The distribution strategy for Montreal filmmaker Karen Cho’s Big Fight in Little Chinatown involves a little “reverse-engineering.”

Instead of focusing solely on commercial distribution efforts, Cho along with community and distribution consultant Shawn Tse are getting more targeted — aiming for the heart of Chinatowns across North America that are under threat of disappearing and mobilizing communities that have been there for generations.

Those sweeping efforts have included leveraging festival and community screenings to set up panel discussions, raise awareness and draw people back to these neighbourhoods, raise funds and also highlight other films that tackle issues Chinatowns are facing.

That means “cutting out what might be seen as the traditional or more commercial infrastructure of film distribution, and kind of reverse-engineering a strategy based on the audience that you’re trying to get to,” EyeSteelFilm’s Bob Moore, the documentary’s producer, tells Playback Daily.

Moore says there is a “cost-saving aspect” to the strategy “in that the methodology is both targeted and scaleable, so it’s much more efficient.

“I think for us [EyeSteelFilm] it’s a return to looking for ways to engage directly with a community that is most impacted and could make the most use of a film,” adds Moore.

Big Fight in Little Chinatown is written and directed by Cho. It is produced by Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm in association with TVO and with the collaboration of Radio-Canada. EyeSteel’s Mila Aung-Thwin and Daniel Cross serve as executive producers alongside Jane Jankovic. U.K.’s Sideways Film is the film’s international distributor, while EyeSteelFilm is handling Canadian distribution in-house.

The film explores the history and cultural significance of Chinatowns in North American cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, New York and San Francisco, and the “active erasure” they are facing due to gentrification, urban development, the economic fallout of the COVID pandemic and the rise in anti-Asian racism. It also focuses on the efforts to revitalize these neighbourhoods and the communities leading those efforts.

It was produced with the financial support of Canada Media Fund, Quebec Film and Television Tax Credit, Canada Film or Video Production Tax Credit and SODEC. The budget was around $800,000.

Moore says EyeSteelFilm does not expect “to go much past break-even,” despite the community response. “Our principal objective is still met, which was to serve the audience we intended to serve when she [Cho] set out to make the film. Meanwhile, broader audiences can still discover the film through [broadcasters] TVO and Radio-Canada.”

The film has run in festivals including the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, the FascinAsian Film Festival in Winnipeg and Calgary, and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. It’s also screened at the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto, the VIFF Centre in Vancouver, and Cinéma Public in Montreal.

In between, the film has screened in a vintage store and various community centres, served as an activator for Q&A sessions with community members and policymakers, provided a platform to raise funds for small businesses, and filled up empty spaces in Chinatowns with “intergenerational folks” and started conversations through Cho and Tse’s efforts.

It has also been used to create bridges between other communities facing similar issues, says the filmmaking team.

“Like the Little Jamaica community, the Black community in Toronto, whose neighbourhoods are facing similar forms of erasure and similar forms of gentrification. There’s a lot of commonality there,” says Cho. A Q&A at a screening in Vancouver also included panelists from the Punjabi Market and the Filipino community to speak about the pressures they face and discuss ways of working together with communities in Chinatown.

Cho is also taking the film on a North American screening tour, which started during Asian Heritage Month in May and will run through September.

She says one of the missions of this film is to show these Chinatowns are not mere tourist destinations. As such, “the cameras move beyond the street level storefront windows to bring the audience into the back kitchens, upstairs gathering spaces or basement areas where the soul of the community resides. We also focused on the agency of the community and their ability to fight erasure and displacement generation after generation.”

Big Fight in Little Chinatown took more than two years to film, with the pandemic closing borders and Cho having to work remotely with New York-based cinematographer Nathaniel Brown to capture the story there, and in some instances deploying just a “one- to four-person crew” because of health concerns.

But the constraints brought on by COVID also worked to the production team’s advantage.

“The end result were very intimate scenes where the film subjects felt comfortable sharing with our small crew and where we could be nimble enough to shift focus on a dime if something developed on the spot while filming,” says Cho, noting that “COVID also became part of the story itself.”

“The brutal ways in which COVID came down upon the Chinatown businesses and brought on a resurgence in anti-Asian racism gave an added sense of urgency to the storytelling that allowed us to draw parallels between racism of the past and what was unfolding in the neighbourhood in the present.”

The film is now set for its Australian release at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, where it will play in the online selection from July 1 to 31.

“Chinatowns are not just a thing in North America, they’re all over the world where the Chinese immigrated to and a lot of Chinatowns, like the one in Melbourne, for example, shares a similar history to the ones in North America … and face similar threats. The story of the film, the story of Chinatown resonates beyond that, so we will be taking the film to larger international markets,” adds Cho.

Photo courtesy: EyeSteelFilms