Vancouver Filmmaker Jon Chiang’s “Spring After Spring” Tells the Story Behind Chinatown Parade

For one short morning, every Spring since 1974, lively parade floats, snapping fire crackers and graceful dancers waving colourful fans flood the streets of Chinatown. 

In his 2025 documentary, Vancouver-based filmmaker Jon Chiang set out to tell how those dancers came to be.

Screening soon at Vancouver’s Chinatown Storytelling Centre, Chiang’s debut feature, Spring After Spring, tells the untold story of the late Maria Mimie Ho, who immigrated to Canada in 1967 and established the Strathcona Chinese Dance Company, a cornerstone of the Chinese community in Vancouver and the annual Lunar New Year Spring Festival Parade. 

Maria’s three daughters, Anabel, Val (also known as “Ms. Vee”) and Lisa, grew up dancing at their mother’s studio and in the parade each year. The film documents how, after their mother’s passing, the responsibility to keep her legacy going fell to the Ho sisters. 

“What I always came back to was the sisters, their relationship to their mom, and this question of how we continue to honour our family legacies,” Chiang says, describing his guiding concepts while putting together the film. 

“Even though it can feel like a burden, even though it is a burden. How do we navigate and manage these two simultaneous, conflicting feelings?” 

Chiang–along with his editor Coline Debray–had decades’ worth of performance tapings, municipal archival footage and home videos to weave together with interviews and parade footage they filmed. 

“It’s such a poignant representation of mom’s life work—all these generations of dancers contributing to the legacy of this dance but also sharing the experience of pride and ownership in who they are,” describes Ms. Vee, the middle Ho sister. “We never actually shared the stage with our mom, but in this film we were able to.”

“Seeing years of work come together, along with archival footage we didn’t even know existed, was incredibly moving,” says eldest sister Anabel.

Growing up in Richmond with Chinese parents who had immigrated from Peru, Chiang felt a deep connection with the Ho sisters’ story. 

“I feel like there’s so much unsaid in Chinese culture. There’s a lot of emotional conservatism,” Chiang says. “I saw a lot of my experiences in the sisters: growing up here in Vancouver, caught between a white, Western Canadian culture and Chinese culture.”

It was important to Chiang that he and the sisters built a strong relationship before they started having the hard conversations about grief—conversations that ultimately make the film a compelling watch. 

“We didn’t get into those conversations in depth until the third year of really working together. I knew that there was a level of trust that had to get built,” says Chiang, who worked on the film for five years.

Spring After Spring premiered at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival in November 2025, where it was recognized with the Best Canadian Feature, but will soon get its second major screening just in time for Lunar New Year in Vancouver.

Chiang’s film showcases what a labour of love it is to put the parade on each year. From mending broken costumes to wrangling the buzzing young dancers, the documentary sees the Ho sisters continue their mother’s legacy with the support of the community around them. 

“What struck me the most was the footage of mom,” says Lisa, the youngest Ho sister. “She was someone that lived through her actions and after her passing, it was always hard to verbalize our mission of continuing the essence of her work. I felt like we were on the right track after watching the film.”

A special screening of Spring After Spring with Chiang and the Ho sisters will take place at the Chinatown Storytelling Centre on February 1. It will have a theatrical run at the VIFF Centre from February 6 and 17. Following this, the film will be available on Knowledge Network.