City scope: all change in Chinatown

"Chinatown is dying."

Eight minutes into Julia Kwan's documentary Everything Will Be, this observation is made by a local herbalist as she condemns a world in which rich Chinese are snapping up property across North America with little sense of heritage.

"In five years it's fated that Chinatown will be gone," she says, with a resigned air, while grinding Chinese medicine. "Half of it will be the Westerners' world."

Kwan's film explains how Chinatown in downtown Vancouver is being targeted by Western developers and mainland Chinese buyers, neither of whom have any interest in retaining the traditional shops or cheap rental apartments.

When it premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival last month, Everything Will Be struck a chord with audiences: all three showings sold out.

When Kwan was a child, her parents worked in Chinatown: her father as a waiter and her mother in a laundry.

"I used to take the bus to Chinatown and dodge the drunks, but it was my community, warts and all, and I loved it," she says.