Sister, Sister, Sister, Brother, Brother

I was born in China and raised in Canada. My maternal grandmother died before I was born, and much of the world she belonged to reached me only through fragments: family photographs, stories repeated over the years, and the memories of relatives whose past I knew only partially.
This film began from a desire to understand that missing part of my family history. I interviewed four of my grandmother’s siblings, allowing their memories to form the structure of the film. Rather than reconstructing the past through experts or a historical narration, I wanted to stay close to the way memory actually works: through pauses, repetitions, uncertainty, contradiction, and ordinary details that have remained vivid for more than fifty years.
What interested me was not only what happened to them, but how each person remembers the same family differently. Their voices move from one to another, sometimes completing each other and sometimes revealing different understandings of the past. Gradually, a family history becomes a history of separation, distance, return, and the identities imposed or reshaped by a particular time.
I was sixteen when I made the film, close in age to some of them when they first left home. That realization changed the way I listened to their stories. Experiences that had once seemed to me like distant history began to feel immediate: leaving one’s parents, entering an unfamiliar place, learning to live independently, and not knowing when one might return.
Sister Sister Sister Brother Brother is my attempt to approach a history I did not live through by listening to those who did. More than a reconstruction of the past, the film is about the fragile way a family remembers itself across generations.