"The thing about magic is, it's all about misdirection. You watch closely, and there's all these little bits that diverge but will eventually lead you to one place," says director Ann Marie Fleming. Her words could equally apply to her documentary, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, a playful, deeply felt biography of her great-grandfather, one of the seminal vaudeville performers of the 1920s.

Born in 1961 after he'd died, Fleming never met Sam, but her alchemical approach to his life story -- she blends conventional documentary techniques with vivid comic-book animation and an eye for diverting details -- suggests that his penchant for showmanship endured down the family line.

The film, a labour of love that took Fleming six years to complete and required her to travel from her home in Vancouver to China to interview members of her extended family, attempts to tell the life story of a man whose embrace of mystery was central to his success. A tireless professional who incorporated members of his family -- including his Austrian-born daughters -- into his exotic variety show, Sam's masterstroke was to balance his act's Eastern mysticism with some Western razzle-dazzle. "Imagine, in tiny towns everywhere, from Alaska to Middle America, walking into a little vaudeville theatre, decked out like the Temple of Carnac with all of these amazing colours, and seeing this troupe of bejewelled Oriental performers," says Fleming, with starry-eyed enthusiasm. "It must have been the highlight of the year."

Certainly, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is an elegy for a venerable, bygone form of entertainment, but it also functions as an examination of its subject's subsequent and curious historical disappearing act. Despite a list of show-biz friends that included Orson Welles (who referred to him as his "teacher") and almost universal acclaim during his career, he remains, outside of magician's circles, only a marginal figure. It was only through conducting interviews for the film that Fleming began to get any sense of Sam's life, and even then, she found that his offstage persona was equally dependent on carefully honed illusion.

"At the beginning," she says, "I was sort of a disseminator of bad information. I would tell people one story, and they would tell me another one. I realized that there were a lot of stories about Sam, and that he was probably the architect of all of them. By the end, I knew it was just part of who he was."

It was this same inscrutability that would inform the film's boldest stroke, the depiction of Sam's early years in the form of Monty Python-esque animated interludes. "I figured that the comic-book stuff would work because Sam's time was a golden age for that medium. But it was also a way to parallel the surprise and excitement of his life with that of his act." The result is a documentary that, while obviously intelligently researched -- Fleming's cross-continental odyssey included meetings with several of Sam's now-ancient contemporaries -- has a pleasing, fairy-tale tone.

Not that any of this gaiety came easily. The film is also a document of Fleming's determination to overcome the dearth of material relating directly to Sam's private life. Many of her most important discoveries, she says, were accidental, the result of "serendipity and cause and effect and all of that. It really was like some sort of journey where you go into the woods and meet the wise man, and then he tells you where to go and who to talk to." Her narration of her experiences -- which is alternately cheerful, astonished and flat-out exhausted -- draws us past esoteric biography and into something memorably personal.

The sheer attrition of making the film has Fleming grateful for a little time off, but she says that her fascination with her great-grandfather will continue to inform her professional ventures. In addition to promoting the film, she's been working on a dramatic treatment of Sam's life, and laughs resignedly when asked if the link between her family and her art will prove inextricable. "Oh fuck... you know, it's probably going to be my whole life. I always tell friends that I feel like I'm a Borges short story, where I'm doomed in my work to relive the lives of my family."