(Honorable Mention)
Red Carpet & Award Ceremony 🎫 Get Your Tickets
Original Film Title: SING MY SONG
Director’s Name: Barbara K. Lee
Writer’s Name: Barbara K. Lee
Producer: Barbara K. Lee
Country of Origin: Canada
Country of Filming : Canada, Hong Kong, United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1 hour 28 minutes
Film Description:
SING MY SONG documents an aspiring songwriter, Kayee Lee, and her personal journey to find a singer for her songs. Her quest begins with attempts to meet Kelly Clarkson in hopes of the American Idol winner to sing her songs, but she must soon confront her own internalized racism ingrained from the lack of Asian rockstars while growing up in the West.
Lee pursues her recurring dream to keep working on her music while meeting current Asian American and Asian Canadian singer-songwriters along the way, all trying to “break” into the evolving music industry, now that the gatekeepers are losing their stranglehold on who gets to be heard and who doesn’t. All of this happens under the backdrop of a world that is waking up to racial inequities and the marginalization of communities of colour. Lee examines the Model Minority Myth and how it has been used to promote Asians to excel in classical music, but simultaneously creates barriers of not being “cool” enough to participate in popular mainstream music. At times a mediation on the Asian communities’ complicity while other times a frustrated indictment of the erasure of Asian musicians and rockstars in North America, these issues are brought to the forefront as Lee navigates a rapidly changing political and social landscape through the experiences of the Asian-American/Canadian musicians that she meets and the rise of anti-Asian racism.
Ultimately, they inform and inspire Lee on her own personal relationship with her music and how she finds a place to fit in while providing audiences a glimpse of what it is like to be an invisible visible artist in popular music, an industry that should be colour blind.