An intimate look at Asian Canadian small business owner Andy Sue as he explores the psychological trauma of a first-hand encounter with racism during the pandemic. The film examines the social implications of our digital media reality, where algorithms detect bias and translate fear, blame and outrage into profit.
The experience of racism has become a central focus of the COVID-19 global pandemic. From Black Lives Matter to Stop Asian Hate, citizens across the world are mobilizing to condemn active and institutionalized injustices that continue to perpetuate discrimination, blame and violence against people of colour. But while communities raise their voices to dismantle these biased structures, portrayals and policies, there remain systems that continue to benefit if not outright profit from these inequities.
While Canada has an often-untold history of anti-Asian racism, and COVID-19 is marked by familiar patterns of blaming marginalized communities, the film reveals that when our common shared humanity is translated in simple acts of kindness, a movement against discrimination will bloom.

In 1939 Velma Demerson was jailed for falling in love with a Chinese man. Pregnant and without legal counsel, Velma was sentenced to one year in a Toronto prison where she was tortured by a eugenicist doctor who attempted to abort her child. 60 years later she sued the Canadian government for wrongful incarceration, and until her death at age 98 in May 2019, continued to fight for the rights of the thousands of women imprisoned on the grounds of “incorrigibility” until 1964. Gemini Award-winning director Karin Lee has made a documentary film about her life. VOICES OF CANADA Series.

In a not too distant future wracked by ecological devastation, a young boy grows up on an isolated lake. Though not yet destroyed by fire, the land he lives on and the lake at its center are slowly dying. As the boy wanders, drawing pictures of the dead animals and decaying landscape, refugees of all sorts start to pour in. Unable to rouse his despondent and abusive father, the boy takes matters into his own hands helping an old woman who is dying of thirst, and hiding from a strange animal-like man that would do him harm until all boils over and chaotic violence consumes the life he knows and casts him to the wind.