Film Screening: Café Daughter Directed by Shelley Niro
Fri Jan 31, 2025 | 7 PM
Still from Shelley Niro, Café Daughter, 2023, Courtesy of the Artist
A Cree-Chinese girl struggles to keep her dreams from being extinguished in this affecting period drama from celebrated Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) multimedia artist Shelley Niro, subject of a major touring retrospective currently on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Adapted from Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams’s one-woman play, itself based on the life of retired Canadian senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck, Café Daughter follows young Yvette Wong, a whip-smart student coming of age in small-town 1960s Saskatchewan, who has been taught to conceal her Indigeneity in a bid to pass as fully Chinese, the lesser persecuted minority. A death in the family compels Yvette to embark on a discrimination-laden path to medical school, while a taboo friendship with a Mi’kmaq classmate sows the seeds of Indigenous pride. Niro, whose art practice routinely involves film, crafts a soul-stirring picture that honours the extraordinary resolve of its inspiration—a neurosurgeon before her appointment to the Senate.
Thank you for your interest in this event. It has now reached capacity.
Audience Choice Feature Award
imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival 2023
POST-SCREENING PANEL DISCUSSION
Join us at 6:30 pm for a reception before the film, followed by a post-screening panel discussion with Shelley Niro and Elder Larry Grant, moderated by Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee, CEO of the Chinese Canadian Museum.
Co-presented with the Cinematheque and the Chinese Canadian Museum
