Emily Carr University film student Ken Tsu’s experience of growing up in an Asian Canadian family in Jasper, Alberta, helped him identify with David Chariandy’s novel Soucouyant. “It was about a black family living in Scarborough, dealing with racism there,” Tsui said in an interview at the Straight offices, “but at the same time”¦I think that kind of racism happens all the time, and I felt I could relate to that.”

Tsui and screenwriter Brittany Junek’s pitch for a three-minute interpretation of the book won the Moving Stories Make a Film On Our Dime competition. Tsui said his film prefaces the book by portraying the main character just before he enters his house, which begins the story in the novel.

Tsui and Junek’s film will premiere at the Moving Stories Film Festival on Saturday (October 25) at 8 p.m. in the Emily Carr University Theatre. It will screen alongside 15 other literature-inspired short films, presented by curator Paul Quarrington, festival founder Judith Keenan, and local author and Straight contributor Ivan E. Coyote. Among the films are B.C. filmmaker Claudia Morgado Escanilla’s adaptation of Coyote’s short story “No Bikini” and Irene Duma’s take on broadcaster Patrick Watson’s This Hour Has Seven Decades.