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Ancestors in America: Coolies, Sailors, Settlers [VHS]
60 minutes, 1996
Description: This feature documentary digs beneath school book histories, with their cursory look at the Gold Rush-era migration of Chinese laborers who helped build the trans-continental railroad. It brings to life a complex and nearly lost past of journeys that began more than three centuries ago and led generations of Asian immigrants to uncertain futures on the North and South American countries.
This program tells its story from points along the way as diverse as a Guangdong village, a fishing community in India, Spanish military barracks in Manila, and a Chinese cemetery in Havana. Filipino sailors settled in the bayous of Louisiana as early as the 1760's, a decade before the American Revolution. Chinese sailors worked on European trade ships and settled in port cities of the East Coast, becoming progenitors of some of today's Chinese racially mixed descendant populations in such cities as Salem, Boston, New York and Philadelphia.
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Animal Appetites [VHS]
20 minutes, 1991
Description: Animal Appetites takes a wry look at the 1989 Long Beach trial of two Cambodian immigrants charged with killing a dog for food. With over 99 million cattle and 5.7 billion chickens consumed per year in the U.S, this humorous video poses the question: "Why all the fuss over one dog?" This video follows the pair's trial on animal cruelty charges and examines the law prohibiting consumption of pets, which was passed as a result of the case.
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a.k.a Don Bonus [VHS]
56 minutes, 1995
Description: After escaping the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Ny family became one of thousands of refugees faced with resettlement in the U.S. Their experiences unfold through the images of this stirring video diary. As Sokly Ny (Don Bonus) struggles to graduate from high school, his family is harassed in the housing projects, his eldest brother cannot fill a dead father's shoes, and his youngest brother ends up in youth prison. Ultimately, a.k.a. Don Bonus becomes a story of triumph and survival from the perspective of one of America's newest arrivals.
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The Fall of the I-Hotel [VHS]
58 minutes, revised in 1993(1983)
Description: This film brings to life the battle for housing in San Francisco. The brutal eviction of the International Hotel's tenants in 1977 ended a decade of spirited resistance. Almost 20 years since the hotel's demolition, the former site of the heart of Manilatown, and home to more than 10,000 people in the 1950s, is still vacant. Many of its surviving elderly residents still seek low-cost replacement housing. This film resonates very clearly in the 1990s, as homelessness becomes a fact of life in many cities today.
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| A Family Gathering [VHS]
30 minutes, 1989
Description: Five days after the Japanese attacked Pearly Harbor, the F.B.I arrested Masuo Yasui, a 30-year resident of the U.S., as a "potentially dangerous" enemy alien. Forty years later, Masuo's granddaughter journeys to uncover stories about her family's experience during World War II, a period when thousands of Japanese-Americans were evacuated from their homes and interned by the U.S. government. Through a striking mixture of home movies, photographs, archival footage, and interviews, A Family Gathering offers a deeply personal look at the repercussions of the events, myths, memories and silence that surround this American family history. |
| History and Memory [VHS]
32 minutes, 1991
Description: This moving, exquisitely structured exploration of personal and cultural memory juxtaposes Hollywood images of Japanese Americans and World War II propaganda with stories from videomaker Rea Tajiri's family. Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past, the artist blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family's house removed from its site. A haunting testament to Japanese American experience. |
| Home from the Eastern Sea [VHS]
58 minutes, 1990
Description: Home from the Eastern Sea tells the story of the immigration of the Chinese, the Japanese and the Filipinos to America. The documentary explores the history of each nationality through the personal stories of representative families. The film begins with the story of the Yee family Seattle, who represent four generations of Chinese-Americans in the United States. Their roots go back to the building of the trans-continental railway, and there are fascinating archival photographs of the period. Next, the Hondas of Spokane provide a lively testimony to the resilience of Japanese-Amricans. Having suffered discrimination during the war, the family displays a strength of character engendered by their wartime experience. And finally, Lorena Silva is a Filipino-American who lives in a close-knit community where extended family ties provide an environment of support. Woven throughout the family stories are historical and cultural perspectives provided by scholars, community activists, and writers. |
| No Longer Silent [VHS]
57 minutes, 1987
Description: In India, a woman has far less value than a man. A good woman's duties include cleaning house, bringing up the children, fetching water, washing clothes, and cooking, all in silent toleration. But when women come together to work against discrimination, they are "no longer silent." Khamla Bhasin is a native Indian woman who works with the United Nations in a rural development. Her words and actions reflect the events and issues covered in the film. In her work, Bhasin helps rural Indians organize and fight for their rights and interests. The documentary follows Bhasin as she conducts workshops, consults with journalists, discusses her mixed feelings about women who choose not to give birth to daughters, leads a demonstration, and prepares for an International Women's Day march. |
| Slaying the Dragon [VHS]
60 minutes, 1998
Description: America's image industries have not been kind to Asian-American women. From the Dragon Lady to St. Elsewhere, Slaying the Dragon analyzes images of Asian women promulgated by the Hollywood film industry and network television for the past fifty years. Film clips and interviews with Asian-American actresses and media critics trace the history of these stereotypes, which by now have become main-streamed and remain virtually uncontested by more accurate information. Slaying the Dragon also interviews Asian-American women about the impact these stereotypes have had upon their self-identity, personal relationships, and careers. |
| Taxi-vala/Auto-biography [VHS]
48 minutes, 1994
Description: Taxi-vala/Auto-biography is an experimental documentary that explores a complex range of issues within New York's growing South Asian communities. The work takes as its points of departure the intersection between a second-generation, biracial Indian-American (the videomaker) and a group of recent immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who drive taxicabs twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week, in New York.
