1. Continuous Journey
Ali Kazimi / CA / 2004 / 87 / Punjabi – Urdu /S.T. English
In 1914, Gurdit Singh, a Sikh entrepreneur based
in Singapore, chartered a Japanese ship, the
Komagata Maru, to carry Indian immigrants to
Canada.
On May 23, 1914, the ship arrived in Vancouver
Harbour with 376 passengers aboard: 340 Sikhs;
24 Muslims and 12 Hindus. Many of the men on-
board were veterans of the British Indian Army
and believed that it was their right as British
subjects to settle anywhere in the Empire they
had fought to defend and expand.
They were wrong... Continuous Journey is an
inquiry into the largely ignored history of
Canada's exclusion of the South Asians by a little
known immigration policy called the Continuous
Journey Regulation of 1908.
Unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, people from British India were excluded by a
regulation that appeared fair, but in reality, was an effective way of keeping people
from India out of Canada until 1948. As a direct result, only a half-mile from
Canadian shores, the Komagata Maru was surrounded by immigration boats and
the passengers were held incommunicado - virtual prisoners on the ship.

2. Ali Kazimi
 Ali Kazimi is an India-born, Toronto-based award-winning filmmaker whose career spans
over two decades. His point of view films address a wide range of social, environmental
and historical issues. They have been heralded as beautifully crafted and astutely
observed. In 2005, Now Magazine declared Kazimi Toronto’s Best Documentarian, “In a
city crowded with great documentary filmmakers -- Allan King , John Walker , Richard
Fung , Laura Sky , Peter Lynch -- Ali Kazimi stands out… Whether it's the story of an
Iroquois photographer, Canadian government racism or villagers resisting an Indian
mega-dam, there's a common thread. Kazimi's films are both the ongoing diary of an
immigrant and a wide-ranging critique of hidden power”.
 He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts at
York University where he teaches production and is the lead filmmaker in 3FLIC, a
stereoscopic 3D research/ creation/ training project.
 Ali Kazimi’s first book, Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru – An
Illustrated History launches in May 2012.

4.  “That Canada must remain a white man´s
country is seen necessary on moral and
political grounds”
William Lyon Mackenzie King quoting British authorities
in his report on his mission to England, 1908.

5. In Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru, award-winning
filmmaker and author Ali Kazimi addresses provocative questions. At the
heart of the story lies the struggle between Canada’s desire to build a
homogenous nation of white immigrants – preferably from Britain and
Northern Europe – and the British Empire’s need for stability.

6.  The turning away of the Komagata Maru became one of the most
infamous “incidents” in Canadian history. But it was far from
incidental – it revealed one component of what was effectively a
white Canada immigration policy. Weaving text together with rarely
seen photographs, key documents and other striking visual
materials, Kazimi brings new insight to what the federal
government acknowledged in 2008 as a “dark chapter” in our
country’s past. Today, with Canada’s immigration and refugee
framework under intense scrutiny, the story of the Komagata
Maru is all the more relevant.
 Undesirables was made possible through the support of the
Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration’s Community Historical
Recognition Program (CHRP).
Why did Canada refuse to let these South Asian migrants land, when it had accepted
more than 400,000 immigrants the previous year? Why did this ship pose a threat to
the mightiest empire the world had ever known?
http://undesirables.ca/

7. Continuous Journey
 The Komagata Maru was the first ship carrying migrants to be
turned away from Canadian shores, and the event would set a
precedent for the century to come.
 The differentiation between “desirable” and “undesirable”
immigrants was embedded in Canada´s offcial immigration policies
from the time of Confederation. ¿White Canada?
 The “White Canada” policy was finally dismantled in 1967, when all
references to race were removed from Canada´s Immigration Act
and a points system was implemented.
Kazimi, A. Undesirables. Introduction. Quebec: Douglas & McIntyre,
2011.8

8. Foucault, Michael. Of Other Spaces. Paris: French
Journal Architecture, 1984
Heterotopia. Their role is to create a space of
illusion that exposes every real space… is to
create a space that is other, another real space,
as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as
ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.
The boat is a floating piece of space, a place
without a place. The ship is the heterotopia for
excellence.

