Golden Gate Girls

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Golden Gate Girls

A film by S. Louisa Wei

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SYNOPSIS

In GOLDEN GATE GIRLS author and professor S. Louisa Wei tells the story of filmmaker Esther Eng, the first woman to direct Chinese-language film in the US, and the most prominent woman director in Hong Kong in the 1930’s. A San Francisco native and open lesbian, her contribution to film history is sadly overlooked – her 11 feature films mostly lost. After the retirement of director Dorothy Arzner in 1943 and before Ida Lupino began directing in 1949, Eng was the only woman directing feature length films in the US.

Wei’s documentary paints a fascinating picture of how Eng’s career in filmmaking broke through gender and racial boundaries in Hollywood and Hong Kong, at a time when opportunities for Chinese women in the industry were few and far between. With a captivating archive of newly discovered images and interviews with those who knew her, Wei uncovers a rich chapter of film history that challenges both gender hierarchies and national narratives. Essential viewing for Cinema Studies and Asian American Studies.

PRESS

"...extraordinarily interesting..."

Indiewire

"...eye opening and compelling..."

Hollywood Reporter

"Golden Gate Girls restores Eng to her place in history, weaving her story in and out of those Hollywood contemporaries, director Dorothy Arzner and actress Anna May Wong."

Patricia White, Professor and Chair Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College

"Golden Gate Girls is cultural history at its best."

Staci Ford, Hon Associate Lecturer Department of History, Hong Kong University

"Golden Gate Girls is alluringly posited at the intersection of these fields: how women’s contribution to film history overlaps with the tumultuous History of the 20th century." – and Professor, California Institute of the Arts.

Bérénice Reynaud, Festival Curator Professor, California Institute of the Arts

"Louisa Wei takes us on a journey of discovery in the footsteps of the remarkable Esther Eng. Wei provides a sensitive portrait of the intrepid, but largely neglected filmmaker who too easily fell through the cracks between Asian American and Chinese screen history."

Gina Marchetti Professor, Hong Kong University

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

Hong Kong International Film Festival
San Diego Asian Film Festival
Washington DC Chinese Film Festival, Intra-Cultural Spotlight

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

S. Louisa Wei

S. Louisa Wei is a documentary filmmaker and a member of Hong Kong Director’s Guild since 2018. She is also an award-winning writer and an Associate Professor teaching film related courses in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Wei has four documentary features to date: Storm Under the Sun (2009, co-director Xiaolian Peng), Golden Gate Girls (2014), Havana Divas (2019), and A Life in Six Chapters (2022). She also made three TV documentaries, Writing 10000 Miles (2019, RTHK), Wang Shiwei: The Buried Writer (2017), and Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006, Cable TV HK).

Among her works, Golden Gate Girl portrays the life and times of Esther Eng, once honored “South China’s first woman director.” The documentary has received positive reviews and attention from The Hollywood Reporter, Voice of America, South China Morning Post, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. Elizabeth Kerr of The Hollywood Reporter praised the documentary for its seamless ability to weave history, Sino-U.S. relations and social standards together to allow for inference and context. Havana Divas is a sister work covering the Chinese immigrants’ life and the traveling Cantonese Opera in the Chinatowns of North and Latin America. It focuses on the art of two divas who learned and performed Cantonese Opera in Havana in the 1940s and performed throughout the country. They made their way to Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, China, in their 80s, finding a new audience out of expectation. Both films have travelled to many film festivals around the world.

Wei makes historical documentaries from an explicitly personal perspective as a means to advocate for significant figures and voices lost to historical process. She plays the simultaneous roles of director, writer, and editor, not to establish a singular subjective viewpoint, but to ensure that life and the people in her films are presented intact, with all the complexity and failings of human intellect and sense. Her broader research beyond each documentary she made has been published in monograph and book forms. Esther Eng: Cross-Ocean Filmmaking and Women Pioneers (2016, co-author Law Kar) won Hong Kong Book Award in 2017. Wang Shiwei: A Reform of Thinking (2016) won the Best Publishing Prize in the Fiction and Literature Category at Hong Kong Biennial Publishing Award in 2017. Wei researched widely on women directors and writers, incorporating her findings in books like Cinema East and West (2016) and Women’s Film: Dialogue with Female Chinese and Japanese Directors (2009, co-author Yuanying Yang). (01/22)

Subject Areas

Filming Desire:

