Biography
ARTHUR DONG 曾奕田
San Francisco native Arthur Dong’s film career began with Public (1970), an animated Super-8 film shot on his bedroom floor. Based on a poem written by Dong, Public tells the story of a child’s response to oppressive societal norms and the culture of violence surrounding him. The five-minute film earned first prize at the California High School Film Festival and was the young filmmaker’s first introduction to the power of film as a tool for progressive change. In his award-winning films since then, Dong has continued to combine the art of the visual medium with an investigation of social issues.
As a film student at San Francisco State University, Dong produced Sewing Woman (1982), a documentary about his mother’s immigration to American from China. The film went on to receive an Academy Award® nomination, and instead of signing with a distributor, Dong started his own company, DeepFocus Productions, Inc, which continues to develop, produce, and distribute his work.
In 2010, Dong released his second DVD collection, “Stories from Chinese America.” It includes the collector’s edition of his two feature documentaries: Hollywood Chinese (2007), a landmark examination of the Chinese in American feature films and Forbidden City, U.S.A., a ground-breaking account of the Chinese American nightclub scene during World War II. The box set also features three earlier short films that comprise A Toisan Trilogy, which includes Sewing Woman, the Oscar®-nominated documentary based on the filmmaker’s mother; Lotus, a fictionalized film exploring the conflicts over footbinding; and Living Music for Golden Mountains, Dong’s 1981 documentary directorial debut profiling his Chinese music teacher. In addition to the full-length versions of each film, Stories from Chinese America premieres the newly scored and restored 1916 film, The Curse of Quon Gwon, the earliest known Chinese American feature film that Dong helped rescue during his work on Hollywood Chinese.
“Stories from the War on Homosexuality,” Dong’s first DVD collection, puts together his trilogy of films covering the challenges and conflicts over gay issues. It includes Family Fundamentals (2002), a look at America’s culture wars over homosexuality as experienced by three conservative Christian families with gay children; Licensed to Kill (1997), a study of murderers who killed gay men; and Coming Out Under Fire (1994), an examination of the World War II origins of the military’s policies governing gay and lesbian service members.
From 1991-1992, Dong produced thirteen documentaries for the Los Angeles PBS program on KCET-TV, Life & Times. For PBS’s first national series on the gay and lesbian issues, The Question of Equality, Dong directed the premiere episode, Out Rage '69 (1995), which explored the New York City Stonewall Riots, an event many historians cite as the catalyst for the modern gay and lesbian civil rights movement.
In addition to an Oscar® nomination, Dong has earned a George Foster Peabody Award, three Sundance Film Festival awards, the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Award, Taiwan’s Golden Horse Award, and five Emmy nominations. His numerous awards for public service include the Asian American Media Award from Asian CineVision, the Historian Award from the Chinese Historical Society of America, the Pioneer Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans, two consecutive GLAAD Media Awards (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and the OUT 100 Award from OUT magazine, which was presented to Dong "for waging a one-man anti-violence project with his documentary on convicted murderers of homosexuals, Licensed to Kill. Indeed, “for his continued success in the challenging arena of independent documentary filmmaking and his longstanding commitment to social justice,” San Francisco State University named Dong its 2007 Alumnus of the Year.
Dong’s feature-length documentaries have been theatrically distributed throughout America and his films have and continue to be featured in hundreds of festivals worldwide. In addition to domestic broadcasts on PBS and the Sundance Channel, his films have been televised in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at the Human Rights International Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hawaii International Film Festival, and Outfest in Los Angeles.
Funding for Dong’s work has been received from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the Center for Asian American Media, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, American Documentary, the Hugh Hefner Foundation, the California Council for Humanities, the American Film Institute, the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, among many others.
Dong has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and two Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowships. In 1984, he was selected a Directing Fellow to attend the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies. Over the years, Dong has served on the boards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Film Independent, Outfest, and the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. He has been invited as a documentary juror for the Sundance Film Festival, the International Documentary Festival at Amsterdam, the Morelia International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, Outfest, and others. He recently served as a curator for the exhibitions, Chop Suey on Wax: the Flower Drum Song Album at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, and Hollywood Chinese: the Arthur Dong Collection at the Chinese America Museum in Los Angeles.