Random Acts of Legacy
Today, we have the luxury of being able to document our lives in an instant, but during the Great Depression and into the 1950s, this luxury was almost nonexistent. Filmmaker and director Ali Kazimi knew he stumbled upon a rare artifact when he found himself in an online bidding war for film footage from 1936 to 1951. The old home movies had a name attached to it, Silas Fung, and offered a little-seen glimpse into how a Chinese family embraced American customs. Fung was a first-generation Chinese American commercial artist who had a passion for filming home movies. Restoring Fung s films took years, but Kazimi succeeded in keeping this family s archive intact. What he found was a look at everyday life, from ice cream cakes on birthdays, to an obsession with the 1933 Chicago World s Fair.