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Asian Pacific Islander Diaspora

The # 7 Train: An Immigrant Journey
Hye Jung Park & JT Takagi
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1999, 29 min., Color, US
Every day 500,000 people from 117 different countries ride a subway that runs from Flushing to Times Square, going through Queens, the most culturally diverse region in the United States. This documen...

…I Told You So
Alan Kondo
Producer: Visual Communications
1973, 18 min., BW, US
"All this identity thing. What is it you're looking for?" asks the elderly aunt of leading Japanese American poet, Lawson Inada. Through this intimate portrait, we explore Inada's answer to this compl...

Acting Our Age
Gurinder Chadha
1992, 30 min., Color, UK
This humorous and thought-provoking film documents the residents of a South Asian home for the elderly in Britain. Director Gurinder Chadha assists the residents in directing their own video. The resu...

aletheia
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1992, 16 min., Color, US
An introduction to Kim-Trang's video series on metaphorical and physical blindness, ALETHEIA explores the interconnected issues of cosmetic surgical alteration of the eyelids, technology, language, ra...

alexia
Tran T. Kim-Trang
2002, 10 min., Color, US
Alexia is an experimental video about word blindness and metaphor. Word-blindness is a condition that usually afflicts people who have suffered a stroke, causing them to lose the visual recognition of...

amaurosis
Tran T. Kim-Trang
2002, 28 min., Color, US
Amaurosis is an experimental documentary about Nguyen Duc Dat, a blind, American Asian guitarist living in Little Saigon, California. Dat was a 'triple outcast': blind, Amerasian and an impoverished o...

Animal Appetites
Michael Cho
1991, 18 min., Color, US
Michael Cho's biting critique on popular cultural stereotypes centers on the case of two Cambodian immigrants tried in California on charges of slaughtering their pet dog for food. Contrasting animal ...

Anomaly: A Documentary Film about Multiracial Identity
Jessica Chen Drammeh
Producer: Jessica Chen Drammeh & Sharon K. Smith
2013, 47 min., Color, US
ANOMALY is an award-winning documentary film that provides a thought-provoking look at multiracial identity by combining personal narratives with the larger drama of mixed race in American culture. Th...

Asian Boys
Angel Velasco Shaw
1994, 19 min., Color, US
This documentary was produced in collaboration with performance artist Nicky Paraiso for his critically acclaimed multi-media performance at P.S. 122. Eleven different interviews with "Asian Boys" are...

B.E.S. (Bangla East Side)
Sarita Khurana & Fariba Alam
2004, 45 min., Color, US
B.E.S. (Bangla East Side) is a documentary portrait of four Bangladeshi teenagers growing up in the Lower East Side of New York City. Initially started as an after-school workshop at a local high sch...

Bittersweet Survival : Southeast Asian ​R​efugees in America
J.T. Takagi & Christine Choy
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1982, 30 min., Color, US
This documentary examines the re-settlement of South-East Asian refugees in the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The film begins with a montage of riveting footage depicting the deva...

The Blindness Series
Tran T. Kim-Trang
US
Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series consists of eight experimental videos which consider blindness as metaphor. Titles include: EPILOGUE, ALETHEIA, OPERCULUM, KORE, OCULARIS, EKLEIPSIS, AMAUROSIS, an...

Borne in War
Va-Megn Thoj
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1996, 9 min., Color, US
This semi-autobiography traces the maker's birth on a secret CIA military base in the hills of Laos to his anti-war college years during the Persian Gulf War. Mixing archival footage, family photograp...

The Chinatown Files
Amy Chen
2001, 57 min., Color, US
This documentary brings to the public, for the first time, a story that was classified as secret by the US government for over four decades. Exploring the roots and legacy of the Cold War on the Chine...

Claiming Our Voice
Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel
Producer: Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel & Chitra Aiyar
2013, 21 min., US
CLAIMING OUR VOICE follows members of Andolan, a Queens-based organization founded and led by South Asian domestic workers as a means to support each other and collectively organize against exploitati...

Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Korean Transgendered Adoptee
Larry Tung
2015, 24 min., Color, US/Korea
Pauline Park, a transgender rights activist in New York City, was born into a poor family in post-war Korea. Adopted by white American parents, she left Korea as a 7-month old baby boy and grew up in ...

