Blue Skies Over Chinatown: Rediscovering Chinese Cable Television
Blue Skies Over Chinatown: Rediscovering Chinese Cable Television
Friday, November 13, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th floor
From 1976 to 1983, a group of filmmakers and activists in Manhattan's Chinatown built something radical with an utopic vision: a community-run television station broadcasting in Cantonese, by and for the neighborhood. For seven years, Chinese Cable Television (CCTV) covered labor strikes, battles against gentrification, neighborhood services, and Hong Kong soap dramas—all from a loft on East Broadway.
This screening presents selected digitized CCTV broadcasts drawn from the Asian CineVision Records at NYU's Special Collections. Footage includes coverage of the 1980 Silver Palace Restaurant strike, boycott campaign against the launch of the film Charlie Chan: The Curse of Dragon Queen, and the historic 1982 garment workers' rally that mobilized over 20,000 Chinese immigrant women.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with documentary filmmaker and former CCTV producer Nancy Tong.
This screening is curated by Koel Chu (MIAP '27). Co-sponsored by NYU Special Collections.
This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.
About the Speaker
Nancy M. Tong has been an active member of the Asian American media community since 1981 when she arrived in New York and joined Asian CineVision as the executive producer of their daily Cantonese language news program on Manhattan Cable Channel M. She held key positions on documentaries for HBO, PBS, and ABC. Her credits include Associate Producer of Who Killed Vincent Chin?, Co-Producer of the HBO documentary Cancer: from Evolution to Revolution,Director of In the Name of the Emperor, a film on the Nanjing Massacre, and Producer/Director of Trailblazers in Habits, which was aired on ABC network.
She also managed the New York production of award-winning Hong Kong feature films such as Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale, Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York and Clara Law’s Farewell China. In 2000, she moved to Hong Kong to teach documentary production to college students, and to Muslim women filmmakers in China, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia. Since 2020, she has been mentoring several young Hong Kong filmmakers on their documentaries on the 2019 protest movement. Some of her work is on permanent exhibition at New York's Museum of Chinese in America (MoCA).