Logline
An embodied camera searches for the “truth” hidden behind the facade of the oldest alleyway in San Francisco Chinatown, finding its way between past and present, imagination and reality, and the seen and seer.
Duration
4’47’’
Screenings
NOWNESS Short Film Awards, Shanghai PSA, China, Dec. 2023
Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, USA, Jan. 2024
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, North Carolina, Apr. 2024
Tiny Film Festival, Long Beach, CA, USA, Apr. 2024
Hamburg Chinese Film Festival, Germany, May 2024
The Roxie Mixtape #7, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 2024
Reviews
“The most experimental of the documentary shorts is Shirley Yumeng’s He’s Fortune. The only active photography sees the film observe a fortune cookie factory at work, beyond that we are talking about a film that is truly a “document”. 16mm cinematography observes the life, tourism and residents of an American Chinatown offering magical realism through some expressively edited black and white footage and sequences all observed from afar. Fortune presents a well-designed soundscape that captures the soul of the Chinese American community without ever uttering a word – beyond those half-heard in the sound mix, at least. A very impressive work of art that stretches the boundaries of what makes a documentary tick. And, to continue this year’s Slamdance theme of being very personal, it does so without a single subject coming remotely close to addressing the camera’s gaze.”
— The Geek Show
Filmmaker Statement
Visiting San Francisco Chinatown for the first time, I was struck by the overwhelming sensory stimulations and even more, by a strange sense of uncanniness. The architecture, the languages, the open-air food market, the faces, all of these seem familiar yet utterly unfamiliar. As a Chinese immigrant in America, I set off to make this film as a portrait of Ross Alley, an attempt to make sense of not only the space but also my hybrid identity as an inbetweener sandwiched between two languages, two places, two cultures, just like the alleyway as a physical bridge between two main streets.
To understand my own hybrid identity as well as Chinatown and the Chinese-American experience at large, I was guided by these questions during the filmmaking process: What makes Chinatown different from the rest of San Francisco? What is behind the fabricated facade of the architectural styles? Who lives behind the windows above the tourist attractions? How to make peace with the between and the betwixt? I recognize this film as a return to my cultural heritage in its embracing of messiness. Different from the Western preference for light and tidiness, East Asian aesthetics sees beauty in the shadow, as detailed in Tanizaki’s canonical work In Praise of Shadows. In the shadow, the remnant holds sway. Behind the visible – where light can reach – the layer of tourism and commodification of culture, there is the shadow, the hard-to-see, and hard-to-define — from the residents who live in Chinatown to the traces of the immigration history imprinted on the decaying material surface of the place. The word, fortune, carries multiple layers of meaning. It indicates wealth, luck, and signifies a force that is outside of human control. To encapsulate the film with one word as its, Fortune invites its viewer to be curious of the different layers at play in the geographical space of the alleyway as well as with regard to the Chinese American immigrant identity.