9. Sea In The Blood
Richard Fung / CA / 2000 / 26 / English
Sea In The Blood is a personal
documentary about living with
illness, tracing the relationship of
the artist to thalassemia in his
sister Nan, and AIDS in his partner
Tim.
At the core of the piece are two
trips. The first is in 1962, when
Richard went from Trinidad to
England with Nan to see a famous
hematologist interested in her
unusual case. The second is in
1977 when Richard and Tim made
the counterculture pilgrimage
from Europe to Asia.
The relationship with Tim blossomed, but Nan died before their return. The
narrative of love and loss is set against a background of colonialism in the
Caribbean and the reverberations of migration and political change.

10. An intensely moving personal essay about living in the shadow of
illness, Sea in the Blood explores two of Fung's closest
relationships — with his late sister Nan, who died in 1977 of a
rare blood disorder called thalassemia (which literally means
"sea in the blood"), and with his lifelong lover, Tim, who has
been living with HIV since 1980.
 The film begins with the soothing sound of gurgling water and an
ethereal image of Richard and Tim swimming between each other's
legs as veiny patterns of light dance across their skin. The sea is the
central metaphor, an image Fung explores from different angles —
some poetic, some medical. But Nan's death is the emotional
epicentre. Despite an age difference of six years, Richard and Nan
are inseparable as children in Trinidad. They drape fake pearls
around their necks and secretly read Mao Tse-tung together.

11. In his videotape, Richard says, “Nan´s eventual
death was a fact I was born into, like mangoes
in July…” The illness is there from the
beginning, at Nan´s birth, inseparable from
her. She is the disease. Not a temporary
shelter, nor a way station, she will never know
the other side, the blank horizon of intimacies
not yet tasted, desires shared with strangers.
Hoolbom, M. “Stairs.” In ed.,Helen Lee and Sakamoto, Kerri, Like
Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung. Toronto: Insomniac
Press, 2002.

12. Scene: underwater swimming
 Playing in the water evokes feelings of curiosity, and
suggests the intimacies of shared experience and
discovery. They connect Richard´s childhood play with
his sister, to his young adult travels with Tim.
 The rose-tinted waters dilute and refract the blood
everywhere. The colour of the water recalls the blood
of heredity: the blood that caries illness.
Shah, N. “Undertow.” In ed.,Helen Lee and Sakamoto,
Kerri, Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung.
Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002.

13. Sea in The Blood
Pictures:
 There aren´t any pictures of Nan in the hospital.
 Nan´s is dying, Arlene said. I stop taking pictures.
 Last picture I took of Nan. Spring 1977.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
 The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but
only and for certain what has been. (85)
 Every photograph is a certificate of presence. (87)
 The reading of public photographs is always, at bottom, a private
reading. (97)
 The photograph sometimes makes appear what we never see in a
real face. (103)

14. Theory

15. Documentary
Documentary as a concept or practice
occupies no fixed territory. It mobilizes no
finite inventory of techniques, addresses not
set number of issues, and adopts no
completely known taxonomy of forms, styles,
or modes.
Documentary most often draws our attention
to an issue, concept, or problem that is at the
center of the film’s argument.
Nichols, Bill. Representing reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991

16. Documentary
The documentary viewer’s subjectivity shifts
according to whether a politics of sexual or of
spatial representation is predominant. The
indulgence of fantasy is blocked to some degree
not simply by the invocation of a desire to know,
but by an awareness that the views given
originate from the encounter between social
actors on either side of the lens. The viewer’s
relation to the image, then, is charged with an
awareness of the politics and ethics of the gaze.
Nichols, Bill. Representing reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991

17. Documentary
Realism in documentary film
Documentary realism is not the realism of fiction.
It possesses antecedents and characteristics of its
own; it answers to needs and suggests tensions
that differ from those of narrative fiction. In
fiction, realism serves to make a plausible world
seem real; in documentary, realism serves to
make an argument about the historical world
persuasive.
Nichols, Bill. Representing reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991

18. Nation
 I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined
political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign.
 It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will
never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
 The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them,
encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.
 It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in
which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of
the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.
 Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual
inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always
conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origen
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983

19. Contrary to its attendant mythology, the
nation is not an organic, homogeneous,
unitary entity.
For Etienne Balibar, social formations
reproduce themselves as nations in part by
fabricating a “fictive ethnicity” that stands in
for the national ethnic composition, while
Homi Bhabha views the nation as “an
impossible unity”.
Gittings, Christopher. “National Cinema.” In ed. Barry Keith Grant,
Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. Detroit: Schirmer Reference, 2007

20. Producing the People
 What makes the nation a “community”?
 The Fundamental problem is therefore to produce the
people. More exactly, it is to make the people produce
itself continually as national community. Or again, it is
to produce the effect of unity by virtue of which the
people will appear, in everyone’s eyes, ‘as a people’,
that is, as the basis and origin of political power.
 Every national community must have been
represented at some point or another as a ‘chosen
people’.
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein eds. Race, Nation,
Class: Ambiguous Identities. New York and London: Verso, 1991.

