‘Seagrass’ Is about More than Just One Japanese Canadian Family
Writer Carolyn Hinds talks with filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown about her stirring film of life and loss
Remy Marthaller as Emmy in "Seagrass."
Still frame from "Seagrass"
Words by Carolyn Hinds
Official selection at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and winner of the FIPRESCI Prize, Seagrass by writer, actress, and filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown is a film that can’t quite be defined by its initial facade of an idyllic summer retreat on a northern Pacific island getaway.
In the bright sunshine of summer where children play is the uncomfortable heat of cruel gestures and words said with the perceived innocence of youth, and the carelessness of adult humor. And in the coolness of its nighttime shadows is uncertainty and doubts of burgeoning prepubescent desires, and marital unrest.
Making up the ensemble cast are Judith (Ally Maki) a Japanese Canadian mother whose grief over the loss of her own mother leads to her finally acknowledging discontent with her marriage and personhood, her two daughters: 6-year-old Emmy (Remy Marthaller), and 11-year-old Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz) who are making their own discoveries about the world they inhabit as siblings and biracial Asian females. And their father Steve (Luke Robert), a man more concerned with playing a game of egotistical one-upmanship with Pat (Chris Pang) and his wife Carol (Sarah Gadon), than what’s going on with his own family.
Though Seagrass is her first feature film, Hama-Brown’s years of making short films have given her experience in drafting stories where no frame or line of dialogue is without purpose. As the film intertwines all of its respective themes about relationships, racial stigma, death, grief, and history of Japanese Canadians, Hama-Brown keeps them as intricate and delicate as the seagrass the film is named for, and with the same sense of eeriness they possess.
Seagrass has also won awards for Outstanding Canadian Feature Film at Cinéfest, and the 2023 Festival du nouveau cinéma, at Prix de la diffusion Québécor in Montreal, Quebec, for best first film in the national competition.
I recently interviewed Meredith via Zoom following the film’s 2023 festival run.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
"Seagrass" director Meredith Hama-Brown.
Courtesy of Meredith Hama-Brown
Carolyn Hinds: I love that Seagrass sits in the pocket of multiple genres like those popular 90s family vacation films, and tense thrillers or horrors where we’re unsure what’s going to happen next.
There’s almost a third presence in the film, like a ghost, and to me this entity is what led the family to where they are at the start of the film. So talk about the camera as perhaps the grandmother observing this family.
Meredith Hama-Brown: Well, I think you definitely combined the story points and the backstory and the themes that I would associate with when I use that camera for sure, and hope this isn't too much of a spoiler…but for me, when that type of camera is used, it is meant to literally potentially be the grandmother's ghost. But I think it can also be interpreted in another way, that it's more a feeling or potentially Emmy's perception of her fear around her grandma and her fear around death.
There's many different ways to interpret the camera, that it could be something just more purely emotional or something a little bit more literal, that it is an actual ghost. Or maybe this idea that the ghost could be our memories, or our fears, or our past. I think there's a lot of different ways to interpret that camera.
I wanted it to feel just slightly eerie and just slightly scary—something that I spoke a lot about with the cinematographer Norm Li and the sound designer Oscar Vargas, who both did a wonderful job of evoking that [type] of feeling. And I never wanted it to feel super scary, but almost be kind of beautiful as well. You don't really know if you're supposed to be afraid of this presence or not.
CH: I get it. It’s not this entity that causes the unease, but it’s the things happening in this place that feel uneasy.
The kids are laughing, but then when you listen to the conversations, they're saying things that are very mean and cruel to each other. With Stephanie, she's experiencing possibly for the first time in her life, passive-aggressive racism, and she's being discriminated against. She doesn't know what it is because she doesn't yet have the name and language for it. It’s the beginning of this type of awareness for her of others pointing out that she doesn’t look like them.
MHB: Exactly! And I think especially because this is set in the 1990s. Now there's a lot more terms that we have and there's more discourse around microaggressions or othering, and these are terms that weren’t around when I was young—or at least I never really heard. I don't think they were as common although they probably existed. But yeah, as a kid I certainly didn't know how to put a name to what I was feeling or what potentially a lot of other people have felt as well.
"Seagrass" follows a Japanese Canadian woman grappling with the death of her mother as she brings her family to a retreat.
Still frame from "Seagrass"
CH: Yes, and the same way that Stephanie is told things that she knows makes her uncomfortable, she in turn makes Emmy do things she doesn't want to do, and she ends up thinking that anything that goes wrong is her fault. I saw Emmy as the centerpiece of this entire film. She’s also watching everything happening around her and has the same sense that there's something wrong and very off here.
I love the way you structure the film where individual scenes play off the one that came before like a domino effect, and Emmy kind of catches the consequences of Stephanie’s actions.
MHB: You hit the nail on the head with saying that she's the core of this. I see her as this in the same way, that she's the heart of what's happening there, and that came about just because she's so young.
There’s this domino effect, like you said, because when she's that young, she really has the least amount of power in the situation. She doesn't really have any power over her parents. She doesn't have power over her sister, and so everything trickles down to her. So she's just really experiencing all these profound core emotions. And of course, just being a 6-year-old, she doesn't know how to process them or maybe understand them at all. I also think that despite being so young, sometimes we forget as adults that kids go through such big things.
