Inverse Journey

This video loop follows the artist as she collects and assembles pieces of a torii gate across historically and personally significant sites: Hastings Park, Tashme, Esquimalt Gorge Park & Pavilion, and Nikkei No Haka Japanese Cemetery, culminating in the shallow waters of Ross Bay. There, at dusk, the completed gate becomes a threshold the artist walks through as bubbles swirl around her—symbolizing free spirits, ancestral presence, and the continuity of resilience.

Infused with elements of magic realism, the work transforms landscapes marked by displacement and erasure into places of agency, remembrance, and renewal. Each gesture becomes an act of reclamation, turning histories of loss into movements of creation and presence.

Ross Bay—where some of the earliest Japanese immigrants to Canada are buried—serves as a place of beginnings and endings. This liminal shoreline, suspended between memory and lived experience, is where the torii gate feels most at home. The artist’s passage through it suggests that heritage and identity can be carried, reconstructed, and honoured on one’s own terms.

Inverse Journey embodies possibility, revealing how movement, landscape, and the body can converge to open spaces of connection, continuity, and return.

An Artist's Journey: Legacy of Japanese-Canadian Internment follows artist Laura Shintani as she retraces a history of displacement, resilience, and remembrance across Canada. Through encounters with landscapes, archives, former internment sites, and community voices, the film reveals how art can become a means of reconnecting with histories that risk being forgotten.

Rooted in Shintani's own family experience of Japanese Canadian internment, the documentary explores the creative process as an act of inquiry, restoration, and witness. As past and present converge, the journey becomes a reflection on memory, identity, and the enduring impact of place.

Broadcast nationally by CBC, the film offers a deeply personal perspective on a chapter of Canadian history while illuminating the role of art in making visible stories that continue to shape the present.