Comrades
Edward Wong
1999, 26 min., Color, US
COMRADES is a personal documentary essay about two men who took part in the violent socialist struggles of the mid-20th century, only to face resistance and disillusionment. The producer's father, Yoo...

Corner Store Blues
Kaizad Gustad
1994, 48 min., Color
Although he feels trapped working in his uncle's corner store in Little India, Rahul dreams of someday making it as a blues musician. A real black blues musician. Now if only he can overcome his Bomba...

COVER/AGE
Set Hernandez Rongkilyo
Producer: California Immigrant Policy Center
2019, 24 min., Color, US
COVER/AGE examines the lack of healthcare access for undocumented immigrants in California, and how two undocumented individuals are advocating to fight this exclusion. One protagonist is Emma, an eld...

Cruisin' J-town
Duane Kubo
Producer: Visual Communications
1974, 24 min., Color, US
This is the story of the formation of the popular jazz fusion band, Hiroshima, in the late 70s. The musicians reflect on their culture, musical influences, and the political movements of the 1960's ou...

Dal Puri Diaspora
Richard Fung
2012, 80 min., Color, Canada
The recipe for dal puri traveled with indentured workers from India’s Gangetic plain to southern Caribbean colonies of Britain and the Netherlands in the 19th Century. In the 1960s the wrapped roti mi...

Dastaar: Defending Sikh Identity
Kevin Lee
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2005, 12 min., Color, US
A restaurant owner beaten. A policeman fired. A 20 year subway conductor born in the U.S., threatened with job loss: All for wearing the signature turbans of their religion, Sikhism. Since 9/11, h...

December 7/September 11
Ann Brandman & Paul Nishijima
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2001, 15 min., US
A comparison of how the events and possible after effects of September 11th may mirror those of the attack on Pearl Harbor. A collection of interviews with Japanese-American veterans who witnessed the...

Desi Remix Chicago Style
Balvinder Dhenjan
1996, 46 min., Color, US/UK
Shot in Chicago and London this energetic documentary follows three very different Punjabi bands and their attempts to use their music as a bridge between the competing cultural influences of India an...

Double Exposure
Kit-Yin Snyder
2003, 26 min., Color
A poetically inspired documentary, exploring the conflicts and contradictions of the "cultural statelessness" experienced by a first generation Chinese-American immigrant. It uses a series of first-pe...

ekleipsis
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1998, 23 min., Color, US
"I came across a New York Times article about a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, the largest group of such people known in the world. Hysterical blindness is sigh...

Enemy Alien
Konrad Aderer
2011, 82 min., Color, US
ENEMY ALIEN is the gripping story of the fight to free Farouk Abdel-Muhti, a Palestinian-born human rights activist detained in a post-9/11 sweep of Muslim immigrants. Told through the eyes of the fil...

Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life
Tran T. Kim-Trang
2006, Color, US
How can we make visible the invisible? How can we "see" our lost loved ones? In EPILOGUE, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tran T. Kim Trang looks for answers to these questions in the audio recordings ...

Excuse My Gangsta Ways
Corinne E. Manabat
Producer: Corinne E. Manabat & Third World Newsreel Workshop
2008, 15 min., Color, US
We all go through transitions in life, whether it's a career change, or moving, but for Davina Wan, hers has been very extreme - from the gang life to a "normal" life. Excuse My Gangsta Ways is a visu...

Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides
Lucy Craft, Karen Kasmauski & Kathryn Tolbert
2015, 26 min., Color, US
Three Japanese war brides trace their tumultuous journey to America as the young wives of US soldiers and civilians. Atsuko, Emiko and Hiroko were among tens of thousands of Japanese women who married...

Fei Tien: Goddess in Flight
Christine Choy
1983, 23 min., Color
Based on the play, "Pigeons," by Ginny Lim, this film focuses on the meeting between an older immigrant and younger American-born woman living in Chinatown. The linkages in their pasts and possible fu...

Flow
Yau Ching
1993, 38 min., Color
FLOW is a multi-layered investigation of contemporary political, cultural and psychological dislocations. Interweaving interviews with image processing and a critical and formally flexible use of the ...

