Description

Finding Cleveland Finding Cleveland is a documentary short film that follows Charles Chiu and his family on an emotional journey as they take a trip to Cleveland, Mississippi to visit the grave site of Charles’ father, KC Lou. In less than 48 hours, Charles has many surprising encounters with the local townspeople, who help fill in some blanks about the father he never knew. He also learns of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a discriminatory law against Chinese immigrants and the struggles his father faced in a pre-civil rights era. Reunification Between faded family photographs, old video footage, and interviews collected through the years, Alvin Tsang’s REUNIFICATION bears the look and feel of a documentary that’s taken decades to produce. Perhaps it required all that time for Tsang to fully process his family’s history and confront his own emotionally turbulent upbringing. For the audience though, that passing of time is key to the film’s powerful portrayal of tireless emotional reconciliation. When his mother and two siblings first immigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, six-year-old Alvin was forced to stay behind with his working, and consequently absent, father. Spending the following three years often alone in an empty apartment, he longed for his family’s reunification. However, upon Alvin and his father’s arrival to America, that dream was utterly and permanently shattered under circumstances the filmmaker has yet to fully comprehend to this day.

Venue Details
Atlantic Plumbing Cinema
807 V Street, NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001, United States
DC Asian Pacific American Film was established to be the beacon of creative output of Asian and Asian American media arts through community outreach.The mission of the DC APA Film Festival is to bring attention to the creative output from APA communities and encourage the artistic development of APA films, media, and creative output in the greater Washington DC metropolitan region as well as the across the country.