Director Henion Han’s intimate documentary, A Letter to My Cousin in China, provides insight into life as second-class citizens under apartheid, writes Andrew Worsdale
Henion Han’s production company is called Spook-asem, which gives you some indication of the mix of humour and spirituality which imbues his work.
To catch part of Han’s intense, self- effacing genius, tune into his documentary A Letter to My Cousin in China, an incredibly intimate revelation of one immigrant family’s history and the notion of what creates a feeling of “home” and belonging.
The story begins with the extraordinary events of Han’s parents’ early lives, their childhood on an island off mainland China, their arranged marriage and tragic separation, and their touching reunion in South Africa 14 years later.
A Letter to My Cousin gives an insider’s view of what it was like to live as a second-class citizen during the apartheid years – moving from Hainan Island to South Africa, from Taiwan to the United States, following Han’s ailing father, preparing for the afterlife.
“The project had been in my head about 15 years ago,” says Han. “I always wanted to tell the story of how my parents found themselves in Africa. After I had photographed my mother during her manic- depressive period in the early 1980s I had to look backwards into her and my father’s history to understand her condition.
“Over the years that followed I simply recorded, with whatever medium was accessible, footage of my family and specifically of my father. Two years after my father died I felt I had the emotional distance to finally make the documentary tangible. My father was a keen weekend photographer and 8mm movie buff. I managed to fix his old Bauer T4 projector and started sifting through hours of home movies he had shot. I saw, for the first time, moving images of my family and myself as a child – quite a haunting experience.
“I had made a promise to my relatives in Hainan to send them footage I shot there – that gave me the idea of writing an audio/visual letter to my cousin in China. Making a film as a diary, out of home-video footage, means that the film-maker has to react immediately. To get it as it happens demands total mastery of one’s tools.”
Above all, though, it is Han’s editorial talent that makes the film so much more powerful than it might have been. As a result he won last year’s South African Guild of Film Editors Best Documentary Award for the work.
In many ways Han has successfully succeeded in creating an “absolute film”. Sure it has a narrative, and his candid and unpretentious voice-over neatly explains the rigours of growing up between cultures – but it’s the montage that makes the movie. It creates a complete world of colour, form, sound and movement, in a controllable flux. That is what A Letter to My Cousin in China is, an utterly complete film that tells an epic story, keeping it simple and poignant.
There are so many striking images – from early 1950s Johannesburg, to gay pride marches (or at least men in dresses), to the painfully evocative scenes of Han filming his mother in a state of near dementia.
“I think photographing my mother was a way of working through the trauma,” Han remarks. “It was almost like a defence mechanism to alleviate the pain and confront the situation directly. In a way looking through the camera helped me look at what I didn’t normally want to see, and often I saw something which was tragic but quite beautiful.”
The American avant-garde and experimental film-maker and columnist for the Village Voice, the legendary Jonas Mekas, said, “In the times of multimillion-dollar productions and Hollywood vacuousness, I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema, the lyrical form, the poem, the water-colour, the etude, the sketch, portrait, arabesque …” Indeed, Han’s work embodies all of these things.
The problem is that, in order to be nearer to the world film buzz, he’s seriously considering emigrating to Australia. There, with the boom in television and film, he’ll be working in a top-notch, digital on/off- line editing suite – for the local industry it’ll mean one less contributor, with vital skills.
Before launching into a chicken-run attack on Han, in his defence one can look at his movie which above all says: “Home is not where you live, but how you live.”
A Letter to My Cousin in China will air on February 3 on e.tv at 8.30pm