Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a young San Francisco film student and Chinatown resident turned his lens onto his community. Fast forward 50 years, Harry Chuck’s now archival material portrays a divided community’s struggles for self-determination. Weaving together never-before-seen footage and photographs, “Chinatown Rising” spans three generations in its portrait of the historic neighborhood in transition.
From the 1960s-1980s, the once quiet streets of Chinatown were rattled by the fight for bilingual education, tenants’ rights, affordable housing, and an ethnic studies curriculum. These struggles are chronicled through current-day interviews as Chinatown’s organizers and leaders of the ’60s return to the battles for social justice and equality of their youth that would shape their community and nation.