Christopher Chow

Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s, a young San Francisco Chinatown resident armed with a 16mm camera and leftover film scraps from a local TV station, turned his lens onto his community. Totaling more than 20,000 feet of film (10 hours), Harry Chuck's exquisite unreleased footage has captured a divided community's struggles for self-determination. Chinatown Rising is a documentary film about the Asian-American Movement from the perspective of the young residents on the front lines of their historic neighborhood in transition. Through publicly challenging the conservative views of their elders, their demonstrations and protests of the 1960s-1980s rattled the once quiet streets during the community’s shift in power. Forty-five years later, in intimate interviews these activists recall their roles and experiences in response to the need for social change.

A collection of film clips of what would become Curtis Choy’s seminal documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel. This work-in-progress documentary includes In-depth interviews with Manongs – an Illocano term of respect for elders – and community leaders as they fought to stop the mass eviction of Asian American elders from the International Hotel and the destruction of San Francisco’s Manilatown.

A collection of film clips of what would become Curtis Choy’s seminal documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel. This work-in-progress documentary includes In-depth interviews with Manongs – an Illocano term of respect for elders – and community leaders as they fought to stop the mass eviction of Asian American elders from the International Hotel and the destruction of San Francisco’s Manilatown.