A Nikkei Canadian Story, a short version of Landscapes of Home, will be screened at the Astoria Film Festival (NYC, USA) on Sunday, June 1, at 4:30 PM (EST).
INTRO
ALICE IL SHIN 신일 is a Korean filmmaker who received her formal film training at Nihon University, Japan. Since then, she has been working as a director, producer, and editor on film projects in Japan, Korea, and Canada.
Alice’s work takes an interest in Asian-Canadian experiences similar to her own. Her debut Canadian short film, Haru’s New Year (2018), was shown at film festivals worldwide with numerous awards, while her elegiac short film Signal Fire (2019) was hosted at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham during its festival run. Her first short documentary, CBC Arts: History in Paper (2020), showcases an artist whose experimental creations demonstrate the human cost of the Japanese internment in Canada, and started an interest in documentary filmmaking that has preoccupied her since.
Continuing to explore the topic of Japanese-Canadian internment, her one-hour length documentary Landscapes of Home (2024) is currently supported by the National Association of Japanese Canadians and the Canada Council for the Arts with mentorship from the 2020 Hot Docs X Netflix Accelerator Lab and 2022 Breakthrough Development Lab by DOC Institute. Aside from documentary filmmaking, Alice is currently developing her first short animation, Pearl (2025), which adapts a medieval English poem about child bereavement to a Joseon Korean setting, and is currently supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
As a commercial filmmaker, Alice worked as an editor for Banger Films’ 7-parts documentary series on the Youtube Originals series K-Pop Evolution (2021), which gave her hands-on experience with professional and collaborative editing. More recently, she has worked as the on-set translator for Apple TV+ series Pachinko (Season 2 – 2024) as an aid for the directors and actors.
Currently, she is working for NJcreation to develop Thai drama series into Japanese remakes, expanding her cross-cultural contents expertise. She is also a board director at Arts East-West, a Montréal-based, non-profit, artist-driven organization that has been specializing in thematic festivals since 1995, with no national boundaries across Pan-Asia and its diaspora.