Freckled Rice
Stephen C. Ning
Producer: Stephen C. Ning & Yuet-Fung Ho
1983, 48 min., Color, US
This is a story of Joe Soo, a 13-year-old boy coming of age and coming to terms with his Chinese America heritage in Boston during the 1960s. His Boston encompasses Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the Kennedy ...

From Asia With Love
Sari Dalena
2002, 12 min., Color, US
A critical look at the proliferation of the mail-order bride industry in Asia and its representations of Asian women in the West....

From Spikes to Spindles
Christine Choy
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1976, 46 min., Color, US
This raw, gutsy portrait of New York's Chinatown captures the early days of an emerging consciousness in the community. We see a Chinatown rarely depicted, a vibrant community whose young and old join...

Gaman...to Endure
Bob Miyamoto, Drawings by Betty Chen
1982, 6 min., Color
An animated film told through a young girl’s eyes, it combines the drawings of Betty Chen and haunting music of Nobuko Miyamoto to tell of 110,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. concentration...

The Good Son
Michael Sandoval
2002, 9 min., BW, US
Pummeling abag, a young Filipino-American fighter forges a space for himself in Queens, New York City -- a house dominated by the sermons of his minister father. Beneath the surface of this unspoken t...

Her Uprooting Plants Her
Celine Salazar Parrenas
1994, 17 min., Color, US
Ten years after immigrating to the United States, three Filipina sisters move out of the family house and open a sari-sari (corner) store. On Christmas Eve their family meet in the store and share sto...

Here to Stay
ManSee Kong
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
2008, 7 min., Color, US
Illustrates the effects of gentrification in Manhattan’s Chinatown as an elderly man and fellow tenants in endangered single-room occupancy building await the results of an anti-eviction lawsuit. A TW...

Hiroshima Nagasaki Download
Shinpei Takeda
2010, 73 min., Color, US/Japan
In Spring of 2009, two former high school friends set out on a road trip from Vancouver, Canada, heading south towards the Mexican border. Along the way, they meet atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima a...

Hito Hata: Raise the Banner
Duane Kubo & Robert Nakamura
Producer: Visual Communications
1980, 90 min., Color, US
This poignant drama chronicles the contributions and hardships of Japanese Americans from the turn of the century to the late seventies. This history is told by Oda, a feisty Issei--one of the elderly...

Homes Apart: Korea
J.T. Takagi & Christine Choy
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1991, 56 min., Color, US/Korea
They speak the same language, share a similar culture and once belonged to a single nation. When the Korean War ended in 1953, ten million families were torn apart. By the early 90's, as the rest of t...

I Call Myself Persian: Iranians in America
Tanaz Eshaghian & Sara Nodojoumi
2002, 27 min., Color, US
From the Iran hostage crisis of '79 to the WTC attacks, images of hostile Iranians and Middle Easterners have been well-ingrained in the American psyche, but no informed images come to mind representi...

I'm British But…
Gurinder Chadha
1989, 30 min., Color, UK
This unique look at Asians in Britain offers first-hand views of second generation Asians, adding archival footage and invigorating Bhangra and Bangla music--traditional Punjabi songs updated with hip...

Imagining Place
Anita Chang
1999, 35 min., Color, US
For one year, with a curious eye and a curious mind, the filmmaker asks herself and a cross section of individuals, "What does belonging feel like in America?" Amidst increasing social, technological...

Inbetween
Robert Crusz
Producer: Sankofa Film and Video Collective
1992, 25 min., Color, UK
"When I was a child in Sri Lanka, my father encouraged me to consider everything European and Western to be of greater value than things Asian and Eastern...I arrived in England with great excitement ...

Indochina: Traces of a Mother
Idrissou Mora-Kpai
2011, 72 min., Color, France/Benin
INDOCHINA: TRACES OF A MOTHER documents a little-known chapter in African, Asian and French colonial history and the personal story of Christophe, a Beninese-Vietnamese orphan that returns to Vietnam ...

Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You About?
Yau Ching
1991, 12 min., Color
Using a combination of dramatized footage, tourist video, old propaganda films and archival material to explore the nature of exile and the ambivalent longing for "home" which it produces....