“In this bold documentary Marie Mandy asks the question: how do women directors film love, desire, and, especially, sexuality? In rare interviews with many of the leading women directors working in the world today – including Sally Potter, Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, Doris Dörrie, Deepa Mehta, Moufida Tlatli, Safi Faye, and Jane Campion – FILMING DESIRE: A JOURNEY THROUGH WOMEN'S CINEMA directly engages the sexual politics of cinematographic choice. Powerfully illustrated with film clips from their own work, the directors discuss the reality of an explicit women’s point of view, the possibility of a women’s cinematic language, and the desire in their films to ‘fantasize and dream a new image of themselves’. While discussing how their depictions of sexuality and relationships are correctives, they also reflect on the sexual differences in selection of image, shot, and story. The film also provides a virtual anthology of the debates about the body, sexuality, power, and passion one sees in contemporary feminist and film theory: the body in representation and image; as a subject of censorship; as the vehicle of desire and love; as the contested ground of cinematic production; and as part of women’s identity and voice. Explicit, funny and beautifully edited, FILMING DESIRE weaves an intriguing essay that is international in scope and reflective of the great diversity of women filmmakers. Essential viewing for classes in women’s studies, film studies, sexuality, body image, and feminist theory.” – Joseph Boles, Visiting Scholar, Center for Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr

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Sisters of the Screen

Beti Ellerson’s engaging debut explores the extraordinary contributions of women filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora.

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Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema

In the days before movies could talk, silent films spoke clearly of sexual politics, and in Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema, historian and writer Kay Sloan has assembled rare and wonderful footage that opens a historic window onto how women’s suffrage was represented in early American cinema. Taking advantage of the powerful new medium, early filmmakers on both sides of the contentious issue of suffrage used film to create powerful propaganda and images about women. Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema contains clips from many films from the era, including: A Lively Affair (1912); A Busy Day (1914), which stars a young Charlie Chaplin in drag portraying a suffragist; and the pro-suffragist film, What 80 Million Women Want (1913), which includes an eloquent speech from president of the Women’s Political Union, Harriet Stanton Blatch. Silent films may have passed into history, and their representations of feminists abandoning babies or stealing bicycles to attend suffragette meetings may now seem outrageous, but the struggle for gender equality and the issues surrounding representations of women in the media remain as fascinating, engaging, and relevant as ever.

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Havana Divas

Offering a window into the experience of Chinese migration to Cuba, HAVANA DIVAS follows two Cantonese opera singers who perform for decades in Cuba before, and during, Fidel Castro’s revolution.

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Inside the Chinese Closet

The complexities of gay life in modern China collide at the event where Andy and Cherry first meet—a “fake marriage fair” in Shanghai, where a new, cosmopolitan generation of gay men and lesbian women seek to make a deal with a spouse of the opposite sex. Homosexuality has only recently become legal in China, but morally and practically, life is still difficult. People in Andy and Cherry’s generation, the result of the “one child” policy, are under an unbearable pressure to meet the demands of their parents and grandparents. To these elders, who carry the trauma of the great famine and the limits of the Cultural Revolution, their gay children’s search for love and happiness in the city is unintelligible. INSIDE THE CHINESE CLOSET is a humorous and compassionate portrait of modern gay life, the eternally difficult relationship between parents and children, and the social, cultural, and moral beliefs in flux in China today.

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Girl From God’s Country: The History of Women in Film and Other War Stories

GIRL FROM GOD'S COUNTRY is the untold story of the first female independent filmmaker and action-adventure heroine, Nell Shipman (1892-1970), who left Hollywood to make her films in Idaho.

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Ulrike Ottinger - Nomad from the Lake

This intimate personal portrait of Ulrike Ottinger, a unique, influential voice in women’s cinema for over four decades, begins at the lakeside city of Constance, where she was born and started her career. Describing key moments in her life, including the impact of student protests in Paris and her move from painting to filmmaking, Kramer traces Ottinger’s artistic development. Excerpts from her films, notably Madame X; Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press; Johana d’Arc of Mongolia; and documentaries shot in Asia (recently released by WMM), explore her luxuriant cinematic style combining fact and fiction in opulent, idiosyncratic images. Interviews with collaborators and friends offer further insights into Ottinger’s singular body of work. A richly rewarding close-up of the woman director who, along with Margarethe von Trotta and Helke Sander, helped launch New German Cinema on world screens, ULRIKE OTTINGER—NOMAD FROM THE LAKE is an indispensable companion for any Ottinger film.

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Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words

Anna May Wong knew she wanted to be a movie star from the time she was a young girl—and by 17 she became one. A third generation Chinese-American, she went on to make dozens of films in Hollywood and Europe. She was one of the few actors to successfully transition from silent to sound cinema, co-starring with Marlene Dietrich, Anthony Quinn and Douglas Fairbanks along the way. She was glamorous, talented and cosmopolitan—yet she spent most of her career typecast either as a painted doll or a scheming dragon lady. For years, older generations of Chinese-Americans frowned upon the types of roles she played; but today a younger generation of Asian Americans sees her as a pioneering artist, who succeeded in a hostile environment that hasn’t altogether changed. Yunah Hong’s engrossing documentary is an entertaining and imaginative survey of Wong’s career, exploring the impact Wong had on images of Asian American women in Hollywood, both then and now. Excerpts from Wong’s films, archival photographs and interviews enhance this richly detailed picture of a woman and her extraordinary life.

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