MOCAFILMS: Sneak Preview of Chinese Couplets

When
04/24/2015
Location
Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013

Registration

Member – $20.00
Non Member – $40.00

MOCAFILMS: Sneak Preview of Chinese Couplets

Fri, Apr 24, 2015 @ 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Admission: $12/Adult; $7/Student & Senior; FREE for MOCA Members Click to Register

Dir. Felicia Lowe | USA | 2015 | 53 mins

In her latest film, Felicia Lowe searches for answers about her mother’s emigration story during the Chinese Exclusion era. Through tough intergenerational conversations, Lowe weaves history into a personal narrative that takes her on a surprising trip to Cuba and a family history in Hawaii in her quest of “the hardest story for me to crack.” Part memoir, part history, part investigation, Chinese Couplets reveals the often painful price paid by immigrants who abandoned their personal identity, the burden of silence they passed on to their offspring, and the intergenerational strife between immigrants and their American born children.

Please join us for a special sneak preview followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, moderated by Jack Tchen.

Watch the trailer.

Felicia Lowe is an award winning independent television producer, director, and writer with more than 30 years of production experience. Lowe received an EMMY for Best Cultural Documentary for Chinatown: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco. The lively hour-long piece on the history of San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood has been broadcast numerous times on PBS. Carved in Silence, a documentary about the experiences of Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island Immigration Station and China: Land of My Father, a personal journey to China to meet her paternal grandmother have garnered numerous awards and have also been broadcast on PBS and abroad. Her innovative works have screened in film festivals, museums and are used in classrooms across the country. Prior to her documentary work, Lowe worked in children’s television and broadcast journalism. She has also taught film production at San Francisco State University and Stanford University. A descendant of Angel Island detainees, she has been actively involved in the preservation of the Angel Island Immigration Station.

John (Jack) Kuo Wei Tchen is a historian, curator, and writer. Professor Tchen is founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific /American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, NYU and a founding faculty of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He also co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). He is editor of The ‘Yellow Peril’ Reader: Understanding Xenophobia, and author of New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882; Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, 1895-1905; and “30 Years and Counting: A Context for Building a Shared Cross-Cultural Commons.” Professor Tchen regularly collaborates with filmmakers and media producers, artists and collectors

Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013 http://www.mocanyc.org, (212) 619-4785