Documentary Feature

Title

Director

Running Time

Format

Chinese Restaurants: Song of the Exile

Cheuk Kwan

79

Video

(English, Mandarin, Hebrew & Turkish w/ English Subtitles)
This documentary pegs the Chinese restaurant as an icon that gives us a glimpse into the lives of immigrants around the world. In Haifa, Israel, the Yan Yan restaurant is run by a Chinese Vietnamese refugee and community organizer whose Chinese Israeli daughters follow their own path in this Middle Eastern country. Meantime, an activist widower and her daughter operate a Chinese restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa where apartheid is still a recent memory. Finally, a Chinese restaurant in Istanbul, Turkey is the site of a reunion of a large family of mixed Chinese Turkish descent whose matriarch reflects on running a restaurant that has been her home and livelihood- and seen her through two husbands- over the last four decades.

-Anna Petrillo and Suevon Lee