Dream of Water and Song – Sam Luk – Canada

A woman’s soul traverses the sea of time.

Director Biography – Sam Luk

Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Sam Luk began working for the screen in 2009, writing and directing two short films that entered the international festival circuit. He also worked as a finishing editor for many broadcast and theatrical projects, including CBC’s The Nature Of Things and the animated feature film Window Horses.

Director Statement

“Dream of Water and Song” is an experimental short about the soul of a woman traversing the sea of time. Edited during the pandemic, the images in the film explore the transient but balanced nature of life and death, juxtaposed against the voice-over of the woman’s “inner voice” in search of its own identity. The film is constructed as such to illustrate the cyclic theory of life, death, and rebirth, as the woman’s soul travels deep into her residual memories of an ancient and foreign land, with which she shares a mysterious familiarity like a past life. She witnesses its destruction, before seeing its resurrection unfold in the present. Through her exploration, she finds almost mirrored images in her own present life in the West. In her newfound perspective, life and death achieve an equilibrium that transcends the flow of time. At the end of the film, she comes face to face with peace when she meets her inner child, alive before her own eyes.

Current events, like past ones, have caused misunderstanding, animosity, and separation among individuals, especially those with different backgrounds and history. This film was inspired by the filmmaker’s experience with “otherness”. Our own personal history seems more familiar and immediate to ourselves when compared to that of another person, another nation, another era, or another consciousness; but all is written in memories and reflections. In both the past and the present, our tendency to reject the unknown and unfamiliar is deepened by conflict and tragedy. This film provides the perspective that history, foreignness, and even the mystical are perhaps reflections of our own lives, as in a mirror, that we could embrace on our quest to knowing ourselves as individuals, because the bonds we share with others are often deeper than we think. This film thus poses questions of how much our personal identities are tied to those of others, and whether peace within ourselves is relevant to achieving greater harmony among all things past, present, and future.