In this interview, Thao Lam and Kjell Boersma discuss their collaboration on Boat People, blending artistic visions and animation styles to bring Thao’s designs to life. They explore the film’s evolution; the film’s ant metaphor; and how the story resonates universally through themes of war, migration, and resilience.

Can you talk about your collaborative process with animator Kjell Boersma? How did you merge your distinct artistic visions to create the film’s unique aesthetic?

Kjell Boersma: When Thao first approached me about creating this film, I was immediately interested. We’d worked together briefly on an animated trailer for her book Skunk on a String, and I fell in love with both the artwork and the narrative sensibility. In that project I was only able to work with Thao’s designs as they existed in the book, so I was cutting up digital versions of the published art, so I was very limited in what I could do with it. With Boat People, I saw an opportunity to create something with animation in mind from the start, and thus bring Thao’s designs to life in a much fuller way. 

We worked collaboratively on the storyboards for the film, with Thao’s focus being creating compelling compositions as she would in her books, and mine being how those compositions would evolve or transition with the addition of time and motion. We also worked closely together on the story – Thao conducted interviews with her family to try to understand the truth of the story, and then I would interview Thao about the experience of interviewing her family. From there we were able to pull out what felt like the important details and emotions that made it into the final script. 

Collaboration is not always easy, but I think it helped that we were able to somewhat separate our responsibilities, with Thao leading the visual design and ensuring the story was truthful to her experience, and me leading the animation production and technical processes. 

The film uses a hybrid of traditional 2D animation, stop-motion multiplane animation, and 3D rendering. What motivated you to blend these techniques, and how did they enhance the storytelling?

KB: The choice of technique was driven by Thao’s illustration aesthetic – I knew from the beginning that the film needed to look as if one of her books had been brought to life. It was a very challenging problem to solve, we needed the fluidity of hand-drawn animation and the stylistic cues of stop-motion (the feeling that a hand has touched each frame), but relied on digital cutout and 3D rendering in the end to achieve what felt like an authentic replication of Thao’s static artwork. 

The digital toolset allowed us the flexibility to go back and make revisions, which proved important as Thao and I reworked the script many times, and we got valuable feedback by screening the film throughout the production process, so we were able to go back and adjust timing and emphasize certain things for clarity. 

Thematically, I think the focus on replicating Thao’s style was very important – Thao and her family were very lucky to survive their journey, but hundreds of thousands did not. An individual human life, like an ant’s, is such a fragile thing, and Thao’s unique style and body of work could so easily have never existed, it felt important that the film be faithful to it.

Thao’s minimalistic, measured narration is a striking feature of the film. How did you develop the narrative voice, and what impact did you hope it would have on the audience?

Thao Lam: I have no formal training as a writer, I went to school for illustration and became a children’s book author unintentionally. In fact, most of my books are wordless picture books, using only images to tell the story. My fondness for wordless picture books started when I was young. When I was three my family escaped Vietnam and resettled in Canada, and there were a lot of things we had to learn and relearn, but English was probably the most challenging. Before I was able to read or write, I would often flip through children’s books, looking at the illustrations and coming up with my own stories. So it’s not a surprise that I am more comfortable communicating and expressing myself through my drawings. I don’t enjoy writing—I find writing to be a difficult and painful process. If you take a look at my books that do have text, you will notice that it is pretty sparse, probably because it is difficult for me to string words together that can properly express my thoughts.

When the story was first conceived, Boat People was mapped out like a wordless picture book—all images, no narration. My goal was to tell the story through movement. To me the migration of people and ants was best told through movement. The act of fleeing is a movement. The journey across the South China Sea, the motions of the waves as it rages during a storm, the bodies of people moving about in a refugee camp like scurrying ants, all are forms of movement.

It was the folks at The National Film Board of Canada (the NFB) that encouraged me to add narration. They saw potential in what we pitched and wanted to add another layer of depth to the story, in the hopes of reaching a wider and older audience (the target audience for my books is usually ages 4 to 12 years old).

Over the course of four years we wrote and rewrote the narration over 50 times, tweaking it up until the last minute. It was a challenging process since this was my first time making a film. It is a medium with so many moving parts from narration, images, perspective, composition, music, lighting, and sound. And with the time restriction of ten minutes to tell my story, I had to be measured with my words. The minimalist approach took a lot of editing, an approach I put into practice when illustrating and writing children’s books. By stripping the narration down to only what was essential, we were able to create pockets of silence where the audience is forced to sit with their emotions. War, refugees, and family are such heavy topics that giving the audience space to breathe and process their thoughts is just as important as what is being said on screen, especially in a ten-minute film when the audience has so much to process in such a short period of time.

Despite its specific cultural and historical context, Boat People resonates with its universal themes. How did you approach making the story accessible and relatable to a global audience?

TL: I don’t think that the fact that Boat People is accessible and relatable to a global audience had anything to do with the way the film was made but sadly more about the current state of the world.

There has not been a moment in time when the world was at peace. If we look back in history, every country has experienced discord or been affected by war. War has a rippling effect, destroying everything in its path as it picks up steam and rages, but it also shapes and scars generations long after. Memories and trauma are passed along from generation to generation. Even those of us living across the ocean in First World countries are not exempted from the horrifying images of war, especially in the age of social media. We can’t escape or claim ignorance as images of refugees fleeing and washing up ashore bombard our devices.

Nobody goes untouched as long as war exists, and we will continue to have stories about tragedies and heroism.

The motif of ants plays a significant role in the narrative. What inspired you to use ants as a symbol, and how do they reflect the themes of survival and community in the film?

TL: As mentioned above, the topic of war and refugees is sadly nothing new, but I am uncomfortable talking about a topic that I have no memories of nor fully understand, so I wrote about what I knew.

For the longest time, all I knew about the war and our escape was this magical story woven by my mother about how the ants she rescued as a little girl saved her in return years later as our family fled Vietnam. 

A lot of research was done for this film. Not only did I do a deep dive on the Vietnam War and on the history of Boat people, but also on the topic of ants. Did you know ants can float on water for weeks? They form a raft by clinging on to each other’s claws and jaws. If they don’t find land, they will eventually die but not from drowning—they die of starvation. Seeing images of ants floating on water reminded me of all the photographs of boat people that I’ve seen. The mass of bodies crammed into boats, holding on to each other as they floated at sea.

As I pieced together my family’s journey to Canada I was struck by a common trait between ants and refugees, that they will always put family above all else. As one of nature’s smallest creatures, ants often find themselves in the position of moving and rebuilding their colony when they are attacked or when their homes are destroyed. Like refugees they are scattered to all parts of the world (except in the North and South Poles where it’s too cold)—adapting, contributing, and making a substantial impact on the region they colonise. Working together, ants show great determination and resilience in tough times. They have no fear of hardship and are willing to sacrifice themselves to ensure the survival of their family.

Every family has stories that are told and retold. My mother told me her story of the ants as a lesson in kindness and karma. And now I am retelling it to my daughter, as a story about how deep her roots run and about the strength and courage of her people and community.

Boat People will only be available on the virtual platform only for viewers in the United States. It will be a part of the short film set entitled “Crossing Generations” (U.S. version). “Crossing Generations” will also play in-person at the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, California on Friday, October 11 at 10 AM and 12:45 PM as part of Viet Film Fest’s traditional high school students’ screenings that kick off the festival.

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VIET FILM FEST 2024

October 5 to 20, 2024

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https://vietfilmfest2024.eventive.org/schedule

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