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This one-of-a-kind film series explores Chinese American cultural history and its transnational character through the life and work of Bruce Lee. The five films include a rare 1929 silent; and a hard-to-see archival title featuring a Bruce as a spirited teenager; Bruce's final full-length film as a director; a documentary; and a fictional narrative of Bruce's martial arts master. The selection mixes genres from martial arts action to arthouse and melodrama.
Radiating Bruce Lee is a cinematic communion in the birthplace of its namesake. We hope it will help audiences to see Lee beyond the martial arts icon – transcendent though he was and unsurpassed to this day – to the larger universe of ideas, histories, and cultures that shaped and inspired him, and that he shaped and inspired in turn.
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students and seniors. Purchase on Eventbrite.
Saturday, October 22 @ CHSA
7:00pm
RED HEROINE
China, 1929
Director: Wen Yimin
Possibly the earliest extant Chinese martial arts film, Red Heroine shows the genre not only goes back to the silent era, but that the woman warrior was striking for justice for her sisters even then. The film was so titled to reflect the original red tinting of the woman warrior’s costume, and is an example of the shenguai wuxiapian, the supernatural martial arts subgenre that Bruce Lee’s more “realistic” combat shoved aside for a time. In this case, the flying heroine wields sword and Daoist magic to rescue virginal lasses from a warlord’s debauchery.
Digital video, Chinese intertitles with English subtitles, 94 min.
With live musical accompaniment by DJ Kendo!
Note: Please dress warmly because this will be a nighttime outdoor screening.
Saturday, October 29 @ CHSA
5:00pm
Louisa Wei on Filmmaker Esther Eng
45 min. talk, followed by 30 min. Q&A
City University of Hong Kong professor and director of Golden Gate Girls (see below) Louisa Wei will speak about the pioneering Chinese American filmmaker Esther Eng (1914-1970) and her cultural milieu. Like Bruce Lee, Eng was born in San Francisco Chinatown into a family involved in Cantonese opera. Those connections eventually led Eng to cast the infant Lee in his first screen role (as a baby girl) in her film, Golden Gate Girl (1941).
7:00pm
GOLDEN GATE GIRLS
Hong Kong, 2014
Director: Louisa Wei
Louisa Wei’s documentary unearths the remarkable story of director-producer Esther Eng, who decades before Lee similarly forged a transPacific filmmaking career, “becoming the most prominent woman director in Hong Kong in the 1930s” and for a period in the 1940s, “was the only woman directing feature-length movies in the US.” (Women Make Movies) While most of Eng’s 11 features are sadly lost, Golden Gate Girls gathers archival photos and interviews for its captivating portrait of an unconventional life (including clips from Golden Gate Girl with baby Bruce). Perhaps even more than the future star, Eng defied social and film industry norms as an open lesbian, at the same time occupying liminal status as a Chinese American “in between” majoritarian ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups on both sides of the Pacific. Golden Gate Girls does salutary service in uncovering Esther Eng’s overlooked place in American film history.
Digital video, in English and Cantonese with English subtitles, 90 min.
Note: Please dress warmly because this will be a nighttime outdoor screening.
Saturday, November 5 @ Great Star Theater
2:00pm
Sam Ho on the Making of Bruce Lee
45 min. talk, followed by 30 min. Q&A
The Hong Kong-based curator, researcher, and writer Sam Ho will examine the syncretic identities of Bruce Lee and their formation in the nexus of postwar, colonial Hong Kong.
4:00pm
Special Screening!
THE ORPHAN
Hong Kong, 1960
Director: Lee Sun-fung
This social-issue drama was Bruce Lee’s swan song to the Cantonese cinema in which he had been a child star, and the last film he made before leaving Hong Kong to study in the US. The teenage Lee plays a wild child whose thievery one day lands him in the path of a kindly headmaster. The venerable Cantonese actor Ng Cho-fan, also the film’s screenwriter and producer, plays the older man who tries to reform the apparently orphaned boy. Lee’s preternatural grace in motion and onscreen charisma are amply on display, notably in a nightclub scene in which he dances the cha-cha. As with its Eastmancolor vistas of a Hong Kong transiting to modernity, The Orphan also accords an enticing glimpse of an international star on the verge.
Digital video, in Cantonese with English subtitles, 104 min.
Saturday, November 12 @ CHSA
7:00pm
THE GRANDMASTER
Hong Kong/China, 2013
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Acclaimed director Wong Kar-wai brings his trademark romanticism to a telling of the life and times of Ip Man, the renowned Wing Chun exponent from Foshan, Southern China whose most famous student was Bruce Lee. Set in the turbulent 1930s-’50s, the film is less biopic than a contemplation of the ethos of the martial arts, tinged with loss and separation. Does winning amidst war mean defeating the opponent or living? Is the grandmaster simply the person left standing as Ip Man (Tony Leung) suggests at the beginning of the film? As the strong-willed daughter of a Northern bagua master, Zhang Ziyi plays countervailing force of temperament and technique to the dignified Leung. Joining the stellar cast is a who’s who of Hong Kong film greats, including action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping and longtime Wong Kar-wai collaborator William Chang taking on editor, production designer and co-costume designer duties.
Digital video, in Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles, 108 min.
Sunday, November 27 @ Great Star Theater
Commemorating Bruce Lee’s 82nd birthday!
2:00pm
THE WAY OF THE DRAGON
Hong Kong, 1972
Director: Bruce Lee
The only complete film written and directed by Bruce Lee, The Way of the Dragon begins as a Chinese immigrant saga in Rome in the familiar locus of a restaurant – one where the owner and workers are trying to fend off extortionist bullying from mafia thugs – and ends up in a gladiatorial showdown in the Roman Colosseum. The finale is a kung fu duel for the ages. Lumbering Chuck Norris goes up against Lee’s trickster arsenal of squalling calls and float-like-a-butterfly footwork, before meeting the full force of Lee’s unleashed fist strikes and kicks, as stunning in the beauty of their rapid-fire execution as in their lethal power. The fight against the White Man comes away with chest hair no less.
Digital video, in Mandarin with English subtitles, 99 min.
3:45pm
Panel Discussion: Of Chinese American Immigration and Restaurants
(60 min.)
Spinning off the precipitating plot point of The Way of the Dragon, a roundtable of chefs and labor historians will discuss how the restaurant business became a defining feature of Chinese immigration to the US in the 20th century and how Chinese American restauranting has evolved in the present. Panelists to be announced.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Chinatown, San Francisco, United States
Tickets