08/04/2025
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Golden Gate Girls Documentary Recommendations & Comments:
Elizabeth Kerr (Critic, The Hollywood Reporter): Documentary filmmaker S. Louise Wei sheds much-needed light on a hidden piece of Hollywood, Hong Kong, women’s, and Asian-American film history. … One of Golden Gate’s strengths is its seamless ability to weave history, Sino-U.S. relations, and social standards together to allow for inference and context.
Derek Elley (Film Critic, Film Business Asia): Hong Kong film teacher Wei frames her film as a personal journey of exploration, following the traces of Eng's trail from Asia to the US, tracking down any survivors who knew of her, and assembling every piece of information that remains. The portrait emerges of an energetic, sunny, and determined woman for whom "boundaries of race, language, culture, and gender... did not seem to exist."
Kevin M. Thomas (Critic, The Examiner, San Francisco): “Golden Gate Girls” is a beautiful documentary by Louisa Wei, who digs deep into the past to tell us of pioneering le***an director Esther Eng, one of the first female (and q***r) Chinese American directors. Wei’s film is more than a loving tribute to Eng, set to the most amazing jazz music, but Wei also pays tribute to other pioneering and le***an filmmakers such as Dorothy Arzner, who paved the road for many of our more recent female directors, gay or straight. The 90-minute film is also a beautiful reflection of early San Francisco, where Eng made many of her movies. The film can cover a lot of ground with its short run time.
Kimberly Chun (Critic, San Francisco Bay Guardian): What gets lost in translation? These directors, more often than not, foreground their attempts to read between the lines and pe*****te a fog of forgetfulness and counter-histories in order to get to a few truths, subjective and otherwise. Such is the case of Hong Kong documentarian S. Louisa Wei, who unearths the once-dumpster-relegated tale of SF Chinatown-born-and-bred Esther Eng, the first Chinese American woman director, in Golden Gate Girls — with rich, mixed results.
Patricia White (Professor and Chair, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College, Board member, Women Make Movies): In Golden Gate Girls, Louisa Wei tells the story of one remarkable woman and uncovers a rich chapter of film history that challenges both gender hierarchies and national narratives. With a captivating archive of hundreds of newly discovered images, prodigious research, and interviews with those who knew her, the film tells the story of San Francisco-born Esther Eng, the first woman to direct Chinese-language films in the US and the most prominent woman director in Hong Kong in the 1930s. She was also out as a le***an—she sported mannish attire and lived with her leading lady. While Eng later became a celebrity as a New York restaurateur, her contribution to film history is sadly overlooked, her 11 feature films mostly lost.
Golden Gate Girls restores Eng to her place in history, weaving her story in and out of those of Hollywood contemporaries, director Dorothy Arzner, and actress Anna May Wong. With her oeuvre of women’s pictures, proud sexual and ethnic identity, and transnational career, Eng is an ideal subject for the novel forms of historiography scholars have devised to illuminate those fascinating figures. Wei, in turn, is an ideal interpreter, animating the archive with very contemporary questions of agency and cultural exchange. Through commentary on the tantalizing photographic record, she invites viewers to project their own movie fantasies onto the gaps in the historical record.
Bérénice Reynaud (Curator for San Sebastian Film Festival and Vienna Film Festival, Professor of Film at California Institute of the Arts): Esther Eng gave Bruce Lee his first role as an infant (talk about “casting intuition”). She made films on both sides of the Pacific, in Cantonese, for the larger Chinese diaspora. She was openly gay at a time when few women were out and won respect both in the film industry and the restaurant business. Born in the first year of WWI in San Francisco, she lived and made films through WWII and died in New York on the cusp of the 1970s. Yet, until the last few years, there was virtually no account of her life and work. Louisa Wei is an uncommon director: she teaches film theory while making films and writing books that investigate hidden corners of Chinese history or the untold achievements of female directors. Golden Gate Girls is alluringly posited at the intersection of these fields: how women’s contribution to film history overlaps with the tumultuous History of the 20th century. Professor Wei taps into her own trajectory as a diasporic Chinese woman (born in Shandong, educated in Canada, living a few years in Japan, and working in Hong Kong) to try and re-create what it must have meant “to be Esther Eng.” Through her minute research and intuitive editing, Eng’s beautiful face looks back at us, forcing her to reconsider what we thought we knew; we decipher the subtle traces she left in the streets of San Francisco and New York and, at moments, it seems that we hear her silenced voice whisper in our ears.
Deirdre Boyle (Professor, The New School of Social Research, New York): I was impressed with the aesthetics of this film. I think it is a beautifully crafted film, with everything from the animation for the titles and some of the sequences to the beautiful sound design. Sound designs in documentaries have been a lost art until recent years. A number of filmmakers have recognized the importance of sound design, not to use sound to cover up mistakes or to make continuity when it doesn’t exist, but to use it artfully so that sound takes on a greater role. I think Louisa, who worked with brilliant saxophones and was a composer, created a very evocative sound of the period. It is not just found sound, it is the sound that supports the momentum of the film."
Gina Marchetti (Professor and Chair of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute, New York): Louisa Wei takes us on a journey of discovery in the footsteps of the remarkable Esther Eng, who defied gender expectations and racial hierarchies as an early Chinese American woman filmmaker. While investigating Eng’s screen career and personal life, Wei opened up the world of the Chinese diaspora in the interwar period to a greater appreciation of the role women played in the film industry. A woman pioneer in her own right, Wei provides a sensitive portrait of this intrepid but largely neglected filmmaker who too easily fell through the cracks between Asian American and Chinese screen history.
Stacilee Ford (Hon Associate Lecturer, Department of History, Hong Kong University): Golden Gate Girls is cultural history at its best. Esther Eng's life is a transnational tale of connecting pasts, and her films are an understudied and (until now) unappreciated archive of transpacific flows. Louisa Wei's formidable talents as a scholar/researcher and as a director are lovingly poured into 90 minutes of lively and thoughtful recuperative biography. In addition to restoring Eng to her proper place in the history of film, US, and transpacific history, Wei manages to tell several other stories that show how women's networks have been shaping Hollywood and individuals and communities for decades.