Japan Across the Seas
Mabel Maio
1998, 48 min., Color, Argentina
The Japanese who have settled in Argentina since the end of the 19th century came for many reasons: wanderlust, good farming, and even a love for tango. Japan Across The Seas weaves together the tales...

Keep Saray Home
Brian Redondo
Producer: Brian Redondo, Bethany Li & Kevin Lam
2020, 31 min., Color, US
Far from the southern border, in the outskirts of Boston, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees are facing their own battle against family separation. ICE is detaining and deporting community members on a...

Kites & Other Tales
Alan Ohashi, Animation by Glen Iwasaki
1976, 12 min., Color
Tom Joe, a kite maker, recreates the folklore of Asian kites by illustrating magnificent stories from China, Japan and Polynesia....

kore
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1994, 17 min., Color, US
The third installment in the series opens with two women who are blindfolded and making love. This visually lush and erotic exploration of blindness investigates questions of desire and power, empowe...

Leaving Bakul Bagan
Sandeep Ray
1994, 45 min., Color
This moving documentary follows the filmmaker's cousin's imminent departure from India to pursue studies in the U.S. Torn between familial and national loyalties and her desire to travel and experienc...

Living in Half Tones
Me-K Ahn
1994, 9 min., Color
A metaphorical reconstruction of the artist's developing identity as an adopted Korean girl in America who returns to Korea for the first time "to search for bits and pieces of my past." A visually po...

Looking For Wendy
Kimberly Saree Tomes
1998, 18 min., Color
Tomes' pseudo-search for her roots as a Korean adoptee takes her from her adoptive father who works in bio-engineering (genetically creating the world's juiciest tomato) to the adoptive relationship b...

Ma/baap
Siraj Jhaveri
1994, 30 min., Color
When your parents hate each other -- how do you learn to love? This award-winning, personal chronicle's the relationship between the filmmaker's Muslim father and Hindu mother --exploring their forbid...

Maid to Stay
Aparna Talaulicar
1999, 30 min., Color, US
"Maid to Stay" is the story of four South Asian Women domestic workers in New York. Elizabeth has been sent back to India because her employers discover she's been talking to a women's group about ho...

Mississippi Triangle
Christine Choy, Worth Long, Allan Siegel
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1984, 78 min., Color, US
This is an intimate portrait of life in the Mississippi Delta, where Chinese, African Americans and whites live in a complex world of cotton, labor, and racial conflict. The history of the Chinese com...

Mississippi Triangle (110 minutes)
Christine Choy, Worth Long & Allan Siegel
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1984, 110 min., Color, US
This is an intimate portrait of life in the Mississippi Delta, where Chinese, African Americans and whites live in a complex world of cotton, labor, and racial conflict. The history of the Chinese com...

Mommy, What's Wrong?
Anita Chang
1997, 14 min., Color
Along with optically-printed home movie and hand-processed Super-8 film footage, the filmmaker incorporates an interview with her mother about immigration, motherhood and spirituality, in search of st...

Mott to Mulberry
Herman Lew
1992, 30 min., Color, US
A lighthearted but poignant story about a second generation Chinese American teenager named Conrad. Living in New York City's Chinatown, Conrad's attraction to a local Italian girl clashes with the cu...

Mr. Ahmed
Terrance Grace
1994, 52 min., Color
Internationally renowned actor Naseeruddin Shah stars in this poignant drama of an Indian ex-patriate living in a small American town. The film paints a portrait of a man struggling to re-invent himse...

Nailed It: Vietnamese & The Nail Industry
Adele Pham
2018, 59 min., Color, US
Visit any strip mall in the United States, and there’s bound to be a Vietnamese nail salon. While ubiquitous in cities across the country, few Americans know the history behind the salons and the 20 V...

Najeeb: A Persian Girl in America
Tanaz Eshaghian
2000, 26 min., Color, US
After the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979, after which 80,000 Persian Jews fled the country. Since then, thousands of young women have grown up in Iranian homes in the United States, where they...

A Nice Arrangement
Gurinder Chadha
1990, 11 min., Color, UK
Set in the London home of an Indian family on the morning of their daughter's wedding, this film is a wry depiction of one of the most central of Indian traditions -- the arranged marriage. As the you...

