In an early scene, in The Gardener and the Dictator, the 87-year-old Ms. Kaui reveals herself to be a virtuoso of the elder-relative guilt trip. Staring into the camera, she tells her adult granddaughter, Toronto-based filmmaker, Jane Hui Wang, “If you love your grandpa, don’t leave until you bury us.”
Ms. Kaui, a comically bossy matriarch whose family affectionately calls her a “dictator,” ruled a one-bedroom concrete-walled apartment in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Her only subject was her husband of more than 60 years, Grandfather Wang, the gentle “gardener” of the film’s title.
Neither is alive today. The footage comes from 15 years ago, during a period when Wang shared her grandparents’ apartment while shooting her debut feature, Last Harvest (2015). That film followed a Chinese farming couple, the Xu family, who were among the 800,000 people compelled to relocate because of the mammoth South to North Water Diversion Project. Last Harvest became a success, winning several awards and getting licensed for broadcast in Europe and Asia.
Whenever Wang returned to her grandparents’ apartment, she turned her camera toward her hosts.
“I had always felt that we don’t see enough stories in media about elderly people,” she tells me. “I basically wanted to film their daily life and share it with the Western audience, but I didn’t realize how interesting their life story was.”
The film is the story of two people surviving the turmoil of 20th century Chinese history, from the Japanese invasion to the Civil War and Cultural Revolution. It’s also a love story about a determined woman, who, after her first marriage fell apart, showed up at Grandpa Wang’s place of work with her two-year-old son and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“She was definitely a strong person, a free spirit,” says Wang, who was raised by her grandparents until she was six. “She spoiled me. She let me do whatever made me happy. Perhaps it is in my genes as well. I’m also someone who always does what I want.”
When she arrived in Canada in 2001, Wang intended to pursue a master’s degree in computer technology, but she followed her passions instead, taking a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at York University, followed by Toronto Metropolitan University’s film certificate course. “I’m someone who can only work on something I’m passionate about. And for me, even if I couldn’t get funding, I knew I would finish this film,” she says.
“After the final shot, of my grandfather washing my grandmother, I knew I didn’t have to shoot any more. I came back to Canada and began working on Last Harvest. I finished that in 2015. I wanted to start working on this film right away, but my producer told me that I should take a break because I was having some health problems.
“During COVID, I had time to focus on it,” says Wang. “First, I felt extremely lucky and grateful that I made the decision to make this film, to live with them again under the same roof. At the same time, it was extremely difficult.
“It may not be the best choice to edit your own film because you are too close to the material, and when it’s about someone you really care about, it is really, really challenging. I can’t count how many times I cried. I have so many memories of them but when I started looking at the footage, it was so different from just remembering. It made you feel that they are still around, like they’re still there in China, and I was spending time with them again.”