21. Fictive Ethnicity and Ideal Nation
I apply the term ‘fictive ethnicity’ to the
community instituted by the nation-state.
How can ethnicity be produced? There are two
great competing routes to this: language and
race. Most often the two operate together. Both
express the idea that the national character
(which might also be called its soul or its spirit) is
immanent in the people.
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein eds. Race, Nation, Class:
Ambiguous Identities. New York and London: Verso, 1991.

22. We continue to live here as outsider-insider
of the nation which offers a proudly
multicultural profile to the international
community. We have the awareness that we
have arrived into somebody’s state, but what
kind of state; whose imagined community or
community of imagination does it embody?
And what are the terms and conditions of our
“belonging” to this state of nation?
Bannerji, Himani. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on
Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender. Toronto: Toronto Scholar
Press, 2000.

23.  Fragmentation or Integration?
 If nations are “imagined communities,” can the content of this national
imagination called Canada be free of its history and current social relations of
power? Does not the context inflect the content here and now?
 At this point we need to remind ourselves that there are different kinds of
nationalisms – some aggressive and others assertive. Anderson makes a useful
distinction between an “official nationalism” of imperialism, and the “popular
nationalism” of lived relations of a settled society and its shared historical/
cultural relations (1991, p.86). The former, Anderson claims, is about hate and
aggression; the latter, about love and sacrifice of a people for a shared culture,
ancestral history and a shared physical space.
 This “popular nationalism” in my view is clearly not possible for Canada, whose
context is the colonization and continued marginalization of the First Nations while
seeking to build a liberal democratic state.
 The case of Canada and its nationalism, when considered in this light, is not very
different from the “official nationalism” of South Africa, erstwhile Rhodesia, or of
Australia. These are cases of colonial “community” in which nation and state
formations were created through the conquering imagination of white
supremacy.
Bannerji, Himani. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism,
Nationalism and Gender. Toronto: Toronto Scholar Press, 2000.

24. Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonial subject, by the very nature of his or her location,
embodies the contradictions and ambivalences of the two
cultures. The postcolonial subject is hybrid, that he or she
occupies a space between – or in – between – two cultures
This in-between space is one of contradictions and
ambivalences, in the first instance because the two cultures
do not match, they are distinct. This is turn makes clear that
there is no unified culture per se. And that the location
occupied by the postcolonial subject is also by its very nature
hybrid. This in-between space is, then, a third space (it is
neither the first nor the second of the two interdependent
cultures whose hybridization makes up the postcolonial
subject). The postcolonial subject is occupying a place of
potential resistance.
Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies The Key Concepts. London: Routledge,
2000

25. Today

26. Komagata Maru today
 The Safe Third Country Agreement is an agreement
between the governments of Canada and the United States
to better manage the flow of refugee claimants at the
shared land border.
 Under the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement,
persons seeking refugee protection must make a claim in
the first country they arrive in (United States or Canada),
unless they qualify for an exception to the Agreement.
Therefore, refugee claimants arriving from the United
States at the Canada-United States land border may be
allowed to pursue their refugee claims in Canada if they
meet an exception under the Safe Third Country
Agreement.

27. First two years after the agreements
refugee claims dropped by more
than 43 percent.

28. Interim Federal Health Program:
Summary of Benefits
Refugee Claimants Health-Care Coverage
Only if of an urgent or essential
•while their claim is still pending and nature:
•who are not from a Designated
Country of Origin*: •Hospital services
•Services of doctors and nurses
•Laboratory, diagnostic and
•The Designated Country of Origin ambulance services and
(DCO) policy has not yet come into Medications and vaccines but only
force. The date of coming into force if needed to prevent or treat a
of this section has not yet been set. disease that is a risk to public
health or to treat a condition of
safety concern
•And An immigration medical
• Citizenship and Immigration Canada examination