Film Screening: Reunification

Wednesday, March 8, 2017 at 12:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
The Presentation Room, Charles E. Young Research Library (11348 YRL), UCLA Library

On Wednesday, March 8, 2017, the East Asian Library presented a documentary film screening of "Reunification" by director Alvin Tsang.

In this deeply personal award-winning film that gives an insider view on the contemporary Asian American immigrant experience, divorce and family psychology, and the personal filmmaking process, filmmaker Alvin Tsang reflects on his family’s migration from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s - fraught with betrayal from his parents’ divorce, economic strife and communication meltdown between parents and children. This poetic exploration of many unresolved years moves moodily across different channels and modes, bending into labor histories and Hong Kong’s colonial trajectories. Tsang turns the camera on his own family, cautiously prodding for answers, but fully acknowledging that the only closure he can get will be from deciding for himself how to move on.

This film screening event was co-sponsored by the UCLA Asia Pacific Center and the Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library.

About the Director

Alvin Tsang is a graduate of University of California, San Diego’s Visual Arts (Media) department where he also began his film career as an editing assistant for THAT’S MY FACE (2001), an award-winning film by Thomas Allen Harris (director, THROUGH A LENS DARKLY) exploring the mythical African “face” found in Brazil, East Africa and the United States. Tsang edited Josiah Lee’s HANDLING THE A.M. (2006), a short film about the absurdity and falsity of Asian American stereotypes, and Robert E. Holley’s HIV/AIDS awareness film, LOVE ME THROUGH IT (2008). He served as co-producer and post-supervisor for Ermena Vinluan’s award-winning documentary, TEA & JUSTICE (2007), about the first female Asian-American NYPD officers on the force. Also co-produced with Vinluan, Tsang filmed and edited a documentary short profiling legendary independent film director John Sayles’s making of his film AMIGO (2010) about the Philippine-American War. He serves as a video documentarian for the pioneering artist Meredith Monk and The Guggenheim Museum NYC, and has created promos for several of Michael Kors’s fashion collections. Tsang’s other films include the shorts FISH (2010) and PRESERVATION (2011). REUNIFICATION (2015) is his first feature.

The selected biographical information is cited from the Reunification film website.