S. Louisa Wei's Lounge Discussions

I am Louisa Wei from Hong Kong. I am a member of the Hong Kong Director's Guild and teach film-related courses at a university. I have written 10 scripts--three feature films (in Chinese), four feature documentaries (in English), and three TV docs (in Chinese). My specialty is in the history of the Greater China and Chinese Diaspora. My past works include two documentaries--Golden Gate Girls (2014) and Havana Divas (2019), that traveled to many international film festivals and are distributed by Women Make Movies. My works received positive reviews from major media outlets like BBC.

Writing stories that take place between the 1890s and 1980s needed a lot of research, but also allowed me to discover a lot of wonderful figures. Esther Eng (1914-70), for example, was a third-generation Chinese American who traveled to Hong Kong in 1936 and became the first woman to direct a film there. She brought a film titled Heartaches (1935) she co-produced in Hollywood with a crew of Chinese cast and Caucasian technicians, including cinematographer Paul Ivano who worked for Josef von Sternberg. Esther had no prior training in studios except for Heartaches, but she directed five pictures for five companies in Hong Kong, and another five after in the US after WWII broke out in Europe. Golden Gate Girl (1941) features a three-month-old Bruce Lee playing a baby girl. She made four more pictures afterward in California, Hawaii, and New York, and settling down in New York as a famous restauranteur, entertaining folks including Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams at the Esther Eng Restaurant. It became such a landmark that it appears on the cover of Madonna’s first single album. My documentary to salute Esther is titled Golden Gate Girls (2014, a.k.a. Golden Gate Silver Light). Only insiders knew that a bar named Eng's Corner was a covert gay bar. Esther herself always dressed in men's clothing. A few producers expressed interest in making a biopic after The Hollywood Reporter review. I hope one day it will be realized.

Currently--in fact, for the past 16 years--I am working on a documentary about China's rock music, featuring Cui Jian (dubbed the "father of China rock"), his band members, DJs, music producers, music festival organizers etc. who share insider looks to China's music scene. During the Cold War, China was not in touch with the rest of the world from after WWII to the late 1970s. Thus when China opened up around 1978, western music in all genres and popular from the 1940s all the way to the late 1970s poured in together. Cui Jian was able to hear blues, jazz, reggae, rock, funk, etc. as a teenager, and he managed to blend elements of these music styles with Chinese folk songs into a style of his own. His first album Rock’n’Roll on the New Long March influenced several generations of people. I was helping him to write a film script in 2004 and began to film him in 2005. Since I have hours of footage and interviews with more than 50 people, who tell exciting true stories. I am thinking, in addition to a feature documentary titled Red Rock, (which shines a light on how western rock'n'roll is transformed and integrated into "China rock",) it's a good fit for a web-TV series. I know this is very original content from 1.2M views of a 5-minute teaser I posted on my personal Weibo (with only 1700 followers). I am really new to this, so I am looking forward to all comments, suggestions, and interested producers.