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Documentary filmmakers have to go with the material they've got, and for Continuous Journey, director-writer-producer Ali Kazimi didn't have much. A few minutes of archival footage, some newspaper stories on microfilm, a few legal documents, some live interviews and contemporary setting shots, and maybe a few dozen old photographs was about it.
What turned that small stack of material into a compelling 90-minute documentary was years of hard work and craft, craft, craft. Kazimi researched his story exhaustively and explored its implications far beyond the local scene and the age in which it took place.
It's a little-known story that says a lot about the world in the waning days of the British Empire: A ship carrying hundreds of would-be immigrants from colonial India arrived in Vancouver in May 1914, but the government kept the passengers from disembarking despite their being, like Canadians, British subjects. What followed was a standoff that lasted more than two months.
It provides a glimpse of a world system that at first looks very different from our own and yet starts to show some similarities. Legally, all British subjects were supposed to be able to travel and settle freely throughout the Empire. However, this arrangement was intended only for white colonialists, not their third-world subjects. Canada, which like the U.S. in the same era was in the grips of anxiety over race and competition for jobs, had to invent specially crafted laws to keep non-white immigrants out. One was the "continuous journey" law, which said any immigrant from the Indian Subcontinent would have to come on a nonstop journey. Then the government-controlled passenger line that made the only nonstop journeys from India to Canada promptly stopped that service. Canada's cooperation with the U.S. on immigration control in the wake of 9/11 offers some interesting parallels.
Imperial politics also enter into the story, plus Indian politics, the feared spread of democratic ideals across the empire, and a fascinating interaction between the immigrants in the harbor and the local Indian-Canadian community. Even at 90 minutes, this movie never slows down, and much of the credit goes to Kazimi's inventive use of visuals and careful insertion of personal perspective. This is an illuminating, highly relevant film.