Street Angel

Part documentary, part fever dream, a performance artist discovers the untold onscreen and offscreen histories of Los Angeles Chinatown as she sings a familiar movie tune to aging residents faced with a rapidly developing neighborhood. Captured on iPhone, Street Angel is an ode to the resilience, joy, and voices of an often overlooked community that has provided an exotic backdrop for the Hollywood film industry for decades.

  • Michelle Sui
    Director
  • Michelle Sui
    Producer
  • Shanhuan Manton
    Producer
  • Shanhuan Manton
    Director of Photography
  • Spencer Lee
    Editor
  • Michelle Sui
    Key Cast
  • Eugene Moy
    Key Cast
  • Jimmy Wong
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Documentary, Short
  • Runtime:
    23 minutes 3 seconds
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    Chinese, English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Michelle Sui

MICHELLE SUI is a multidisciplinary artist, actor and filmmaker. Their films and multimedia works have been presented throughout the U.S. and internationally and received support from Sundance, Center for Asian American Media, California Arts Council, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. They are the director of Nü House, founded in 2017, which produces music, documentary, experimental and narrative works and celebrates conversations across disciplines and borders. Their latest short film Street Angel (Palm Springs Shortfest, SDAFF) is currently streaming exclusively on Aeon. @michelle.sui

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Director Statement

Part documentary, part fever dream, Street Angel follows a wandering singer as she moves through Los Angeles Chinatown and its bus stops, street corners, gift shops, and art galleries, interacting with different passersby and audiences as she sings a refugee song from the 1937 Chinese film Street Angel. The delight of the aging immigrant residents she encounters, who listen to this familiar tune with utmost attention, creates an opening for conversation with an often overlooked group in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Rarely spoken of stories of Chinatown’s past––both onscreen as a backdrop for Hollywood movies and offscreen as a home for the displaced––reveal the pride and resilience of a community looking to an uncertain future.

Street Angel is fueled by the complex and rarely spoken about history of displacement and role-playing in Los Angeles’s Chinatown alongside a visual experiment in reclaiming agency in the Oriental female archetype, a trope of strange delight and exoticism for much of cinematic history. The film captures a moment in time as the neighborhood changes, creating a way for us to remember the joy, ingenuity, and voices of the people who live behind the facade.

I hope the conversations documented in the film invite an opening for further discussions between both the local communities in Chinatown and a broader audience around the world, that the audience’s perception of Chinatown widens and becomes more nuanced, so that what was once strange can be familiar.

––Michelle Sui, Director