The CCA Wattis Presents: Fong and News From Home

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On the occasion of the Wattis Institute’s current programming season on the topic of labor. The Wattis presents a film screening at the iconic Roxie Theater of Fong by Chantal Peñalosa Fong, whose work is currently on view at the Wattis, and Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, selected by Peñalosa Fong. 

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.