Join the Wattis Institute for a film screening of Fong by Chantal Peñalosa Fong and Chantal Akerman's News from Home, selected by Peñalosa Fong. 

This screening is held in conjunction with the Wattis’s research exhibition ‘8 Hours of Work’, and is free for the public to attend.

Doors: 5:30 pm, screening: 6 pm
The Roxie Theater
3117 16th St, San Francisco
Free
RSVP requested, but not required

Fong running time: 12 minutes 07 seconds
News from Home running time: 89 minutes

Through everyday images filmed in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in her essay film, Fong, the artist Chantal Peñalosa Fong addresses the violence and discrimination of the anti-Chinese campaigns in northern Mexico between 1911 and 1935 and the effects they had on her family history. This work blends documentary research with the possibilities offered by fiction in order to give meaning to the spectral absences that appear in historical narratives and personal memory.

Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, in News from Home, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule.

Chantal Peñalosa Fong’s practice has been characterized by analyzing, along many fronts, the implications of inhabiting a border territory. A native of Tecate, the artist has addressed the experience of time and the exercise of memory in liminal spaces and interpreted the generalized absence haunting the subjectivity of the border, especially in connection to the geopolitical reality of the Mexico-United States relationship. In this project, Peñalosa Fong connects her family’s past, her Chinese ancestry, and the absence of her ancestors in her personal history with the consequences of the historical narrative of Chinese immigration to Mexico.

Chantal Akerman (1950–2015) was a Belgian filmmaker whose groundbreaking work shaped feminist and experimental cinema. Over more than forty films and numerous installation works, Akerman developed a distinctive approach to duration and everyday life that made her one of the most influential filmmakers of her generation. Her work has been presented widely, including at Eye Filmmuseum, MOCA Toronto, La Cinémathèque Française, ICA London, The Kitchen, and the Centre Pompidou.