The Fraser Valley farmworker protests of the 1970s and ’80s are the focus of a film and conversation at Surrey Art Gallery on Saturday, Oct. 26, starting at 2 p.m.
Admission is free to see the 1982 documentary A Time to Rise, screened ahead of a chat involving labour historian Anushay Malik and SAG assistant curator Jas Lally.
The event is connected to the gallery’s fall exhibit, Jagdeep Raina’s Ghosts In The Fields, the art of which explores a time when migrant workers and union organizers protested wage theft, long hours and exploitative working and living conditions endured by racialized farmworkers on farms and in greenhouses.
The 39-minute A Time to Rise, directed and produced by Anand Patwardhan and Jim Monro, is in English with subtitles for spoken Punjabi. The film can be viewed on the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) website.
“On April 6, 1980, the Canadian Farmworkers Union came into existence,” says a post on nfb.ca. “This film documents the conditions among Chinese and East Indian immigrant workers in British Columbia that provoked the formation of the union, and the response of growers and labour contractors to the threat of unionization.”
Malik is a social historian who works on labour, migration and global anti-colonial movements, according to a bio on surrey.ca. “She is interested in the exploration of multiple archival registers to explore how people make meaning from the stories they have access to as well as the stories that power has hidden from their view.”
With Ghosts in the Fields, Raina’s solo exhibit draws inspiration from archival images and interviews by media artist Craig Berggold and filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, and includes Raina’s own interviews with union organizers and agricultural workers. A stop-motion animation positions the labour movements against the current backdrop of the Lower Mainland, and Raina’s black-and-white drawings are inspired by Berggold’s archival photographs taken in the 1980s.
