In 1933, at makeshift offices tucked inside San Francisco Chinatown, Joseph Sunn Jue founded the Grandview Film Company and embarked on a cinematic venture that spanned the Pacific Ocean. A director, producer, writer, exhibitor, and entrepreneur, Jue operated one of America’s earliest independent film studios, producing more than twenty-five feature films there during the 1930s and 1940s. The studio also emerged as an innovative force in Hong Kong up to the late 1950s, helping advance the use of sound, color, 3D, and the widescreen.
Grandview Film: Cinematic Crossings with Joseph Sunn Jue is the culmination of writer Arthur Dong’s forty-year search for the story of Joseph Sunn Jue and the Grandview Film Company. What started with one filmmaker and his studio has expanded into a collective portrait of the filmmakers, performers, and technicians whose work connected San Francisco and Hong Kong through film. Dong chronicles how these artists sustained their creative pursuits through decades of exclusion laws, war, migration, and political change, bringing together the histories of Chinese American filmmaking, Hong Kong cinema, and even Cantonese opera.
Richly illustrated with over 700 photographs, film memorabilia, and archival documents, Grandview Film draws on oral histories and Jue’s rediscovered memoirs—licensed exclusively to Dong. It reconstructs a transpacific network through the lives of Joseph Sunn Jue, engineer Clifton Skinner, and collaborators Chow Kwun-Ling, Lai Yee, Luk Wan-Fei, Wong Chiu-Mo, and Wong Hock-Sing to illuminate a world that flourished outside the boundaries of Hollywood, where yellowface, stereotypes, and erasure were commonplace. The book also spotlights the contributions of filmmakers Esther Eng, Moon Kwan, and Chiang Wai-Kwong to further reveal the breadth of this interconnected film culture.
A landmark work of film history and recovery, Grandview Film restores the extraordinary artists behind Grandview to their rightful place in the story of cinema on both sides of the Pacific.
Grandview Film: Cinematic Crossings with Joseph Sunn Jue is the final installment in Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker and American Book Award-winning author Arthur Dong’s trilogy of visual monographs on Chinese American artists in film and performance, following Forbidden City, USA: Chinatown Nightclubs, 1936–1970 and Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films.
Publication anticipated in 2027.
Read more about the actors, directors, writers, and technicians who were a part of Grandview’s creative team:
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