Comrade Dad
Release date: 2005
Running time: 26 minutes
Directed by: Karin Lee
Produced by: Karin Lee
Purchase the film: Moving Images Distribution
Writer/director Karin Lee reflects on her father Wally Lee and the communist bookstore that he ran on Vancouver's Skid Row from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. This experimental biography explores both the person and the effect that his ideological beliefs had on his family, set within the political landscapes of Canada and China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. It is also a little-known story about how a segment of Vancouver's Chinese community embraced Chinese socialism and how their idealism was affected by a changing political climate in China.
Comrade Dad twists memories of a socialist-raised child into the reflection of an adult who is conflicted over the schism between idealism and pragmatism, socialism and capitalism, and personal desires and political activism.