Free Screening Event with the Chinese American Museum DC

Featuring Nancy Bannick: Saving Honolulu’s Chinatown (10:45 min)
and My Chinatown, With Aloha (9:55 min)

Chinatowns across the country from New York to Seattle have seen dramatic and upending changes from gentrification, redevelopment, to the rise of Asian American hate and safety concerns during the pandemic. In this free online screening (two film links) and virtual program, we will take a look at Honolulu’s Chinatown in the 1960’s and 70’s and during COVID-19, through the lens of Robin Lung and Kimberlee Bassford and a discussion with the filmmakers.

Nancy Bannick: Saving Honolulu’s Chinatown and My Chinatown, With Aloha, directed and produced by Robin Lung and Kimberlee Bassford respectively, are short documentaries of about 10 minutes each. Professor Kenneth Lum, Chair of the Fine Arts department at The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, will provide a historical perspective and moderate the discussion. Dr. Joseph Young, Honorary Mayor of Honolulu’s Chinatown, will add his personal message on the program.

Registrants will receive links to view the film prior to the online discussion.

Robin Lung is an independent filmmaker based in Hawaii. Her documentary Finding Kukan, which focuses on the overlooked producer of Kukan, Li Ling A., was nominated for several awards at the Hawaii International Film Festival, CAAMFest, and Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Lung produced the film "Washington Place: Hawaii's First Home," which focused on Queen Liliuokalani of Hawai'i. She was the associate producer for the 2008 documentary Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority, and was an additional producer on NOVA's "Killer Typhoon," which was released in 2014. 

Lung is one of twenty 2022 ITVS Humanities Documentary Development Fellows.  On April 7, 2022 Lung participated in a Webinar hosted by the Historic Hawaii Foundation titled "The Preservation of the Nancy Bannick Collection at the Hawai‘i State Archives."

Nancy Bannick: Saving Honolulu’s Chinatown premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival in November 2022. It is a timely tale of what can happen when engaged citizens fight to preserve the neighborhoods they love. Nancy Bannick moved to Hawai‘i in 1950 and worked for more than 20 years as the editor of the travel publication Sunset magazine. In the early 1960s when federally funded urban renewal projects began destroying large portions of Honolulu’s Chinatown, Bannick raised community alarm with a series of front-page articles she wrote for the Honolulu Advertiser, accompanied by her photographs. Nancy was a community advocate and activist who led the charge to declare Chinatown a historic district in 1973. This short documentary is an inspiring tale of one woman’s activism as well as an image-rich ode to Honolulu’s past.  Run time: 10:45 mins.

Kimberlee Bassford is an independent documentary filmmaker who advances equality by spotlighting stories of girls and women of color, cultural identity and mental health. She directed and produced the documentaries My Chinatown, With Aloha (2022, Asian American Documentary Network), Winning Girl (2014, The WORLD Channel), Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority (2008, PBS) and Cheerleader (2003, HBO Family) and was a producer on two national PBS documentary series: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (2008) and The Meaning of Food (2005). She has garnered festival awards, Firelight Media’s Spark Fund Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, Student Academy Award and CINE Golden Eagles. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, CNN, CBS, HBO, PBS, and the Center for Asian American Media among others. Kimberlee holds a BA in psychology from Harvard University and a Master of Journalism from University of California Berkeley.

In My Chinatown, With Aloha, fourth-generation Chinese American Kimberlee Bassford explores her family’s relationship to Honolulu Chinatown and the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1899-1900 bubonic plague that hit Hawai‘i, highlighting the ways the two public health crises transformed the iconic neighborhood then and now. Run time: 9:55 mins.

Professor Kenneth Lum
As Chair of the Fine Arts department at The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, Professor Lum has a distinguished teaching record, deep international experience of exhibitions and public art commissions, in addition to being a working artist as a photographer and sculptor. He has taught at the University of British Columbia, where he was Professor and Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art from 2000 to 2006, a visiting Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and a Graduate Professor at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College among other educational institutions.  He has published widely and is the Founding Editor of Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Lum was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999 and awarded a Killam Award for Outstanding Research in 1998 and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007.

Lum has also been involved in several large curatorial projects and has worked on numerous public art projects for the cities of Vienna, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto, Rotterdam, Vancouver, Stockholm and St. Moritz.

Thank you to Dr. Joseph W.C. Young and Mrs. Barbara Young for their sponsorship of this program.