Canadian director Meredith Hama-Brown, whose new film Seagrass will be making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September, in Toronto on Aug. 9.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
Meredith Hama-Brown’s Seagrass is the rare film to deal with the fissures that come from within an interracial relationship. In her gentle and introspective drama, which is having its world premiere at TIFF, a Japanese Canadian woman (Ally Maki) struggles with her identity and cultural history, while her Caucasian husband (Luke Roberts) is left ill-equipped to handle that baggage. That disconnect acts like a cancer in their relationship, with writer and director Hama-Brown and her exceptional cast finding incisive ways for it to reveal itself within small gestures, casual conversations and emotionally draining confrontations.
Heaviness aside, Seagrass is a refreshing counterpoint to the romanticism we often see at the movies when it comes to interracial couples. Consider everything from Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Stanley Kramer’s classic where Sidney Poitier presents as the ideal Black man to bring home to white parents, to You People, Jonah Hill’s attempts at healing post-2020 racial discord. Relationships with pigment gaps are either depicted as some frictionless utopian ideal or a classic Romeo & Juliet scenario where rifts are caused by external factors like meddling parents or social groups. The lovebirds act like they don’t see colour. In Seagrass, which unlike those other examples begins near the end of a relationship, the racial distance is complicated and unavoidable.
“When we go into relationships, we’re always going in with different backgrounds and families,” says Hama-Brown, who is biracial. “When you add different races, I think there’s bound to be some conflict there.” Like the couple in the film, Hama-Brown’s mother is Japanese-Canadian and father Caucasian. She explains on a Zoom call with the Globe that the tension between the couple in Seagrass isn’t necessarily based on what she witnessed growing up. “I didn’t see this in my parents. I have no idea if they had small moments. It’s not something I observed. It’s just something I can imagine happening.”
The BC actor and filmmaker is in Toronto weeks before TIFF housesitting for a friend. She is speaking to me about tapping into her own childhood and identity in her feature debut, returning to the sense of disillusionment among children that she conjured up in her award-winning short Broken Bunny.
Seagrass is largely fictional, but there are dynamics between the parents and two young daughters in the film, played by Nyha Huang Breitkreuz and Remy Marthaller, which are filled in with Hama-Brown’s memories and intuition. Her parents were divorced when she was six-years-old, which is about the same age as Marthaller’s Emmy. Though Hamas-Brown points out that they had a far more responsible and respectful breakup. “It’s quite impressive, actually,” she says, “when I think about what people are going through as they go through divorce. In real life, they sat us down and told us they were going to get divorced. They never said a single negative thing about each other. I didn’t ever hear them argue.”
In Seagrass, Maki’s Judith and Roberts’ Steve attend group couple’s therapy at an oceanside retreat. Their children Stephanie and Emmy frolic in the pool and camp while the parents try out relationship exercises with varying enthusiasm and develop a prickly rapport with a seemingly happier couple played by Chris Pang and Sarah Gadon. While one side of the story is about a couple struggling to identify what’s broken between them, the other is a coming-of-age story following the two daughters as they experience this rupturing in their family.
“What I was interested in looking at initially wasn’t so much about exploring divorce,” says Hama-Brown. “I was really excited to explore, in those beginning stages, that uncertainty and stress that I felt at that age.”
Throughout the film, Hama-Brown conjures up feelings of uncertainty and fear. The filmmaker counts Michael Haneke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul among her inspirations, and their influence can be felt in both the dread that tends to hang in the air and a haunting or metaphysical presence on the periphery. There is a ghost story element to Seagrass, one that can be taken as a literal haunting or a manifestation of emotional torment.
Judith is mourning her mother’s recent passing. She’s also wracked with guilt. You might assume that she grew up like so many immigrant children with the kind of internalized racism that inspires us to repress our cultures in order to fit in. Now she’s unravelling because she knows so little about her late mother, and in turn her own family history and cultural identity.
Hama-Brown describes this thread in her story as the most personal. She talks about how her grandparents were among the 23,000 Japanese Canadians held in internment sites during WWII, though she’s short on the details about that history.
“Something that I’ve noticed over the years is that my mom just doesn’t have so many answers to the questions that I’ve asked her,” says Hama-Brown. She explains that there was a lot of silence and repression around that history because of the shame people felt. And that same shame and repression, and inability to communicate, surfaces in the tension between the film’s central couple. “I wanted to look at how that affected the later generations. It made me scared to delve into the subject matter but I truly realized that that was like what I needed to talk about.
“It’s been really special actually talking about it. I’ve connected with other Japanese-Canadians and Americans and realized how universal that experience is.”
Seagrass screens at TIFF Sept. 8, 5:45 p.m. and Sept. 9, 11:35 a.m. at Scotiabank Theatre.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story identified Sidney Lumet, not Sidney Poitier, as the star of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. This version has been updated.