From the filmmakers of “Last Train Home” and “Up the Yangtze” comes the new documentary “China Heavyweight”. In central China, a Master coach recruits poor rural teenagers and turns them into Western-style boxing champions. Through hard work and discipline, these boys and girls come of age, trained in the art of boxing and the game of life. They are filled with Olympic dreams, hoping to become China’s next amateur heroes. The top students face dramatic choices as they graduate – should they fight for the collective good or for themselves? A metaphor for the choices everyone in the New China faces now.
This film was an official selection to the 2012 Sundance film Festival and the 2012 Hotdocs films festival.
Hollywood star Will Yun Lee takes you on a journey to rediscover his past through his martial arts and the current trials, tribulations and triumphs of Hollywood. This documentary style mini-series looks into glitz, glamour, and realities of what LA has to offer. Episode 1 of The Training Diary of Will Yun Lee is entitled “Back to Black”. Follow his journey in Los Angeles.
“Art Recession,” a documentary about the importance of art education, produced, written, and directed by Ming Lai of Humanist Films (Journey of a Paper Son)
Despite its huge impact, art education is often one of the first programs to be cut, especially when the economy is hard hit. “Art Recession” explores the importance of art education, showing how it teaches us to communicate, develops our critical thinking skills, helps us to learn other subjects, expresses our individualism, enriches our culture, builds our society, and ultimately conveys our humanity. This documentary then offers powerful ways to save it.
The documentary interviews the art world about this timely subject—from visionary artists and respected art curators to inspiring teachers and knowledgable museum educators to involved parents and promising art students. These thought-provoking interviews include Gary Baseman, Gary Blackwell, Michelle Borok, Denise Gray, Jason Holley, Brooke Kent, Monica Magana, Rachel Matos, Karol Heinecken Mora, Eric Nakamura, Paige Oden, Ming Ong, Ralph Opacic, Aaron Smith, Brian Stoebe, Courtney Stoebe, Tiffany Stoebe, Edwin Ushiro, Tianyi Wang, and P. Williams.
Lai was inspired to make “Art Recession” by The Mini Show, a group art exhibition to raise money for the Mini Lai Scholarship Fund, which honors the memory of his sister, Mini Lai, and benefits Art Center College of Design illustration students. The fund is managed by the respected California Community Foundation. Mini Lai is a proud alumna of Art Center’s prestigious illustration program.
Mixed Match is an inspirational, emotional, and evocative feature-length documentary that explores the need to find mixed ethnicity bone marrow and cord blood donors to donate to multiethnic patients suffering from life threatening blood diseases such as leukemia. This live action and animated film is a dramatic journey focusing on the main characters’ struggles to survive against incredible odds.
Directed by Jeff Chiba Stearns, the documentary will lead the viewer through the lives of young patients and families struggling to overcome life-threatening blood diseases. While presenting medical concerns, Mixed Match will be a character-driven documentary that will highlight a number of exceptional, courageous, and inspiring participants. The film will follow recently diagnosed multiethnic patients in search of donors, some of whom must struggle to hold on to hope through countless rounds of excruciating chemotherapy as they spend months searching for a match. A patient who is in remission after a successful stem cell/marrow donation will also be documented. Another patient’s story is told through his surviving family members, as he was not able to find a suitable marrow match and, as a result, ultimately succumbed to his illness. Lastly, the documentary will feature a joyous and heartfelt reunion between a donor and patient after a successful transplant, as the two meet for the very first time.
Mixed Match is an important human story told from the perspective of youth who are forced to discover their identities through their deadly illnesses and how their mixed backgrounds threaten their chance at survival, thus highlighting why in this day and age, knowing our history and cultural heritage still matters.
The documentary addresses the fact that every year over 30,000 people in North America are diagnosed with life threatening blood diseases. For many patients, a bone marrow transplant is their only chance at survival. Currently, in the US, of the 7 million registered bone marrow donors and 100,000 cord blood donors, less than 3% are multiethnic. This statistic, although proportionate to the population of mixed people in the country, poses a substantial challenge to a mixed patient given the endless variety of possible genetic combinations in the registry. Finding a multiethnic marrow match in the public registry has been compared at times to “finding a needle in a haystack” or “winning the lottery.” Therefore, this is a very timely and important issue.
Based upon the BBC’s award-winning Britain From Above. America Revealed is a unique look at what makes America tick, what it takes to keeps the biggest food machine in the world going, the delicate balance that keeps our supermarkets stocked with groceries and fast food restaurants supplied with fries. How we keep America moving with its vast and complex transport systems. How we propel ourselves through energy, what maintains the constant supply of fuel and electricity to our homes and businesses and finally how we keep up with the ever changing world, the import and export infrastructure that shapes our manufacturing industry.
