Project title: A Moment in Time
Recipient Organization: Chinese Performing Arts Foundation
Fiscal Sponsor: Film Arts Foundation
Lead Artist: Ruby Yang
Genre and Date Awarded: Media Arts, June 2003
To be Completed: June 2004

Filmmaker Ruby Yang is collaborating with the Chinese Performing Arts Foundation (CPAF) to produce video footage for A Moment in Time, a one-hour documentary for PBS about Chinese performing arts, their relationship to the development of Chinese film, and the public following for both genres in San Francisco. The Creative Work Fund grant will be used toward filming interviews, rehearsals, and performances, producing some 75 hours of unedited video to be shaped into the finished film.

A Moment in Time is a history of movie-going in San Francisco and other American Chinatowns, a history that began in 1852 when the first touring Cantonese opera troupe visited. Over decades, some Cantonese touring performers settled in San Francisco some of whom are alive today. Cantonese opera was the seedbed for Hong Kong’s movie industry: Famous operas were translated for the screen and opera actors became the first movie stars. Cantonese opera films continued to be made through the 1960s and are still loved by a generation of older women.

Chinese Performing Arts Foundation, has a ten-year history of supporting Chinese traditional arts in the Bay Area. Its founder, David Lei, has been active on many fronts—funding scholarly research, symposia and lectures; sponsoring touring troupes from China; buying free tickets for school children; purchasing instruments, equipment, and costumes; and providing classes and rehearsal space for performers. Among these activities, he and CPAF promote amateur and professional opera in San Francisco. He will bring the filmmaker in contact with scholarly research and interview subjects—Cantonese opera performers and fans.

Through their collaboration, Ruby Yang and Chinese Performing Arts Foundation hope to bring national attention to Chinese American performers and audiences, and record skills and works that may disappear with the current elder generation. By showing the emotional resonance of opera and movies in the Chinese American community, the film can help to illuminate their significance as artforms and the influence of Chinese arts on culture in the United States. According to the filmmaker, “Eventually the opera and movies became a single trans-Pacific enterprise in which China and the United States mirrored and changed one another.”

The filmmaking team of Ruby Yang, director, and Lambert Yam, producer, has an intimate connection with this topic. Lambert Yam managed the World Theatre, a movie house in San Francisco’s Chinatown, for ten years. As a programmer, importer and publicist he witnessed the match between certain popular films and moments in Chinatown’s evolution as a community. As Lambert Yam’s wife, Ruby Yang was a partner in that enterprise. She has gone on to direct documentaries for public television and to edit films for Joan Chen, Bill Moyers, Spencer Nakasako, Avon Kirkland, and Lee Lew Lee.

Ruby Yang

Ruby Yang grew up and went to school in Hong Kong. She is a native Cantonese speaker with a conversational command of Mandarin. She trained as a painter at the San Francisco Art Institute and went on to earn a Master’s degree in filmmaking in 1984.

She began her editing career as an assistant on Wayne Wang’s feature film Dim Sum. She continued this apprenticeship on Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Joy Luck Club. She rose to Associate Editor on Carroll Ballard’s feature Wind, Jim Collier’s China Cry, and Felicia Lowe’s PBS documentary Carved in Silence about Asian immigration to the West Coast. She was both editor and associate producer for Joan Chen’s debut feature Xiu Xiu, the Sent Down Girl, which premiered at the Berlin Festival in 1998 and went on to win seven Golden Horses, Taiwan’s equivalent of an Academy Award. She also edited Chen's first Hollywood feature, Autumn in New York, starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder. Recently she served as Series Editor for all three 90-minute shows in Bill Moyers’ public television series, Becoming American – the Chinese Experience.

In 1997 she directed and edited her first feature documentary, Citizen Hong Kong. The film tracks five young Hong Kong residents in the year leading up to the colony's handover to China. Her second project, China 21, a one-hour documentary about mainland Chinese families in the one child, two systems era was completed in 2002
Yang’s documentary style uses unobtrusive digital video cameras to get a candid, close-up view of people’s lives.

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTS AND PRODUCTIONS

• Editor, China, the Wild East, Turner Broadcasting, directed by Peter Kaufman, 1995.
• Editor, a.k.a. Don Bonus, co-directed by Sokly Ny and Spencer Nakasako, P.O.V., PBS Series, 1996. Winner of a national Emmy Award.
• Editor, Street Soldiers, directed by Avon Kirkland, 90-minutes, 1997 PBS broadcast.
• Editor, All Power to the People, directed by Lee Lew Lee, feature-length documentary, broadcast in France and Germany, 1999; to be screened at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, 2003.
• Editor and Associate Producer, Xiu Xiu, the Sent Down Girl, directed by Joan Chen.
• Editor, Autumn in New York, directed by Joan Chen, feature film, 2000.
  Series Editor, Becoming American – the Chinese Experience, a Bill Moyers Special, PBS broadcast March 2003
• Director and Editor, Silicon Valley, in Mandarin, broadcast nationwide on Chinese TV.
• Director and Editor, Citizen Hong Kong, 90-minute documentary, nominated for the International Documentary Association’s Pare Lorentz Award, PBS broadcast May 2000.
• Director and Editor, China 21, 60-minute documentary, PBS broadcast May 2003.