North Korea: Beyond the DMZ
J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park
Edited by Dena Mermelstein
2003, 60 min., Color, North Korea/US
While this tiny state on the divided Korean peninsula is continually demonized in the U.S., few have any first hand knowledge of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. What is it like on the other...

ocularis: eye surrogates
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1997, 21 min., Color, US
The latest tape in Kim-Trang's eight tape series on metaphorical and physical blindness Ocularis: Eye Surrogates addressing issues of surveillance and technology that allow us to see what we normally ...

operculum
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1993, 14 min., Color, US
A visit with seven cosmetic surgeons specializing in eylid alteration, this piece juxtaposes text with consultation footage. OPERCULUM is revelatory of both the medicalization of race and the authorit...

Orientations
Richard Fung
Producer: Gay Asians Toronto
1985, 56 min., Color, Canada
More than a dozen men and women of different Asian backgrounds speak frankly about their lives as members of a minority within a minority. They speak about coming out, homophobia, racism, cultural id...

Parallel Adele
Adele Pham
Producer: Adele Pham
2008, 16 min., Color, US
Two half Vietnamese documentary filmmakers, both named Adele, weave a shared narrative of mixed Asian (hapa) experiences through interviews with 7 other mixed race subjects. History, memory, and anecd...

Promise and Unrest
Alan Grossman & Áine O’Brien
Producer: FOMACS in association with Ned Kelly Pictures
2010, 79 min., Color, Ireland
Through struggle and sacrifice migrant women often stand as sole breadwinners in the transnational family. Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work...

Re:Orientations
Richard Fung
2016, 68 min., Color, Canada
A fascinating look into the lives and thoughts of seven Queer Pan-Asian Canadians as they look back on ORIENTATIONS, a 1984 documentary in which they featured. How have they changed? And how has the w...

Resilience: Garment Workers
Betty Yu
2001, Color, US
Garment worker parents fight sweatshop conditions in New York City....

Resistance at Tule Lake
Konrad Aderer
Producer: Michelle Chen
2017, 78 min., US
The dominant narrative of the World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans has been that they behaved as a “model minority,” that they cooperated without protest and proved their patriotism by enl...

Rest in Peace
Jeff Mao
1990, 15 min., BW, US
In this subtle and comic narrative, a young Asian American is pressured by his wife, family and "tradition" to grant the last wish of a dying relative. First, however, he must decipher a note written ...

Rising Up: the Alams
Konrad Aderer
Producer: Third World Newsreel Call for Change
2005, 11 min., Color, US
As part of the Homeland security measures, immigrant men from 25, mostly Muslim countries were required to enroll in a Special Registrationprogram. The result: no evidence of terror, but some 13,000 ...

Rock Me, Goong Hay
Shelton Ito
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1992, 5 min., Color, US
The Goong Hay Kid is the fictional Chinese rapper created and played by Alvin Eng. ROCK ME, GOONG HAY combines hip-hop styling with a forceful protest against stereotypes....

A Shortness of Breath
Ann Kaneko
1993, 15 min., BW, US
Mixing documentary and narrative this film is a candid account of one woman's struggle with breast cancer and her own imminent death. Delving into various attitudes towards death and dying, the filmma...

Sisters N Brothers
Veena Cabreros-Sud
1994, 4 min., BW, US
The repeated image of an encounter on the street between a young Filipino man and woman grows increasingly threatening as male and female voice-over articulates the moment. Set to the beat of bhangra ...

Sky-blue Hometown
Soh-Young Kim
2000, 93 min., Color, Korea
This documentary traces the trajectory of a Korean diasporic community in the former Soviet Union. Placed in internment camps by Stalin during World War II, the plight of a generation of Korean-Russia...

Slanted Visions
Ming-Yuen S. Ma
1995, 50 min., Color
Working in collaboration with a diverse group of artists, writers, performers and musicians, many of them queer and Asian, Los Angeles-based media artist Ming-Yuen S. Ma has created a promiscuous mont...