From the Corn farmer in Central Valley, California to the live wire cable repairers in New Jersey. Viewers will discover a fascinating new perspective on the hidden patterns and rhythms of American life, by looking through the eyes of individuals who all play a part in keeping America fed, moving, powered and making goods.
The series is presented by technology expert and communications attorney, Yul Kwon, but we probably know him better as the winner of Survivor: Cook Islands 2006. In this series Yul fully embraces his role as presenter and our guide, by jumping out of aeroplanes in Kansas, climbing to the top of wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge and taking part in a giant tomato fight in Nevada.
America Revealed uses beautiful and breath-taking aerial photography to provide an otherwise unseen view of America and use original data visualizations to demonstrate how our systems work.
Look for this series coming to a PBS station near you. AMERICA REVEALED airs Wednesdays, April 11- May 2, 2012 at 10/9c on PBS.
America Revealed with Yul Kwon (extended Preview)
America Revealed – About the series w/ host Yul Kwon
More about Yul Kwon
Yul Kwon is the host of the PBS series, America Revealed. Yul first rose to international acclaim in 2006, when he became the first Asian American to win the popular CBS reality show, Survivor. He has since appeared on CNN as a special correspondent and is currently hosting LinkTV’s weekly news program, LinkAsia.
Beyond his involvement in the media, Yul has had a multifaceted career that spans law, policy, business, and technology. Yul’s government experiences include serving as Deputy Chief of the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau, an adjunct instructor at the FBI Academy, a legislative aide to a U.S Senator, and a judicial clerk on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In the private sector, Yul has held positions at Google, McKinsey & Company, Wiltshire & Grannis, and Venture Law Group.
Yul is active in a wide range of charities, particularly those seeking to increase the number of minority bone marrow donors. He is a board member of Becky’s Fund and sits on the advisory boards of the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
Yul has been profiled in VIBE Magazine’s annual Juice issue of people with power, People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue, and Entrepreneur Magazine. He received his B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served on the editorial board of the Yale Law Journal.
What does a late-1800s Pacific Northwest town have in common with today’s immigration debate? Quite a bit, says San Francisco State’s Valerie Soe. The assistant professor of Asian American studies, has written, directed and produced a new short documentary called “The Chinese Gardens” that explores the lost Chinese community in Port Townsend, Washington and draws connections between anti-Chinese racism in the late 19th-century Pacific Northwest and today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“The Chinese Gardens” shines a light on the often-unseen history of anti-Chinese violence and ensuing resistance in the Pacific Northwest. Soe visited the locations of former Chinatown landmarks in Port Townsend, where today there is little trace of the community despite Chinese at one point making up 25 percent of the town’s population. Even a bronze plaque commemorating the former Chinatown has recently been stolen, Soe said. “It’s kind of like chasing ghosts,” she said. Soe hopes the film will help viewers understand the significant contributions immigrants make to American society and become aware that scapegoating immigrants has been used for many years to deflect blame from deeper issues in our society.
Drawn to the U.S. by the California Gold Rush and the demand for workers to build the Transcontinental Railroad, Chinese immigrants settled in cities and towns along the West Coast. But when the country slid into a depression after the Civil War, those immigrants became scapegoats for the worsening economic conditions. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which severely limited Chinese immigration to the U.S. and was often manifested in beatings and murders of Chinese immigrants. The law was not repealed until 1943.
Unlike in other West Coast cities like Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane and Eureka, Port Townsend’s Chinese community was not violently thrown out, Soe said. But the Chinese, who for a time were integrated with and accepted by the larger community, were eventually driven away by “benign neglect.” According to some accounts, Port Townsend’s Chinatown was destroyed during a citywide fire in 1910 because firefighters only saved the white buildings, Soe said. “We hear the standard history of the Chinese building railroads and settling in Chinatown, and doing well, but there also was a struggle,” she said. “They had to resist a lot of blatant discrimination and violence.”
Perhaps most striking are the similarities Soe found between the anti-Chinese sentiments of the late 1800s and language about Latino immigrants heard today. It is a connection she believes is important for people to make and one she hopes the film illuminates. “The phrases are amazing,” Soe said. “They’re almost exactly the same as what we hear today. ‘People are taking our jobs.’ ‘They’re here illegally.’ ‘They don’t contribute to society.’ All this stuff that is said about Latinos was said back in the 1800s about the Chinese.”
The film will premiere at SF State on April 6 and be screened in San Francisco and several other U.S. locations in April and May 2012.
