Kaleidoscope by IRINA LYUBCHENKO

Long before I knew I was going to come to Canada I watched the film Léolo that was nominated for 1992 Cannes Film Festival and was directed by Canadian filmmaker Jean-Claude Lauzon. I assumed it was French but to my surprise I discovered it was made in Canada. My Russian TV, which delivered stories of anxiety and political cataclysms daily, never mentioned Canada in any of them. Even though I knew where it was positioned geographically, I almost didn’t believe in its existence. It was a mythical land to me.
I didn’t hear the stories of violence coming from this country but I knew that great films were coming out. Furthermore, I identified with Canada because it had the National Film Board, this Government funded agency supported animation as did my favorite Russian animation studio, Soyuzmultfilm.
I have to admit that my knowledge of Canadian cultural landscape back then was shaped by the voices that were directed outside of the country where they originated from, towards foreigners. These voices shaped Canadian cultural identity for me. Now I am inside this voice-making machine, hearing multiplicities, that are not edited down to create coherence, a unified body of national identity. The cultural picture I am now trying to assemble is not a jigsaw puzzle, where each piece has its original purpose and creates meaning only when it is in the right place. I would like to think of Canadian culture as of kaleidoscope, where with each slight movement an original mosaic is created, emphasizing the unique charisma of Canadian culture that allows re-editing of the national identity in a continuous cycle of multicultural transformation.