A National Film Board of Canada production

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

In the new feature documentary Unarchived, co-directors Hayley Gray and Elad Tzadok highlight community archives across British Columbia to reveal some of what has been erased from the official record.

Local knowledge keepers are hand-fashioning a more inclusive history through family photos, newspaper articles and scratchy old VHS tapes. These different collections tell stories of people building connection through work, play, protest, family and tradition.

Through a collage of personal interviews, archival footage and deeply rooted memories, the past, present and future come together, fighting for a space where everyone is seen and everyone belongs. History is what we all make of it.

One-liner
In community archives across British Columbia, local knowledge keepers are fighting for a more inclusive history through family photos, newspaper articles and deeply rooted memories.

Two-liner
In community archives across British Columbia, local knowledge keepers are hand-fashioning a more inclusive history. Through a collage of personal interviews, archival footage and deeply rooted memories, the past, present and future come together, fighting for a space where everyone is seen and everyone belongs. History is what we all make of it.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

In the new feature documentary Unarchived, co-directors Hayley Gray and Elad Tzadok highlight community archives across British Columbia to reveal some of what has been erased from the official record.

The people and places left out of traditional archives and museums are often determined by the dominant power, but as UBC’s Dr. Henry Yu states, “the process of silencing makes a lot of noise.” Local knowledge keepers are undoing these omissions and hand-fashioning a more inclusive history through family photos, newspaper articles and scratchy old VHS tapes.

Ron Dutton started the BC Gay and Lesbian Archive by collecting protest pamphlets,  posters and even cabaret sets from the earliest days of Vancouver’s gay community. In the tiny mill town of Paldi, on Vancouver Island, a remarkable intercultural community was captured on Super 8 and 16-millimetre film by the founders and their families. On the landscape, anthropologist Dr. Imogene Lim points out how plants serve as reminders of Asian communities long gone.

These different archives tell stories of people building connection through work, play, protest, family and tradition. In so doing, they challenge larger institutions to re-examine and address older narratives that no longer reflect the totality of our shared experience. At the Trans Archive at the University of Victoria, a hidden past is documented and preserved. At the Royal BC Museum, staff work tirelessly to right historical wrongs and find a new path towards restorative justice for Indigenous people.

Through a collage of personal interviews, archival images and footage, and deeply rooted memories, the past, present and future come together, fighting for a space where everyone is seen and everyone belongs. History is what we all make of it.

Contact NFB publicist for high-resolution poster for print. 

What were some of the biggest surprises that you discovered about the history of British Columbia as you were making the film?

Over and over again, we were floored not only by what we didn’t know but by how difficult it was to research these stories. With so much at our fingertips, it was mind-bending to note how many amazing pieces of our collective history are known only within individual communities.

It makes you realize how the dominant narrative is just one story, one opinion or just one thing that happened out of a plurality of voices. BC has had so many different communities, different moments, different stories. It makes you realize how vital these community-led archives and museums really are in terms of retaining these narratives and making them accessible to the public.

Can you talk about the approach you took during the making of the film to create safe spaces for people to tell their stories? 

This was a big piece of our work, right from the inception of Unarchived. We started with 20 stories from all across the province and landed on four. These four stories were from communities who were able to speak about their work publicly and safely. They were communities who had something they wanted to share on a platform and who were interested in collaborating when it came to talking about the intersection of how their histories connected and interwove with the larger picture.

When we landed on our stories and subjects, we then wanted to make sure our crew were reflective of the stories we were telling. We wanted everybody on board to be invested in what we were doing. Thus, all of the shooting crew we brought on were from the communities we were building our film with.

Taking the time to build connection in our development phase was paramount; we wanted to know what stories our subjects were interested in and how to work with them to best facilitate their stories.

Lastly, location. It was incredibly important for us to connect with our subjects in places where they felt ownership, ease and a sense of home. Sometimes this was their actual home, the institute they founded or literally a ditch where they harvest flora from their ancestral lands. When we filmed our subjects in these spaces, we watched them light up and bring their histories to life.

Many of the people interviewed took it upon themselves to document their own communities, after being largely excised or erased from the official records. Is there still more history yet to be uncovered? 

OMG, yes! And this is by no means an exhaustive list. History is constantly happening and even as our media landscape becomes pluralized, so many communities and stories are still missed. These four communities are only a small slice of the populace of our province. We hope that they will serve as a starting point for people to examine the history around them, and we hope they will lead the way as examples of how this work ought to be done.

In creating more equitable, inclusive and inviting spaces, what role can traditional archives, museums and universities play? 

Despite making a movie about this for the past four years, we don’t think we have a simple answer. Different bodies and institutions will be different things for different people. And the industry as a whole is going through a major tectonic shift in terms of its understanding of the impact it has and the damage it can cause. One thing we can say for certain, though, through our conversations with people on every level of this work: the consensus seems to be that the role these places should play is to hold space, support and help facilitate communities telling their own stories, in their own voice, the way they see fit.

How can these larger institutions better support community archives?  

A big piece of this is financial. If we continue to underfund community archives and museums, we will continue to see a dichotomy in access. Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, we can’t have various communities pinned up against each other fighting over the same pool of ‘diverse’ funding. It segregates and limits access. Both these forms of funding are often one-offs and leave the institutions spending so much time trying to keep the lights on while trying to keep up with the work.

Another big piece is, again, support and autonomy. We have seen how building community history projects can work within institutions: the South Asian Studies Institute working with the University of the Fraser Valley, or the Trans Archives existing in the University of Victoria. But within that, there must be agency and autonomy for these organizations to truly be representative.

How does recovering and actively contending with the hidden parts of the past enable communities to move forward in new and different ways? 

Wow, what a big question. In our experience, it shifts and reveals a core understanding of what history is. When you get to understand that the history of Paldi is just as important and influential as any European-founded town, suddenly history feels like it is about everyone. And it reveals, in this tactile way, how we’ve been perpetuating a very limited experience. It’s like the Wizard of Oz: you think of history as this huge, ever-amassing institution, but then slowly see the man behind the curtain, the small group that has been holding up a very simple and self-serving narrative as the whole and only truth.

Although many community archives have been documenting their own history for many years, some of these narratives are just now being discovered and shared with a wider audience. How does this change our sense of history and identity? 

Let’s not use the word ‘discovered.’ These histories are now more shareable and more accessible, and that is huge. Large digitization efforts that have gone on in so many of these spaces mean that these slices of our past move into a larger collective memory, and that they are searchable. Now, if you want to know about the South Asian pioneer experience, it is accessible to you, you can see photos, videos and interviews. When these exist on an accessible platform, it allows us all to challenge old colonial ideas of Canada and the world.

In this expanded and more inclusive sense of history, what can we learn about ourselves?

We learn that marginalized and racialized communities built Canada not in collaboration with the state but, honestly, in spite of the state’s efforts to tear them down. We learn that these communities did not exist in silos but have been building each other in solitary since long before BC was BC. But perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned is that if we want to end racism and decolonialize ourselves, we NEED to build a past that is diverse, inclusive and pluralist, and that holds our country and institutions accountable.

Contact NFB publicist for high-resolution images for print.