I know that as a kid at all different stages of my childhood, there have been big, big feelings that come up, and they're no different than when we're adults. But sometimes as adults, we forget the kids have real existential crises or that they go through these profound meaningful changes that when you think back on as an adult and you're like, “Oh yeah, that was…that was weird.”
Ally Maki (right) as Judith in "Seagrass."
Still frame from "Seagrass"
CH: A key theme related to that and the adults, which really came through, is insecurity. The adults don't have their shit together at all. Except for Carol, who ironically is the only character that has any stability because she knows exactly who she is as a person. And on the other hand, there’s Judith, who’s not sure of who she is as a mother, wife, or as a daughter. She's lost her mother, and realizes she doesn't know who her mother is.
MHB: It's really great that you got that from the film because it's exactly the core of what she's going through. Is she happy being a mother and with the type of motherhood that she is doing? Is she happy being a wife?
She even brings up happiness in her career. There's this question around, “If happiness is the goal, I know I'm not happy. I'm not living the life I want to live. But is happiness even the goal?” Is happiness a lofty goal to strive for?
There's just so many questions going on for her, and of course around her racial identity too, and trying to understand that. And it's really interesting what you said about her not knowing her mom. It made me just think, “Can you know yourself when you don't know these key people in your life?” She is such a fascinating character to me, and it's interesting too, because after watching the film, some people really don't like her or get her, and I find that fascinating. I like her and I get her because she's young and she’s going through such a big internal crisis. I think most people get her, but there have been a few people who are like, “Why is she like that? What's wrong? She has a good husband.”
But why should she be warm? Do mothers and wives always have to be warm? She's a human and she's going through these big things and she's not in a good place in her life. I find her understandable.
CH: There's something else that you do brilliantly which is the portrayal of microaggressions of racism in Judith and Steve’s relationship. People like Steve will say “I can’t be racist. My wife is Asian!” and he doesn't understand what he’s saying, and there’s other things like the references to history, like the internment camps.
A lot of people, even in Canada, don't know that Japanese Canadians were in internment camps along with Japanese Americans in WWII.
It’s clear that Judith has never really thought about this, and that she doesn’t understand how that ties into her grief for her mother and this complete loss of connection to her heritage. But Steve also isn’t seeing this because he's trying to make things about him, instead of being curious and suggesting they learn together.
MHB: Exactly. There's that moment where she's talking about that grief, not just for her mother, but of this loss of her connection to her racial identity, and he's trying to help, but he also doesn't know how.
He's very ill equipped as well, and she says during that moment, it's not just about the fact that she didn’t know, it's about the fact that she didn't want to talk to him about it. That's really talking about how it's not just about the literal lack of information she has, but it's also the fact that her mother felt, potentially, such a deep shame around everything horrific that happened then and so much trauma that it was painful for her mother potentially to talk to Judith about this,or for either of her parents to do so. Therefore she doesn't have this information and it's forever lost because of that.
Chris Pang (center) as Pat in "Seagrass."
Still frame from "Seagrass"
CH: It made me think she can learn all of these things, but she's never going to learn from her own parents’ perspective, which I think is very significant.
MHB: Exactly. She's never going to have that, and I think for the Japanese Canadian people of my generation, we have seen such a huge loss. This is very specific to Japanese Canadian identity, which is that there's been a huge loss of language, of culture, of actual information around what happened during the 1940s, and it's something that I've definitely seen pretty much across the board.
When you go to Japanese Canadian museums, it says on the wall, “A lot of Japanese Canadians have lost this…” Although it's a subtle or a small part of the story, I think it's an important part of the story, and an important part of Judith’s character for what she's going through and what that loss means to her.
CH: Speaking about that loss and how important her mother was to her in all these different ways, I think for the film and its ending, perhaps that’s what Grandma is as the specter as we mentioned at the beginning.
I'm not going to spoil it, but this scene where Judith is looking back in the cave, mirrors another scene with Emmy at the same cave, which also has the same dark specter of uncertainty. They’re both saying, “I've confronted the cave. I've looked back into this yawning chasm of darkness, now what?”
MHB: That sums it up perfectly. I don't think the questions the family are trying to grapple with are questions that can be answered simply, and I didn't want to simplify the message of the film by trying to answer every single one of the questions.
At least, the most important things that need to happen do happen in the end, which would be essentially Judith speaking her truth, and Steve seeing it. That's what they've been missing the whole time, and no matter what happens after that, it doesn't really matter because that's really the crux of what they were missing between them, and her acknowledging these are the real feelings she’s been scared to speak to.
Published on January 18, 2024
Words by Carolyn Hinds
Carolyn is a Tomatometer-Approved Critic, Journalist, Podcaster and YouTube. Her published work can be found on Observer, ButWhyTho?, Shondaland, Salon and many other. She’s a member of the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA), co-hosts So Here’s What Happened Podcast! and is the host of Carolyn Talks…, and Beyond The Romance Podcasts. You can find her regularly live tweeting her current Asian drama watches using #DramasWithCarrie, and the weekly Sci-Fi watch along with #SaturdayNightSciFi.