Plague at the Golden Gate

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Wednesday, September 28, 2022 | 6:30pm to 8pm

Watch Video: https://vimeo.com/755333808

Join Third World Newsreel and the Documentary Forum at CCNY for an online discussion of the PBS documentary, Plague at the Golden Gate, with producer/director, Li-Shin Yu, including the making of this film, its significance now, and her own path from editing to leading a film.

More than 100 years before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world and set off a wave of fear and anti-Asian sentiment, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900 unleashed a similar furor. It was the first time in history that civilization’s most feared disease — the infamous Black Death — made it to North America. Two doctors — vastly different in temperament, training, and experience — used different methods to lead the seemingly impossible battle to contain the disease before it could engulf the country.

In addition to overwhelming medical challenges, they faced unexpected opposition from business leaders, politicians, and even the president of the United States. Fueling the resistance would be a potent blend of political expediency, ignorance, greed, racism, and deep-rooted distrust of not only federal authority but science itself.

Scapegoated as the source of the disease early on, the Chinese community fought back against unjust, discriminatory treatment. The gripping story of the desperate race against time to save San Francisco and the nation from the deadly disease, Plague at the Golden Gate is based in part on David K. Randall’s critically acclaimed book, Black Death at the Golden Gate.

Watch Full Film: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/plague-golden-gate/#film_description

Resource List for Post-Screening Discussion: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NB9Y5rMdCUFYJkyQyFA7YBxyQvKZ4hcb-MjgQkmjexk/edit

Co-Sponsor
Asian American / Asian Research Institute – CUNY

Author Bio

Li-Shin Yu, is a New York-based filmmaker, editor and director of Plague at the Golden Gate for PBS’s acclaimed series American Experience. Yu co-directed The Chinese Exclusion Act also for American Experience. A long-time collaborator of Ric Burns, their recent film Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is a critic’s choice on the festival and theatrical circuit. Their epic series NEW YORK: a documentary film is an eight-part production chronicling the city's rise from a remote Dutch outpost to the cultural and economic center of the world, for which Yu received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Editing. Yu began her career collaborating with New York independent filmmakers including Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Sara Driver and Peter Wang and more recently with documentarians Christine Choy, Bill Moyers, Thomas Lennon and Stanley Nelson.