’s purely anecdotal. I figured the most honest way to tell that concept or that feeling is to just tell it as I see it.   In your artist bio, you mentioned that the relationship with place is important to your artistic work. What places are important to you? How has that relationship changed over time?  My first film, 風不太冷 In Passing, is based on my parents’ stories of telling me about growing up in Hong Kong. That one was very place-based as well. I went back to Hong Kong in 2018 to experience Hong Kong for myself, have my own experience, and patch their stories to the place.  This time around, Detours Ahead is very rooted in Canada—specifically so. I tried to situate the film from the West to the East Coast; through what you see geographically from the water of