Slowly, This
Arthur Jafa
1995, 26 min., Color, US
When two friends meet in a crowded Manhattan restaurant, the conversation takes an unexpected and intimate turn. Speaking from their experiences as a Japanese American man and an African American man,...

Some Divine Wind
Roddy Bogawa
1991, 72 min., Color, US
SOME DIVINE WIND (a reference to the Japanese term Kamikaze, or “divine wind”) tells the story of Ben, whose father was part of a U.S. bombing mission that destroyed his Japanese mother’s village—and ...

A Song for Ourselves
Tadashi Nakamura
2009, 35 min., Color, US
A SONG FOR OURSELVES is an intimate journey into the life and music of Asian American Movement troubadour Chris Iijima. Struggling to make sense of their father’s early death, Iijima's teenage sons l...

Spirit of the Dragon
Gil Gavreau
2003, 25 min., Color, Canada
In 1923, the Canadian government passed the infamous Exclusion Act, which barred all Chinese immigration to Canada for 24 years and required all Chinese-Canadian citizens to carry an identification ca...

Stand By Your Man
Chuleenan Svetvilas
1992, 3 min., Color
This satirical music video uses a disturbingly direct montage of footage from Hollywood films to critique the one dimensional imagery that American movies provide of Asian women as either sexual playt...

Stories Within: A Film by the Austin Asian American Community
PJ Raval
Producer: Hanna Huang & Andrew Lee
2022, 10 min., United States
Stories Within delves into a diverse cross section of 14 individuals from the AAPI community in Austin. It allows each participant the opportunity to speak to their younger selves about the acts of ra...

Stubborn City
Pooja Rangan
2006, 9 min., Color, India/US
In 2005, 8 feet of rain fell in Bombay, India in one day. This poetic piece highlights the resilience of the impoverished neighborhoods of this ancient city that were most affected, and how people su...

Studio 17: The Lost Reggae Tapes
Mark James
Producer: Reshma B / Mark James
Color, Jamaica
STUDIO 17: THE LOST REGGAE TAPES tells the compelling story of the Chin’s, The Chinese Jamaican family behind “Studio 17”. Located in downtown Kingston, Studio 17 became a legendary recording studio r...

Su-Casa Senior Media Production Workshop Films: 2020 Films
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2020, 24 min., Color, US
From April to June, 2020, a dozen senior filmmakers learned about film theory, film scripting, and were taught to film and edit on their smart phones. Originally planned as an in-person workshop to be...

Take a Look: NYC Chinatown Post 9.11
Kevin Lee
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2001, 4 min., Color, US
A closer look at one of the most historical neighborhoods near the World Trade Center finds a variety of personalities, viewpoints, and perspectives. Those who live and work in New York City's Chinat...

Tapestry: Asian Women in America (a.k.a. Tapestry II)
Organization of Asian Women
Producer: Organization of Asian Women
1991, 55 min., Color, US
Through archival photographs, oral histories and folk songs by Nobuko Miyamoto, this video weaves the history of 200 years of Asian women's experiences. It begins with early Asian immigration to the U...

Taxi-vala/auto-biography
Vivek Renjen Bald
1996, 45 min., Color, US
This documentary focuses on the lives and dreams of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City. Combining video and taxi-driver interviews and the personal narrative of the second-generation...

To Be Me: Tony Quon
Pat Lau & Don Miller
Producer: Visual Communications
1973, 10 min., Color, US
This award-winning short film follows Tony, an active ten-year-old Chinese immigrant as he describes adjusting to an American school. Tony describes his first impressions of "strange new classrooms", ...

Toc Storee
Ming-Yuen S. Ma
1993, 21 min., Color, US
The first in a series by the artist addressing Asian/Pacific Islander Gay experiences, this multilevel narrative explores sexuality, identity, tradition and personal recollection through gay Asian sto...

Translating Grace
Anita Lee
1996, 20 min., BW, Canada
An innovative drama that explores the unique relationship between two Korean-Canadian women. Grace, a second generation feminist academic, and Hyang-Sook, a recent immigrant from Korea. Grace is the t...

Turmeric Border-Marks
Christina Choe
2000, 25 min., Color
TURMERIC BORDER-MARKS is an experimental documentary set in modern Seoul, Korea, where an intersection becomes two stories of migration, globalization, hybrid identity, cracked mirrors and turmeric (a...

