Winning filmmaker Sidney Phommarath honoured for her work

After screening her latest documentary at last weekend’s FascinAsian Film Festival, Winnipeg’s Sidney Phommarath has received the Erin Hembrador Emerging Filmmaker Award.

Hembrador, who died in 2022 at 33, was a rising star in the local and national film scene, earning a pair of best-of-fest honours at FascinAsian for her short films Mansanas and Container, the latter of which was co-directed with Winnipeg’s Quan Luong.

Phommarath, a Laotian-Canadian filmmaker, is the fourth recipient of the award, presented and funded by Hembrador’s family, the Winnipeg Film Group and Frank Digital, where Hembrador worked starting in 2019.

A film graduate of the University of Winnipeg who specializes in human rights narratives, Phommarath’s latest documentary is Dear Nya, which showcases her visit to her ancestral homeland of Laos.

Phommarath visited the country in 2023 while volunteering for a local non-profit geared toward building schools in Laos. While there, the filmmaker was able to document the inauguration of one of those schools and to explore her roots in a way she’d long dreamed of doing.

“I was really nervous,” she recalls. “A cousin who I never met before met us at the airport at 11 p.m., and walking around at night it felt a bit sketchy (in Vientiane), but in the daytime, it was a totally different world.”

Upon her return to Winnipeg, Phommarath interviewed her grandmother, her father and other relatives about their immigration stories.

For the filmmaker, it was a continuation of a personal documentary style that she honed with her short Rising From Refuge. That film explored her family’s dramatic journey across the Mekong River to a refugee camp in Thailand, to St. Pierre Jolys, to Hamilton, Ont., to Steinbach and to Winnipeg.

Phommarath’s filmmaking career began in her backyard in Transcona, where she would film detective stories with her friends when she was as young as six. While studying at Collège Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Phommarath was inspired to pursue filmmaking as a career.

“It was half photography, half film, and I did poorly in photography but much better in filmmaking. I was shocked that I could do that, so I started doing more,” she says.

At 19, Phommarath pitched her first documentary to CBC, which was released in 2020 when Phommarath was 21, kicking off a fruitful collaborative relationship with the national broadcaster. Including Dear Nya, she has now produced seven projects for the CBC Creators Network.

Recent credits for Phommarath include working in the art department on Vancouver director Robin Dalla-Vicenza’s film Rare Birds, as a gaffer for Winnipeg filmmaker Angeline Javier’s short All the Words, and as the director of Two Widows, a short film created for the film group’s One Take Super 8 event and screened at last year’s FascinAsian.

Starring Stephanie Sy, Joshua Banman and Junko Bailey (The Grudge), Two Widows is a period noir about a widow approached by a mysterious woman in black who transports the woman through a looking glass and into the afterlife. Shot at the St. Boniface Cathedral, outside in St. Norbert and at the film group’s Black Lodge Studio, the stylish short displays Phommarath’s capacity for powerful fictional narrative to go along with her documentary skill set.

Upcoming credits for Phommarath include work in the camera department for local award-winning filmmaker Ande Brown’s short film Half-Naked.

The Erin Hembrador award recognizes an emerging filmmaker who has only made short films in their career and includes a custom plaque, a $500 cash prize, and more than $3,000 in in-kind gear rentals from the film group and Frank Digital.

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