Chinatown Rising captures the story of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Asian American activists who fought for the identity of the neighborhood across three decades.

The Cal Alumni Association Chinese Chapter is offering the chance to stream this revelatory documentary FREE during the 48 hour period from Friday, May 21st, 8:00pm PT to Sunday, May 23rd, 8 pm PT.

Synopsis of Chinatown Rising

Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement of the mid-1960s, a young San Francisco Chinatown resident armed with a 16mm camera and leftover film scraps from a local TV station, turned his lens onto his community. Totaling more than 20,000 feet of film (10 hours), Harry Chuck’s exquisite unreleased footage has captured a divided community’s struggles for self-determination. Chinatown Rising is a documentary film about the Asian-American movement from the perspective of the young residents on the front lines of their historic neighborhood in transition. Through publicly challenging the conservative views of their elders, their demonstrations and protests of the 1960s-1980s rattled the once quiet streets during the community’s shift in power. Forty-five years later, in intimate interviews these activists recall their roles and experiences in response to the need for social change.