Film Screening: Chinese Couplets

Part memoir, part history, part investigation, the filmmaker’s search for answers about her mother’s emigration to America during the Chinese Exclusion era reveals the often painful price paid by immigrants who abandoned their personal identity, the burden of silence they passed on to their offspring and the inter-generational strife between immigrants and their American born children.

 

Felicia Lowe is an award winning independent television producer, director, and writer with more than 35 years of production experience. Her latest film “Chinese Couplets” is gaining rave reviews as it begins circulating in film festivals and community screenings. Lowe received an EMMY for Best Cultural Documentary for “Chinatown: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco.” The lively hour-long piece on the history of San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood has been broadcast numerous times on PBS. “Carved in Silence,” a documentary about the experiences of Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island Immigration Station and “China: Land of My Father,” a personal journey to China to meet her paternal grandmother have garnered numerous awards and have also been broadcast on PBS and abroad. Her innovative works have screened in film festivals, museums and are used in classrooms across the country. Prior to her documentary work, Lowe worked in children’s television and broadcast journalism. She has also taught film production at San Francisco State University and Stanford University. A descendant of Angel Island detainees, she has been actively involved in the preservation of the Angel Island Immigration Station.

 

Film screening is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Center, and Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library.