Snow | Q&A with Rohan Fernando

Snow follows the life of Parvati, a young South Asian woman restarting her life in Canada after the 2004 tsunami that swept away everything—her family, her home, and her identity.

Shot cinema verité style, Snow is the debut feature film from Sri Lankan born, Nova Scotia raised filmmaker, painter and visual artist Rohan Fernando. In advance of the film’s exclusive theatrical premiere on February 24 at Cumberland Four Cinemas in Toronto, the 39 year old Fernando sat down with Schema to talk about his 1.5-generation Sri Lankan experience, becoming a filmmaker, and his personal connection to Pavarti’s search for identity in a foreign place.

How has the impact of Snow changed since it first screened in 2010?

When we opened the Reel World festival it happened right when the Japanese tsunami occurred. I feel like the film isn’t specific to the tsunami itself. It’s really about the aftermath of living through a natural disaster, and the process of healing that this character goes through can be applied to other disasters. Loss is something we all go through in life.

Tell me a bit about where you’re from.

My family is from Sri Lanka, specifically Jaffna. We left in 1977, when the civil war was starting to brew.

How would you identify or describe your personal identity?

My identity is something that I create myself. I learn values from my heritage, my background, that I hold onto because those are things I value. But there are values I let go of because they don’t serve me, or limit me or I feel oppressed by them. Part of that is that my family has been liberal enough to let me follow my own course of identity.

It’s really about the aftermath of living through a natural disaster, and the process of healing that this character goes through can be applied to other disasters. Loss is something we all go through in life.

Coming from an immigrant background, was it hard for you to pursue a creative profession like filmmaking?

I think in some ways, people from immigrant backgrounds have to convince their families or communities in a way, or go out on their own and do it without their blessing—which is a challenge. If you do decide to do it, in terms for what kind of stories you want to tell and what kind of market there is out there is also a challenge. Theres a huge South Asian community in Toronto, and huge Sri Lankan community as well. So you’d think this [film] would find a good audience, because its about South Asian culture and experiences. But that culture is still wrapped up in Bollywood films or a different type of storytelling, so that’s another challenge you have to overcome. It’s also difficult because I’ve had a hard time figuring out who the audience is for this film.

“Every film I’ve made has transformed me in some way, as life experiences do,” says writer and filmmaker Rohan Fernando.

Do you feel that there’s a part of your own story in Pavarti’s?

I think a lot of the documentaries I’ve done before making Snow have to do with what we left behind and what we come to in Canada. I wanted to go through the details of what I went through and bring it to a narrative that’s a bit more open and less specific to me, and it’s definitely informed by my own emotional journey. What Pavarti went through in the film took me 30 years to get to.

Was it a conscious decision to make the people Pavarti encounters so different from her culturally?

Pavarti connects to people wh have suffered immense loss, because she identities with their emotional state. Its not something you see right away from the beginning. So I was interested in seeing her encountering people that just happened to be in her environment. Some kind of bond develops, you find out that they suffered, maybe not as immensely as pavarti but loss as well.

I think in some ways, people from immigrant backgrounds have to convince their families or communities in a way, or go out on their own and do it without their blessing—which is a challenge.

What key themes, other than loss of identity and grief, did you want to convey?

Empathy was a big one. Empathy through sorrow, and how that ties into the immigrant experience, because loss is fundamental to it. You’re trying to reinvent yourself from a different place. The sense of remaking yourself in a way in a new environment. There’s a lot of grief associated with is but there’s also a lot of freedom. That’s not an obvious component of the film but there’s a freedom in remaking yourself.

The people around her are still bound by their political and social identities but she’s already lost so much on a massive level, so that she’s free to find herself.

Will Snow be screened in any other Canadian cities?

Yes, it definitely will, we will update the Facebook page and official site for release dates in other cities including Vancouver.

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Snow opens at the Cumberland Four Cinemas from February 24 to March 1, 2012. For showtimes, check the cinema official site.

Make sure to check out
Snow the Film official Facebook page
Snow the Film official site
Follow Snow on Twitter @Snowthefilm.

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