THE VAULT, APRIL 2021:

The Trained Chinese Tongue, dir. Laurie Wen (1994)
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SAVE THE DATE

 Instagram Live

with Laurie Wen

Thursday, April 15

7PM ET

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MY SIGHT IS LINED WITH VISIONS

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The Trained Chinese Tongue (1994)

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"In a film that seems to center around cooking and eating — where the viewer is prompted to engage in a direct, sensorial relationship with a cultural experience — food is verbally invoked in only two instances: at the beginning, when the filmmaker recalled her piano practice in Ohio as a young pre-teen from Hong Kong, and in the middle of the film, when Mr. Bau, an 'American-born Chinese' hosting a dinner for his Japanese business associates, made an off-putting assumption about Wen’s ability to spit out chicken and fish bones. In sharp contrast to the warm, empathetic, and arguably gendered images of food-making, these blunt articulations foreground the intrinsic difficulty in anchoring intercultural identities, where individuals are at once tied to and disassociated with a so-called authentic culture."

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From "An Incredible and Ordinary Feast," Chanel Kong's essay on The Trained Chinese Tongue 

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Screening copy courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.

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Join us every month for a new featured short film or video in the Vault, our rotating spotlight on rare, underground, and transgressive work.

MY SIGHT IS LINED WITH VISIONS

1990s Asian American Film & Video

January 26, 2021 - January 25, 2022

Co-curated by Abby Sun and Keisha Knight

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With support from and screening copies courtesy of the Center for Asian American Media,

the Harvard Film Archive, and John C. Woo and Asian CineVision

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THANK YOU

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All the filmmakers, writers, and Sentient.Art.Film team. Don Young, Chi-hui Yang, Vince Johnson,

Anna Gustavi, Anna Eriksson, Suzanne Shea, and Czarina Garcia

 

This program would not have been possible without you.

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