Fascinasians
Arizona raised, New York grown. Turning my rage into power!
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Posts tagged documentary
Every year thousands of American men go to China to find a bride. The documentary film “Seeking Asian Female” follows an eccentric modern love story about Steven and Sandy – an 60 year old aging white man with “yellow fever” who is obsessed with marrying any Asian woman, and the young 30 year old Chinese bride he finds online. When Steven meets a willful young woman named Sandy from Anhui, China, over the internet and she agrees to migrate to the US to marry him. Fantasy and reality collide in this modern love story.
Told through the lens of Chinese American filmmaker Debbie Lum, who becomes the couple’s reluctant translator and marriage counselor, the film examines the penetrating effect of stereotype and expectations on love and relationships today. Debbie documents and narrates with skepticism and humor, from the early stages of Steven’s search for an Asian bride, through the moment Sandy steps foot in America for the first time, to a year into their precarious union. Global migration, Sino-American relations and the perennial battle of the sexes, weigh in on the fate of their marriage in this intimate and quirky personal documentary. “Seeking Asian Female” is at the intersection of several timely subjects – finding love online, an increasing interest in New China, and what it means to have a race-based dating preference in a supposedly “post-racial” America.
Read more: Channel APAWow reminds me of this Canadian documentary Say I Do that features Filipino mail order brides. Its quite a contrast from this documentary.
Also here’s an interview with producer Debbie Lum.
^^^ always quality content from pag-asaharibon!
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(via CHINATOWN: A Documentary Film in Post-Production by Yi Chen — Kickstarter)
PLEASE DONATE! This project is awesome and supports the local Asian American community in DC.
My friend is making this documentary! Please help her out! Every penny counts!
WHAT IS THE PROJECT’S GOAL?
CHINATOWN is a half-hour vérité style documentary profiling the oldest ethnic community in Washington, D.C. through the untold stories of three Chinese immigrants. It will be the first documentary to look at contemporary D.C. Chinatown.
After a year of filming and six months of editing, the film is very close to finish. We have been able to complete shooting and rough cut editing with a small but talented team on a shoestring budget. Independent filmmaking means putting in 30-35 hours a week on a project we’re passionate about without getting paid. Fortunately there are organizations and individuals who understand the importance of independent media. To date I have invested my own money and earned critical support from Center for Social Media, Fudan Fuzhong Overseas Foundation, and individual donors for the development and production of the project. Now Kickstarter provides a platform for us to connect with you.
Our goal is to raise $6,000 completion funds so we can hire professionals to do finishing editing, color correction, audio mixing, motion graphics, and music composing for the film. It will allow us to put the finishing touches on the film and bring it to audiences around the world. Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing. If we don’t reach our goal, we’ll get nothing, and that’ll be very sad. We have 30 days to reach the goal and we need your help. We’ve set unique incentives for your contribution and each dollar helps.
WHY THIS FILM SHOULD BE MADE?
The immigration history of Chinese Americans goes as far back as 1820. Chinatown is one of Washington’s oldest ethnic communities – the first documented Chinese resident of Washington, D.C. settled on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1851. The original Chinatown was relocated to H Street to make way for the Federal Triangle Project in 1931. The city’s urban renewal and redevelopment plans in the 1970s displaced 13% of Chinatown residents. Wah Luck House was completed in 1982 to provide subsidized housing for displaced residents and low-income families. Today around 400 Chinese immigrants remain in Washington’s Chinatown.
The film takes audiences into the private lives of the characters to explore the intricate cultural and social issues facing the community today, from language access, affordable housing, seniors services, to a lack of Chinese grocery stores. A year of filming has allowed us to document a mere fragment of Chinese American history, but we believe it will contribute to a better understanding of our collective past, present and future. The story is relevant to all of us because it’s about immigrant experience and the American Dream.
In a more abstract sense, you are helping to bring the issues of gentrification, affordable housing, language access and senior services to the forefront of conversations at film festivals, theaters, museums, universities, broadcast television…everywhere we plan to show the film. We posted some video clips on our YouTube channel and Facebook page.
Signal boosting! Please donate if you can
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Tonight was extraordinary - a night I will never forget. We screened a 9 min film preview on the Oak Creek tragedy for the victims’ families, the mayor, and community members who lived through the event just four months ago. I had been on the ground after the mass shooting for many weeks, reporting and filming the aftermath with Sharat Raju. But tonight was the first time we shared our work with the community. We screened clips from American Made and Divided We Fall and ended with a preview of a potential upcoming film on Oak Creek.
It was a heart-wrenching experience to watch these families see their stories on the big screen and wipe away tears. After the film ended, Kamal Saini, Harpreet Saini and Pardeep Kaleka, who lost parents in the shooting, stood up to tell their remarkable stories. The love and support that had poured in from all corners emboldened them to respond to hate with love and forgiveness. Their stories opened up a space for brave new dialogue in the audience. Community members opened their hearts: a woman tearfully confessed that she wanted to visit the gurdwara after the tragedy but kept her distance out of respect and expressed her condolences for the first time, a schoolteacher described how the tragedy inspired her students to learn everything about the Sikh faith and gave her hope in the future, and a former member of a hate group stood up to tell his story of transformation and began to cry and ask for forgiveness, in the name of the six people who were killed. Pardeep crossed the theater to embrace him and they sat together for the rest of the night, an unlikely pair who had both resolved to combat hate and wage peace.
Tonight’s event was a profound experience for me — it reminded me how storytelling can inspire bravery and vulnerability that can touch and transform us. I left the theater once again astonished by the generosity of the families in Oak Creek - Kamal, Harpreet, Pardeep, Raghvinder Singh who all feel like second family to us. As I reflect back on this year, I am deeply grateful for the privilege of witnessing and playing a role in the healing process in response to the Oak Creek tragedy. Four months later, it has faded from national discourse, but the call to end hate and fear in America is still upon us. And everyone has a role - the schoolteacher, the mother, the civil rights advocate, the neighbor, the storyteller, the healer. We have long hard and beautiful work ahead in the new year.