Two Months to Home
Janice Ahn
2006, 8 min., Color, US
In the months prior to 9-11, an Afghan woman named Samira Rahman narrowly escapes from the Taliban, losing her family. After settling down in Long Island and beginning a new family, Samira is taken aw...

Undertow
Me-K Ahn
1995, 18 min., BW, US
"undertow" is an experimental short film which explores how the loss of family and culture can affect one's body consciousness and sexuality. It juxtaposes one adopted woman's reconstructed search for...

Unspoken
Patrick G Lee
2020, 17 min., Color, US
Through letter-writing, a community discussion, and a drag performance, six queer and trans Asian Americans grapple with their queerness and consider what family acceptance might look like. UNSPOK...

Urga Song
Jessica Woodworth
1999, 18 min., Color
URGA SONG is a lyrical cine-poem portraying democratic Mongolia from the perspective of young artists residing in the capital city of Ulaan Baatar. Poetic imagery of stark landscapes, dramatic citysca...

Voices of Chinatown: Here to Stay
River 瑩瑩Dandelion
Producer: River 瑩瑩Dandelion
2024, 5 min., Color
Voices of Chinatown: Here to Stay is a short documentary film that features the story of a fifth-generation family-run store, Wing On Wo & Co., the oldest continuously operating store in Manhattan’s C...

Wataridori: Birds of Passage
Robert Nakamura
Producer: Visual Communications
1974, 37 min., Color, US
Lyricism and visual beauty are evident in this film as four Issei (first generation Japanese Americans) describe a collective history through their personal memories. The filmmaker paints the canvas o...

We, Too, Sing America: Racist Backlash in the Aftermath of September 11
Yun Jong Suh
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2001, 12 min., Color, US
This short is a poignant and revealing document of the thoughts, hopes and fears of Muslim, Arab-American and South Asian children in the milieu of a country calling for war and unconditional complian...

A Week with Azar
Tara Najd Ahmadi
Producer: Jurij Meden and Tara Najd Ahmadi
2018, 11 min., Color, US
A Week with Azar is a short experimental documentary film, based on a true story of Azar, an Iranian computer engineer living in the United States, who in the winter of 2017 failed to see her ill sist...

What Are Our Women Like in America?
Balvinder Dhenjan
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1994, 12 min., Color, US
An insightful and hilarious account of one immigrant Indian man's attempt to come to grips with American pop culture and "Westernized" Indian women. A TWN Workshop Production....

What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who's Funny?
Gurinder Chadha
1994, 19 min., BW, UK
What do you call an Indian woman who's funny in 20th Century Britain? A British performer? A Black comedienne? An enigma? This humorous and comedic documentary, brings the laughs and dreams of four In...

Whatever It Takes
Christopher Wong
2011, 92 min., Color, US
WHATEVER IT TAKES chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the very first year of the Bronx Center for Science & Mathematics, an innovative public high school in New York City. At the Bronx Center ...

The Women of Waray Waray
Fruto Corre
1990, 5 min., BW, US
A satiric look at U.S. intervention in the Philippines, using a half-Eartha Kitt, half-Imelda Marcos look-alike and television footage to represent the bizarre relationship between s....

The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military
J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1995, 60 min., Color, US/South Korea
Documenting the lives of women who work in the South Korean military brothels and clubs where over 27,000 women "service" the 37,000 American soldiers stationed in the most militarized region of the w...

The Yellow Pages
Ho Tam
1995, 8 min., Color, US
Arranged from A to Z in 26 segments, The Yellow Pages looks at the relationship between imagery and text in the context of the Asian experience within North America and beyond. In a playful and satiri...


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TWN acknowledges that in New York we are on the unceded territory of the Lenni Lenape, Canarsie, Shinecock, and Munsee peoples and challenges the harm that continues to be inflicted upon Indigenous and People of Color communities here and abroad, which is why we all need to be part of the struggle for rights, equality and justice.

TWN is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Color Congress, MOSAIC, New York Community Trust, Peace Development Fund, Ford Foundation, Golden Globe Foundation, Kolibri Foundation and individual donors.