Name: Café Daughter Community Screening with Filmmaker Shelley Niro and Guest
Start: 2024-05-07T18:00:00-07:00
End: 2024-05-07T21:00:00-07:00
Location: Reliance Theatre

$Caf\u00e9 Daughter Community Screening with Filmmaker Shelley Niro and Guest$

Join us for an award-winning film of personal reconciliation, followed by a conversation with trailblazing Mohawk director Shelley Niro.
About this Event

Café Daughter Film Community Screening

Join us for a screening of Café Daughter, followed by a conversation with director Shelley Niro and a special guest.

About the Film

Trailblazing Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) filmmaker and artist Shelley Niro (The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw), whose international retrospective exhibition Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is currently touring, directed and co-produced the film, which she adapted from Kenneth T. Williams’ play of the same name.

Café Daughter features an all-star cast including Violah Beauvais (Beans), Star Slade (Diggstown), Tom Lim (Ditched), Sera-Lys McArthur (Broken Angel), and Billy Merasty (Frontier), as a family facing extreme obstacles with love and strength.

From the Director's Statement

"Café Daughter is an inspiring story of an Indigenous Chinese girl who succeeds against all the unfair obstacles in front of her, in a world that doesn’t see her power. This is a story that is not often told and one that we don’t see enough on screen. It comes from a period of time in Canada where people from minority groups were seen as inferior, when segregation and hate crimes were rampant.

The story—one of survival and what a mother does to protect her children—is close to my heart. The issues that were depicted still happen in today’s world. Racism and exclusion are a part of Canadian society.”

Story (Synopsis)

Café Daughter follows Yvette Wong, a young Chinese-Cree girl determined to find her place in a small Saskatchewan community in the 1960s. In an effort to protect her children from discrimination, Yvette’s mother Katherine, who is a residential school survivor, has charged her with a secret—to never reveal that she is part Cree. Through tragedy, loss and insurmountable obstacles, Yvette finds her way back to her roots; in the reclamation of her identity she makes her way towards her destiny of becoming a doctor and healer.

Thank You

All are welcome to this screening. Thank you to the Community Projects (CCID 202/302) course and supporters at Emily Carr University for making this screening possible.

Learn more: https://cafedaughter.com/

Charlie Wong (Tom Lim), Yvette Wong (Violah Beauvais), and Katherine Wong (Sera-Lys McArthur) in a scene from the film CAFÉ DAUGHTER, directed by Shelley Niro. Courtesy Circle Blue Entertainment, 2023.