PS. We will post the film preview online soon! Now that we have shared it with the families and the people of Oak Creek, we can share it with you all! Stay tuned —
”Calling for short film submissions!
If you have made a short film and want to submit it to an awesome film festival, email your
Name
City/State
Title of film (or if it’s online, the link)
Length of film
Phone Number
to juliet@relentlessaware.com
AWESOME.
JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world’s greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro’s sushi bar.
For most of his life, Jiro has been mastering the art of making sushi, but even at his age he sees himself still striving for perfection, working from sunrise to well beyond sunset to taste every piece of fish; meticulously train his employees; and carefully mold and finesse the impeccable presentation of each sushi creation. At the heart of this story is Jiro’s relationship with his eldest son Yoshikazu, the worthy heir to Jiro’s legacy, who is unable to live up to his full potential in his father’s shadow.
The feature film debut of director David Gelb, JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is a thoughtful and elegant meditation on work, family, and the art of perfection, chronicling Jiro’s life as both an unparalleled success in the culinary world, and a loving yet complicated father.
(Source: blog.angryasianman.com)
Every year thousands of American men go to China to find a bride. The documentary film “Seeking Asian Female” follows an eccentric modern love story about Steven and Sandy – an 60 year old aging white man with “yellow fever” who is obsessed with marrying any Asian woman, and the young 30 year old Chinese bride he finds online. When Steven meets a willful young woman named Sandy from Anhui, China, over the internet and she agrees to migrate to the US to marry him. Fantasy and reality collide in this modern love story.
Told through the lens of Chinese American filmmaker Debbie Lum, who becomes the couple’s reluctant translator and marriage counselor, the film examines the penetrating effect of stereotype and expectations on love and relationships today. Debbie documents and narrates with skepticism and humor, from the early stages of Steven’s search for an Asian bride, through the moment Sandy steps foot in America for the first time, to a year into their precarious union. Global migration, Sino-American relations and the perennial battle of the sexes, weigh in on the fate of their marriage in this intimate and quirky personal documentary. “Seeking Asian Female” is at the intersection of several timely subjects – finding love online, an increasing interest in New China, and what it means to have a race-based dating preference in a supposedly “post-racial” America.
Read more: http://www.channelapa.com/2012/02/seeking-asian-female-trailer.html#ixzz1nochRxlc
If you are free this Friday, the Asian Arts Initiative in Chinatown, Philadelphia has a gallery opening from 6-8pm for First Friday, showing the ongoing exhibition Witness: Artists Respond to 30 Years of the AIDS Pandemic. Later in the evening at 8pm, don’t miss the first KinoWatt Films screening of 2012, featuring the documentary PressPausePlay! The screening will be followed by a discussion about the advent of digital media with several local artists (trailer above).
Had a nice chat with Christina Luna, manager extraordinaire. Currently managing Aj Rafael along with many other artists. She showed us great insight about the AA music scene in NorCal both before and after YouTube.
My one-hour documentary, Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words, shows how Anna May Wong (1905-1961) became an artist, a world figure and an activist in spite of the prejudices of her time. It had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival and has been in four American and Canadian festivals.
Right from the beginning I wanted this documentary to reach a wider audience, especially young Asian Americans and other minorities, to inspire them to have a dream and to follow it the way Anna did. One of the film’s funders, the Center for Asian American Media, will distribute it to public television stations. But first I have to buy the broadcast rights to footage I use from Anna May Wong’s films. Paying for rights, and for the insurance PBS requires, will cost me $20,000. If I can’t raise that money the film won’t reach a national audience.
Anna May Wong grew up in Los Angeles, where her parents ran a laundry. She first starred, at age 17, in Toll of the Sea, a silent version of Madame Butterfly. She went on to make dozens of films in Hollywood, London and Berlin, co-starring with Marlene Dietrich, Anthony Quinn, Douglas Fairbanks and Philip Ahn. She was glamorous; photographers loved her. She was a charming and interesting person whose friends included Carl van Vechten, Evelyn Waugh and Paul Robeson. Yet she spent most of her career playing painted dolls and dragon ladies.
Many older Asian Americans look down on Anna for playing stock Asian characters. But a younger generation sees her as a pioneering artist who beat the odds in a tough industry. Besides her strength as a woman, I admire her for pushing herself as an actress. When her film roles were limited, she traveled around Europe performing in cabarets, polishing her talents as a singer, dancer and monologuist. When MGM didn’t cast her in The Good Earth, a film set in China, she went to China anyway and filmed her trip. Long before anyone was called a “community activist,” she devoted herself to the Chinese American community’s war effort during World War II. She was way ahead of her time. Her courage to be herself against all odds is truly inspiring, the kind of story I want my ten-year-old daughter to know.
The Center for Asian American Media, a consortium of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, exists to bring Asian American programs to public TV. Don Young, Program Director at CAAM, says this about the project:
“I feel that ‘Anna May Wong’ is a very strong prospect for broadcast during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May). Yunah has done an exceptional job with her material – she has put a tremendous amount of energy and intelligence into the film. She has one more hurdle to pass before we can send the film to PBS. She has secured partial copyright licenses for her film clips of Anna May Wong — for festival screenings, but not for national broadcast. Until she does that, she cannot obtain the Errors and Omissions Insurance PBS requires. Both of these steps cost money. I strongly urge anyone who cares about Asian Americans in the media to help Yunah tie up these loose ends.”
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