Taxi-vala shuttles between the stories of these immigrant drivers and the self-critical reflections of the video maker. While the drivers relate experiences of migration, displacement, economic and political struggle, and their quest for the elusive and illusory American Dream, the video maker charts his own personal quest for community with the drivers through the making of the documentary itself. In doing so, the video maker raises questions of cultural, generational, and class difference within the South Asian diaspora and explores his own silences with the drivers around issues of sexism and inter-group racism. Taxo-vala is a fast-paced and complex look at "South Asian New York." |
| Two Lies [VHS]
25 minutes, 1989
Description: Doris Chu, a recently divorced Chinese American woman has plastic surgery to make her eyes rounder. Her youngest daughter Esther's greatest concern is the Indian dwelling she is studying in school. But from her teenage daughter Mei's perspective, her mother's two eyes equal "two lies." When the family journeys to a desert resort during Doris' recuperation, a series of revelations and bitter confrontations erupt and climax during a visit to an Indian pueblo. This beautiful black and white dramatic film is a poignant study of sexual and generational conflict and the struggle for identity in a world of hybrid cultures. A story of contradictions and deception, the film expresses an aesthetic that is uniquely Asian and female. |
| Unfinished Business [VHS]
58 minutes, 1985
Description: In the spring of 1942, more than 110,000 men, women and children, were forcibly evicted from their homes on the West Coast and herded into internment camps across the country. Most were American citizens of Japanese ancestry. No charges were ever filed; no hearings or trials held. Yet they were incarcerated behind wire fences and surrounded by watchtowers and armed guards for more than three years. The sole basis for this action was ancestry.
Unfinished Business tells the compelling story of three men who refused to enter these camps. Fred Karematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yausi defied the U.S government and were convicted and imprisoned for violating Executive Order 9066. The stories of these three men are interwoven with startling archival footage of wartime anti-Japanese in the camps. The film highlights the men today, fighting to overturn their original convictions in the final round of a forty-year battle against an act that shattered the lives of two generations of Japanese Americans. |
| Who Killed Vincent Chin? [VHS]
82 minutes, 1989
Description: This Academy Award-nominated film is a powerful statement about racism in working-class America. It narrates the brutal murder of Vincent Chin, a twenty seven year old Chinese-American. Chin was celebrating his last days of bachelorhood in a Detroit bar when an argument broke out between him and Ron Ebens, a Chrysler Motors foreman. Ebens shouted ethnic insults, the fight moved outside, and in front of several onlookers, Ebens bludgeoned Chin to death with a baseball bat. In the ensuing trial, Ebens was released with a suspended sentence and small fine. Outrage led the Asian-American community to organize an unprecedented civil rights protest. Chin's bereaved mother successfully led a nationwide crusade for a retrial. This tragic story is woven into a fabric of timely social concerns. Issues such as the failure of our judicial system to value every citizen's right equally, the collapse of the automobile industry under pressure from Japanese imports, and the souring of the American Dream for the blue-collar worker are explored. |
Yellow: [VHS]
Description: Writer/director, Chris Chan Lee is the winner of the Best Asian American Independent Feature from the Golden Ring Film Festival. This film portrays the life of young Korean Americans who are influenced by their family as they go through the transitions of life. The film surrounds eight teens in Los Angeles' Koreatown, faced with an uncertain future after they must replace stolen money by any means available...even if it means violence and disgrace. |
| Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice [VHS]
57 minutes, 1994
Description: For the past forty years, the work and passion of Japanese American human rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama has touched the lives of thousands of people across different communities in America. This documentary chronicles the unrecorded history of this remarkable woman's contribution for social change through some of the most significant events of the 20th century. |
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