This short symphonic documentary offers a glimpse into the unique religious co-existence found along No. 5 Road in Richmond, British Columbia. Highway to Heaven takes audiences into many of the temples, mosques, and churches that call No. 5 home, revealing unity despite difference across these diverse cultural spaces. In a world struggling with religious violence and intolerance, filmmaker Sandra Ignagni has crafted a gentle portrait of a rare landscape using attentive imagery and an acoustic tapestry of prayer.

A short symphonic documentary offering a glimpse into the unique religious co-existence found along No. 5 Road in Richmond, British Columbia.

We share a world grappling with ethnic and racial injustice, religious xenophobia, and violence. Such realities are not limited to the world’s conflict zones—they are a part of everyday life, even in the most advanced democracies such as Canada. It was in this context that I was drawn to the unique landscape of No. 5 Road where, because of peculiar zoning by-laws, dozens of cultural and religious communities now share a very short stretch of suburban road. I was curious about how groups pitted against each other in so many corners of the world appeared to be living relatively peacefully with one another, and in very close proximity, in an ordinary Canadian suburb.

In developing this film, I discovered the beauty and cultural vibrancy that characterize what the locals call “the highway to heaven,” but also many subtle tensions. For example, the active and visible national police presence on the road is a stark reminder of the unfortunate precariousness still associated with living a spiritual life. I learned that, for more than one decade, the Richmond Jewish Day School did not have an exterior sign for fear of anti-Semitic attacks against its schoolchildren. And, in recent years, the secular residential community that surrounds No. 5 Road launched a major campaign opposing the proposed expansion of a Buddhist temple, using the pejorative moniker “Buddha Disneyland” to describe the proposed building in local media and public debates. The mere fact that zoning by-laws ordered these communities—the majority of which play a critical role in new immigrant and refugee resettlement—to vacant land on the fringes of a suburb is also ripe for reflection.

Moving into the film’s production, it was important for me to avoid reducing No. 5 Road’s delicate ecosystem to words and/or arguments—to me, doing so would be an exercise in public relations, reducing complex issues to soundbites and polemics. Instead, I wanted to make a film that would at once capture the remarkable—because it is truly remarkable—diversity on No. 5 Road, as it actually exists, while inviting audiences to meditate on the issues that pervade our troubled world. The film is therefore constructed as a “mosaic,” defined by writer and activist Terry Williams as “a conversation between what is broken.”

My film invites viewers to sit with what is unknown, different, raw, or only partially visible. To me, a mosaic captures perfectly the daily life one finds on No. 5 Road, where custom and ritual, language and cultural diversity are practised under surveillance cameras. In making this film, I am asking audiences to look with open eyes and hearts—with a spirit of curiosity—at themselves and their neighbours, and simply reflect on multiculturalism as an unfinished project in need of attention in Canada and around the world.