February 12 @ Moviehouse : Every Day Is A Holiday & Cooking By Heart

February 12 // 3rd Ward
7 pm Doors & Food // 8 pm Films

Parents. These two projects turn their cameras on the stories, knowledge and insight passed down from the people who brought us into this world. Every Day Is A Holiday follows Theresa Loong’s quest to find out about her father’s journey from Malaysian teenager to Chinese POW in a Japanese camp to US citizen. And Cooking By Heart shares the joy that happens when family recipes find their way from one generation to the next.

Cooks from the Cooking By Heart videos will prepare a special plate from two distinct traditions: a masala from India and a joloff rice recipe from Nigeria. With a special collaborative performance from Moviehouse’s own Shantell Martin’s work with a live cellist.

Featuring :

Every Day Is A Holiday by Theresa Loong

Growing up, filmmaker Theresa Loong knew that her father, Paul Loong, was older than most of her friends’ parents. Throughout her youth and young adulthood, Theresa recalls a cheerful father who loved to laugh and play pranks on his kids. But underneath all that laughter, he would show occasional flashes of anger and sadness.

One day, young Theresa asked him innocently about a curious scar on his back. “Everyone has secrets,” he would say.

She knew this much: His road to becoming an American citizen was anything but direct. As a Chinese Malaysian teenager serving in the British Royal Air Force, he spent three years at hard labor as a
prisoner of war in Japan. But it wasn’t until Theresa discovered a hidden diary her father kept while imprisoned, that she uncovered other family secrets.

This work-in-progress showing of “Every Day Is a Holiday” draws upon his experiences to explore contemporary issues of war, immigration, and family.  It celebrates the freedom that comes with confronting the past and facing the future with resilience, forgiveness, and love.

Cooking By Heart by Alana Lowe and Paul Helzer

Cooking by Heart is a series of short videos that document recipes as they are shared across generations. We are learning from extraordinary home cooks as they prepare family favorites with a loved one in the comfort of their own kitchen. We preserve food traditions and document family stories. Or you could say we are telling recipe stories and recording kitchen memories.

MNP

 Without giving so much of the performance away… we make a strong point that we and you are HERE, unlike a lot of shows that want to take you on a journey or an escape to a distant place, we want to create the opposite space. We start with an image of a door that we all walked through and slowly bring in some sound, some recorded conversation that was going on before the show – so people are like – hang on, I know that door/space I came through it to get here, hang on that’s thingy bobs voice…. People are instantly but in a very subtle way brought into that place called now and here - then we really begin. I will start with my voice looper repeating some spoken words, normally a question I heard someone say or the longitude and latitude of our current location …… I/my noise fades out Anna with her awesome cello come in and the live drawing also begins…

RSVP : www.3rdward.com/rsvp