It feels so good to be official. The Chinatown Film Project (CFP) is officially installed in the gradually opening Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). CFP features 10 original short films by 12 of New York’s most exciting filmmakers, and two viewing stations showing works from the CFP YouTube Channel. Catch the series every Thursday at 11a, 12:30p, 2p, 3:30p, 5p with the last screening at 6:30p. 

Once the museum officially opens September 22, CFP will screen every day, and we’ll have special events at the Apple Store in Soho, the Tribeca Film Institute, and more.

In the meantime, check out Larry Rohter’s New York Times piece about the museum and CFP!

The view from my office, at twilight:

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Eight stories up, I peeked this outside my bedroom window:

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The Chinatown Film Project is about re-seeing Chinatown. Through the eyes of filmmakers all over the world. Namely because we don’t always appreciate, or even notice, what’s right in front of us. Last week, it took someone else’s admiration of the views from my Chinatown apartment to re-see what’s right in front of me.

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Manhattan’s Chinatown is the hardest-working neighborhood in a city of workaholics. Finding quiet spaces to relax, and create something other than green, is rare. Even meals are eaten in a cacophony of other people working. Tomorrow I head out to California, where the sunshine perhaps relaxes people’s ambitions a tad. But before I go, a couple snapshots of quiet leisure in Chinatown.Silk Road Cafe has the best coffee in Chinatown. I come here for meetings a lot. Last week, I spied some teens chilling out front, kids who would blend in unnoticed on Bedford Ave, but here, generate double takes.

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I live in Chinatown. And I work 3 blocks away, in Chinatown. Chinatown figures quite heavily into my everyday life.A few scenes, then, from the prior week…When I woke up one Wednesday, this is what I saw out my window. Chinatown provides poetry in the most mundane.I’ve walked past this display window on the Bowery at least 300 times. Why this night I chose to notice this fantastical creation – a brightly-lit-color-chameleon-giant-disco ball – beckoning a sleeping Chinatown to revelry, is a mystery to me.Snow mutes everything. February has been mercifully warm. A few hours later turned this pretty dusting into grayish slush.

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Happy New Year! I fell asleep to the sound of drumming on Feb 6 and awoke to the scene below. I’ve celebrated Chinese New Year in LA and SF before, but this was the first time I found myself in Manhattan’s Chinatown on the 1st day of the lunar calendar. And NYC’s Chinatown is still celebrating. It’s Feb 16, and the drums are still beating and the dragons still dancing…

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Here’s a link to a recent blog entry where I talk about films, MoCA, and rainforests. Big thanks to Alex Steed for the write-up. According to their website, TRACE is a TRANSCULTURAL Styles and Ideas magazine – a perfect host, then, for musings about our Chinatown Film Project. http://blog.trace212.com/archives/363#more-363 And a photo snapped in the old Chinese Benevolent Association in Kingston’s former Chinatown. Get this – the Chinese community is so integrated in Jamaica, that there is no Chinatown. Not only have the Chinese in Jamaica integrated racially, linguistically, and culturally – Bob Marley’s first producer was Chinese – but, after arriving as indentured servants, Chinese Jamaicans now represent the moneyed elite.I wonder why the Chinese immigrant experience was so different in Jamaica than anywhere else. — Karin Chien