Ballinran Entertainment producer Koi Thompson recently completed and released the first five episodes of her Faces of Diversity short-documentary series. She’s now hoping the series can continue telling the stories of local newcomers in a longer format.
For the past several months, Ballinran Entertainment producer Koi Thompson has been meeting with local newcomers to listen to their stories about immigrating to Canada and share them online through her Faces of Diversity short documentary series.
Having now released all of the initial five-minute episodes, she and the Stratford production company are hoping to continue sharing the stories of the many newcomers who call Stratford and Perth County home, ideally in a longer format documentary series.
“We (talked to people) from five different countries with five different stories,” said Thompson, who immigrated to Stratford from China more than seven years ago. “I feel like everyone said their first year (here) was tough (regardless of) if they’re from China or different countries. Every newcomer struggles with culture, language and everything. Everybody came from different situations, but they became stronger through (the immigration experience).”
Whether they moved to Stratford for love, like Koi Thompson did to be with her husband and Ballinran Entertainment executive producer Craig Thompson, or came to find work, like Jatinder and Rajbir Singh, who planned to work as mechanical engineers but ended up opening the city’s first Indian grocer, Koi Thompson said the overall experiences of the people she spoke with seem to have a lot in common, despite the differences in circumstance.
By sharing their stories, the Faces of Diversity producer the project helped connect her subjects to wider newcomer communities in Stratford and across Perth County while serving to show other newcomers that many of their friends and neighbors had overcome similar hardships to forge a new life in Canada .
“From the non-newcomer’s perspective, I think the series was important as well because the people who watched it now understand what struggles these newcomers face,” Craig Thompson said. “Many people who are not newcomers and are from this area or come from close by, they all were touched by these stories. They had no idea what these people went through. The goal was to share the stories, but also to offer non-newcomers a bit of a perspective on what it takes to give up your life in another country to move half a world away.”
The Thompsons hope those who watch the series will realize the things we have in common – like the desire to be loved or to lead a productive life – are much stronger than racial, cultural, political or religious differences.
The first five episodes of Faces of Diversity were made possible thanks to funding and support from the Kiwanis Club of Stratford Charitable Foundation and the Stratford Perth Community Foundation’s Smart & Caring Community Fund. Now, Ballinran Entertainment is looking for additional funding so it can expand the series into a longer half-hour format that can explore newcomer stories in more detail.
For more information and to watch the Faces of Diversity series, visit www.facesofdiversity.ca.