The database is still under construction and will constantly be updated. A link to the archive catalogue will be added at a later stage. Search the film archive for the film title, director or the year it was made.
Golden Gate Girls
S. Louisa Wei
Release year: 2013
Run time: 90 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Hong Kong’s first “directress” was a San Francisco native and an open lesbian. Esther Eng (1914-1970) was a true pioneer in many senses. She made 11 Cantonese language films—one in Hollywood, five in Hong Kong, three in California, one in Hawaii, and one in New York—all for Chinese audiences before, during, and after WWII. She gave Bruce Lee his screen debut in his role as a baby girl in her 1941 film Golden Gate Girl. When production slowed after 1949, she expanded her late father’s Chinese film import business and, later, ran theatres in New York that screened Chinese movies. While in New York City, she also opened at least four restaurants, including the Esther Eng Restaurant, a fine dining establishment frequented by celebrities like Malone Brando and Tennessee Williams. Following her death in 1970, her obituary appeared in Variety magazine and the New York Times.
After the retirement of director Dorothy Arzner in 1943 and before Ida Lupino began directing in 1949, Esther Eng was the only woman directing feature-length films in America. However, the most conspicuous trace of her can be found in the vestiges of her New York City restaurants: the storefront forms part of the iconic cityscape that decorates the cover of Madonna’s first album. Drawing on the marks she left in both the Chinese and English press, this film begins to recover some of her lost stories. Clips from her two surviving films, stills, and posters from her other eight motion pictures, photos from her six personal albums, newsreels of San Francisco as she saw them, as well as hundreds of archival images, are all collected to present her life and the tumultuous time in which she lived in a stunning display of visuals.
Golden Gate Girls is not just a biographical portrait of Esther Eng; it is also a tribute to pioneer women filmmakers working on both sides of the Pacific and the courage with which they crossed boundaries of language, culture, race, and gender.
Director biography
Louisa Wei was born in China during the Cultural Revolution but mainly grew up in China’s Post Mao era. She left China in 1992 to study literature and film in Canada. In 2001, she moved to Hong Kong. During the past 13 years, she has taught film production, story writing, and media culture courses at the City University of Hong Kong while making films.
Wei began writing creatively as a teenager after winning many awards in various writing competitions. In 2005, she co-wrote the script for the feature Show You Color with Cui Jian, a pioneer rocker of China. This script won an award at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2006. In 2012, Cui Jian directed a feature film, Blue Bone, based partly on this script. In 2007, Wei assisted Hong Kong director Susie Au in the production of Ming Ming, co-writing the script and helping the director obtain funds for the project. The same year, she wrote the script for Gun of Mercy and was credited as the primary scriptwriter in the film’s release. The film's theme was to be a positive portrayal of a Chinese policeman, but Wei’s script lent the story a complex narrative structure and a series of unexpected twists. In 2009, she wrote the Storm under the Sun script, a feature documentary on the purge of writers by Mao. In 2010, she wrote the script for Broken Wings: An Incomplete Genius, which took mid-century Chinese writer Lu Ling as its subject. In 2012, she completed the script for Golden Gate Girls (a.k.a. Golden Gate, Silver Light) in English and Chinese. She is working on the scripts for two new documentaries: Flower Girl from Havana, about a Cuban lady who performed Cantonese opera in Cuba for ten years, and Dream under the Sun, a film about Cui Jian and his fans.
As a documentarian, Wei’s first released work was the short musical Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006, DV, 35 minutes) broadcast on Channel 13 of Cable TV Hong Kong. Her feature-length Storm under the Sun (2009, DV, 139 minutes) premiered at IDFA in 2007 and, then in a vastly revised version at the HKIFF in 2009. Storm under the Sun has received warm feedback from audience members and film critics. It has also been viewed by historians and sinologists as a rare effort and an in-depth representation of Mao’s first nationwide purge of writers in the PRC. Partially sponsored by the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam, Storm has been written about and reviewed in journals in as many as five languages. It is housed in the permanent collections of three museums, two archives, and over 60 university libraries worldwide.
Her most recent feature documentary is Golden Gate Girls (a.k.a. Golden Gate Silver Light) sponsored by the Hong Kong Art Development Council. Golden Gate Girl portrays the life and times of Esther Eng, once honored as “China’s first woman director.” The documentary has received positive reviews and attention from The Hollywood Reporter, Voice of America, South China Morning Post, Film Business Asian, etc. Elizabeth Kerr of The Hollywood Reporter praised the documentary for “its seamless ability to weave history, Sino-U.S. relations, and social standards together to allow for inference and context.”
Wei makes historical documentaries from an explicitly personal perspective to advocate for significant figures and voices lost to the historical process. She plays the simultaneous roles of director, writer, and editor not to establish a singular subjective viewpoint but to ensure that life and the people in her films are presented intact, with all the complexity and failings of human intellect and sense.
Director's statement
My first encounter with Esther Eng occurred in 2001 when I began researching Chinese female directors. This research originated from the realization that women’s stories often got lost in history writing, particularly in film history. Recovering such stories has become the main focus of my academic career. I did not consider making a documentary on Esther Eng until early 2009, when over 600 photos from her collection—including many stills from her films—fell into my hands. Her career seemed to be an extraordinary case in the history of Hong Kong filmmaking, giving rise to many intriguing questions.
When I began to dig further into materials concerning Esther Eng, I found a few factors that contributed to her success. First, she started her career with Heartaches (1935), a film with a patriotic mission. This helped her establish a positive public image with audiences on both sides of the Pacific as the second Sino-Japanese War was underway. Second, the fact that her first film was filled in a Hollywood studio was stressed and even exaggerated by the local press, which gave her immense credibility as a new, although very young, filmmaker. Third, her directorial debut was also a critical and box office success that opened up opportunities for more projects. Finally, she could draw talent from the many Cantonese opera troops visiting North and Central America during the 1940s. For 14 years, she was an active professional filmmaker, but by the time of her death, she was mostly remembered as a restaurateur.
When reconstructing Esther’s life, I was constantly amazed by how many times she had personally journeyed across oceans, but even more so by her casual boundary crossings in her everyday life. To find the narrative that would leave the most vivid impression of Esther and her time on the mind of today’s audience, this film went through eight complete versions before settling at its ninth version.
