My Chinatown, With Aloha
US | 10 min. | Pacific Asian Premiere
Documentary, Cultural, Social Issues | GIFF Guide: Parental Guidance – some material may be inappropriate for children under 13
Synopsis
Fourth-generation Chinese American Kimberlee Bassford explores her family’s relationship to Honolulu Chinatown and the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1899-1900 bubonic plague that hit Hawai‘i, highlighting the ways the two public health crises transformed the iconic neighborhood then and now.
Screenings and Awards
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, CAAMFest, PBS Short Film Festival
Kimberlee Bassford (Producer, Writer, Director)
Kimberlee Bassford combines her love for storytelling with her background in journalism to bring underrepresented stories from the Pacific to the world.
She is currently in production on several feature-length and short documentaries and previously directed and produced the documentaries WINNING GIRL (2014, The World Channel, Women Make Movies/Java Films), PATSY MINK: AHEAD OF THE MAJORITY (2008, PBS, Women Make Movies) and CHEERLEADER (2003, HBO Family, Documentary Educational Resources) and was a producer on two national PBS documentary series: UNNATURAL CAUSES: IS INEQUALITY MAKING US SICK? (2008) and THE MEANING OF FOOD (2005).
She has garnered numerous honors for her work, including film festival audience awards and grand jury prizes, Firelight Media’s Spark Fund Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, Student Academy Award and CINE Golden Eagles. In 2021, Hawai‘i Women in Filmmaking recognized the significance of her work in a short documentary about her for its docuseries REEL WAHINE OF HAWAI‘I.
Kimberlee’s films have been supported by the Sundance Institute, CNN, CBS, HBO, PBS, ITVS, Center for Asian American Media, Pacific Islanders in Communications, International Documentary Association, Film Independent, Firelight Media, The Gotham, Chicago Media Project, Fund for Investigative Journalism, Australian International Documentary Conference, Doc Edge, Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc), Women in Film, Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) and Hawai‘i Women in Filmmaking.
She has served on juries for the Hawai‘i International Film Festival, ‘Ohina Short Film Showcase and Guam International Film Festival and is a member of A-Doc, BGDM, Documentary Producers Alliance and Film Fatales. Kimberlee holds a BA in psychology from Harvard University and a Master of Journalism from the University of California Berkeley. She owns Making Waves Films LLC, a documentary production company in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
Website: https://www.makingwavesfilms.com/chinatown
Funding has been provided to Guam International Film Festival, Inc. from Humanities Guåhan and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the federal ARP Act of 2021.