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Pooja’s journey in White Elephant also parallels that of Asian Canadians in their country’s TV industry, of being the model minority for never daring to rock the boat or the perpetual outsider onscreen. But as she and Trevor spend time together, Pooja’s brown and Black friends and immigrant father confront her for mixing with a member of the opposing tribe.Įventually, in Chung’s partial retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Pooja’s relentless pursuit of romance takes a violent turn and her quest for love as part of a Hollywood fantasy crumbles and becomes a discovery of self-love. In White Elephant, Pooja yearns for forbidden love across racial lines as she innocently falls for Trevor, a local white boy just like the teen heartthrobs she sees in Hollywood movies and TV shows everywhere. The film’s themes are what that does to a young person’s identity as it makes your adolescence very confusing and your own experiences in real life not feel valid or important,” Chung argues. “What she (Pooja) is seeing on TV and in films isn’t lining up with the reality of her neighborhood. His coming-of-age tale, set in Scarborough, a predominantly Black and Brown neighborhood in east Toronto, follows Pooja, a 16-year-old South Asian teenage girl played by Zaarin Bushra, as she grapples with her cultural identity and racial tensions. There’s just a huge void,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.Ĭhung’s White Elephant thematically addresses the impact of Canadian TV’s lack of diverse voices and faces. “We make up almost 20 percent of the Canadian population, yet we rarely see ourselves on TV in Canada. Netflix Unveils 2022 French-Language OriginalsĬhung points to the irony of being defined by his ethnicity as a minority in the Canadian TV industry, when he grew up in a predominantly Black and Brown neighborhood in Toronto, and Asian Canadians make up around a fifth of the overall Canadian population. it’s very in your face, the issues being confronted, while in Canada we’re always trying to brush it under the rug and pretend that everything is great,” says Chung, a Chinese Canadian born of parents who themselves were born and raised in Calcutta, India before they emigrated to Canada. That’s unlike Hollywood where the box office success of Crazy Rich Asians already had Asian Americans breaking through the U.S.

Toronto director Andrew Chung says the Canadian entertainment industry has failed Asian Canadians like himself for decades by mostly erasing their representation on domestic TV sets.īut the industry-realigning success and controversy around Kim’s Convenience on Netflix has led Canadian TV programmers to finally greenlight more stories by and about Asian Canadians.

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