STREET ANGEL

Part documentary, part fever dream, Street Angel follows a wandering singer as she moves through Los Angeles Chinatown and its bus stops, street corners, gift shops, and art galleries, interacting with different passersby and audiences as she sings a refugee song from 1937 Chinese film Street Angel. The delight of the aging immigrant residents she encounters, who listen to this familiar tune with utmost attention, creates an opening for a conversation with an often overlooked group in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Rarely spoken of stories of Chinatown’s past––both onscreen as a backdrop for Hollywood movies and offscreen as a home for the displaced––reveal the pride and resilience of a community looking to an uncertain future.

Street Angel is fueled by the complex and rarely spoken about history of displacement and role-playing in Los Angeles’s Chinatown alongside a visual experiment in reclaiming agency in the Oriental female archetype, a trope of strange delight and exoticism for much of cinematic history. The film captures a moment in time as the neighborhood changes, creating a way for us to remember the joy, ingenuity, and voices of the people who live behind the facade.

I hope the conversations documented in the film invite an opening for further discussions between the local communities in Chinatown and a broader audience around the world so that the audience’s perception of Chinatown widens and becomes more nuanced so that what was once strange can be familiar.