[Updated 28 February 2022: For those who might have missed the conversation, here are the webcast and the photos.]
Reunification
Directed by Alvin Tsang
2015 | 86 mins.
Cantonese and English with English subtitles
Online screening
Free and open to all. Registrants will receive a link to access the film for up to 7 days.
Conversation with director
Friday, 28 January 2022, 17:00–18:00 PST
via Zoom
A City Reassembled event
Registration required
“Filmed over a 17-year period, this award-winning film gives an insider view on the contemporary Asian American immigrant experience, family psychology, and personal filmmaking. Director Alvin Tsang reflects on his family’s migration from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s – fraught with betrayal from his parents’ divorce, economic strife and communication meltdown between parents and children. This poetic exploration moves moodily across different channels and modes, bending into labor histories and Hong Kong’s colonial trajectories. Tsang turns the camera on his own family, cautiously prodding for answers, but fully acknowledging that the only closure he can get will be from deciding for himself how to move on.”
★ DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival
★ Hong Kong Independent Film Festival
★ Macau Film Festival
★ Queens World Film Festival
★ San Diego Asian Film Festival – Special Jury Prize
Alvin Tsang is a filmmaker and artist based in New York City. His work explores the more personal human experience to inform on bigger issues such as humanism, community and migration. His award-winning documentary Reunification (2015), about memories of migration and Tsang’s once intact family, was praised for “explor[ing] the past with a Proustian sensitivity” (The Boston Globe), its “clear-eyed honesty” (Meredith Monk), and being “the film that’s come closest to feeling like a truly distinct Asian-American [film] language” (Salon). Tsang studied film under the tutelage of Babette Mangolte (late Chantal Akerman’s cinematographer) and Jean-Pierre Gorin (co-director of Tout va bien (1972) with Jean-Luc Godard). He was an editing assistant for That’s My Face (2001), an Ecumenical Prize winner (Berlinale) by Thomas Allen Harris that explores the mythical African “face” found in Brazil, East Africa and the United States. Tsang served as a co-producer for Ermena Vinluan’s award-winning documentary, Tea & Justice (2007), which reflects on the very first female Asian-American NYPD officers on the force. His shorts include Fish (2010) and Preservation (2011). He is currently collaborating with artist Siyan Wong on her ongoing art exhibitions Five Cents a Can (2019–2022) by creating a “gold mountain” and several other conceptual installations out of 5,000+ gold soda cans in order to shed light on the people (mainly immigrants and elderly) who must collect cans and bottles for a living in our land of plenty.
Preview:
Further information:
reunificationthemovie.com/
This screening+conversation is organized by the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative and co-sponsored by: Department of Asian Studies, Department of History, Centre for Chinese Research, Centre for Migration Studies, Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies, Public Humanities Hub, and the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster.
Registration for: “Reunification”
Registration for this event is now closed.