Julia Kwan

Bio

Filmmaker Julia Kwan, a second generation Chinese-Canadian, is a writer and director based in Vancouver. Her debut feature, Eve & the Fire Horse, met with critical acclaim after premiering at The Toronto International Film Festival and garnered several awards including at The Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize for World Cinema and The Claude Jutra Award at the Genies (Canadian Oscars). Everything Will Be marks Ms. Kwan’s feature documentary debut. The film received several nominations at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle as well as the Meilleur Espoir Award at the Montreal International Documentary Festival.

Reflection

Rosalind’s heart sutra mantra as well as the chants from the nuns at the Gold Buddhist Monastery reverberate with me well after the shoot. As someone just experiencing the beginnings of diminished eye range and night vision due to aging, I found that filming Rosalind, the gentle and wise Buddhist elder, was a profound reminder of the need to let go and to embrace the simpler life.

“When you get older, you don’t really like to have a complicated life”, says Rosalind, a Buddhist senior, who has recently taken up tai chi and is letting go of the worldly concerns of her youth. In Sacred‘s aging segment, we explore Rosalind’s quest for spiritual growth through Buddhism, the practice of tai chi and living the simple, “monastic” life in her twilight years.