Scholar and documentary filmmaker S. Louisa Wei visits Doc Films on Tuesday and Wednesday for post-screening Q&As.

What does it mean to inhabit the “Asian” as a fluid site of historical attachment? To trace migration is to map the exhausting labor of belonging – not just across borders, but through racialized time and space. “Encountering ‘Two Americas’” brings together two films by scholar-artist S. Louisa Wei that explore Chinese artists navigating the early twentieth century.

GOLDEN GATE GIRLS (金门银光梦, 2014) screens Tuesday, Mar. 24 at 4 PM, followed by a Q&A with Wei. Widely considered a major work in early film history, it tells the story of Esther Eng (伍錦霞), a San Francisco-born director who made ten Chinese-language films across the Pacific. The documentary also highlights fellow pioneers Anna May Wong and Dorothy Arzner.

HAVANA DIVAS (古巴花旦, 2018) screens Wednesday, Mar. 25 at 4:30 PM, followed by a roundtable in the Ida Noyes Library Lounge with Wei and Professors Judith Zeitlin, Cassandra Guan, and Carlos Gustavo Halaburda. The 2024 director’s cut traces migration in pre-revolutionary Cuba through Caridad Amaran and Georgina Wong Gutierrez, Cantonese opera performers trained in 1930s Havana. Caridad’s mentor, her Chinese foster father Julian Fong, immigrated in the 1920s after being barred from performing opera. The film explores wartime displacement and the performers’ transition from temporary workers to permanent residents, revealing an often-overlooked chapter of Cuban cultural history.

Organized by Haotian Lin and Thomas Lamarre, with support from the Center for East Asian Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Doc Films.