Michelle Kim Photo Melissa Shaw
Filmmaker, writer and director Michelle Kim recently released her new young adult novel, Running Through Sprinklers about two childhood friends growing up in Surrey.
"It's about the intense friendships young girls have with each other when they're 12. It's like your first love -- your first best friend," Kim says.
The relationship between the two girls, Sara and Nadine, begins to change when Nadine skips a grade and goes to high school ahead of Sara. "Their friendship shifts and they sort of stop being friends" leaving behind days of running through sprinklers and slurping up ice cream cones together.
Kim was born and raised in Surrey and now lives in Vancouver. The two girls in the book are bi-racial with one Asian parent each and Kim is half-Korean, like Sara. Kim says the suburban setting captures that feeling of being in-between in terms of not only being bi-racial but also living in-between the city and rural spaces.
She's now working on another novel and is writing and directing a Korean-language feature film set in the in '90s during the Asian economic crisis about a female taxi driver.
In the past she has worked as a journalist for the BBC in London and returned to Vancouver to write, co-direct, produce and act in the feature film The Tree Inside. The 2015 film won audience choice awards and the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and the Northwest Filmmakers Festival in Portland.
"Storytelling is storytelling it just morphs into a different form each time. Whether it's film journalism or fiction -- for me it's the same thing. I'm multi-racial and it's hard to categorize me. I'm just doing what I love to do," she says.
Running Through Sprinklers is currently rated 4.27 out of five stars on Goodreads and is published by Simon & Schuster.
