Linda Zhang's short film Chinatown 2025 premieres at DOXA

Assistant Professor Linda Zhang's short film 'Chinatown 2050' recently premiered at the 22nd annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver. The film, a collaboration with Maxim Gertler-Jaffe, is "a visual collage of dreamlike LiDAR 3D modeling scans" that asks how might the pandemic shape the future of Toronto’s Chinatown? Five scenarios tackling this question are imagined through this technology by Asian-Canadian youth with the hope to preserve vibrant streetscapes rather than create an empty tourist attraction.

DOXA is presented by The Documentary Media Society, a Vancouver based non-profit, charitable society (incorporated in 1998) devoted to presenting independent and innovative documentaries to Vancouver audiences. The society exists to educate the public about documentary film as an art form through DOXA Documentary Film Festival, a curated and juried festival comprised of public screenings, panel discussions, public forums and educational programs. 

The film was presented as part of a short film program titled 'Space as Place / Place as Space' a spacious slate of short films that (re)imagines individual and communal relationships to the spaces we inhabit, and the places they become. Be it a family home or a government office, an industrial island or scorched and submerged lands, folks are turning their attention—and ours—to the sprawling maps of our lives, with some resorting to 3D images to better locate their historic roots in future placemaking.