Film screening event.
Friday, October 17, 2025
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Kaplan A26
Professor Louisa Wei will be screening HAVANA DIVAS. The screening will be followed by an casual reception in Kaplan 193, featuring four talented students: Shenandoah Márkos 馬晶晶, Anthony Lam 林智遠，Ella Li 李亦甜, and Pete Sparks 張宇航.
Havana Divas
Directed by S. Louisa Wei
2018 | 96 minutes
SYNOPSIS
Stage-sisters Caridad Amaran and Georgina Wong, both of Chinese descent, learned the art of Cantonese opera from their fathers in Havana, Cuba in the 1930s. Caridad’s Chinese foster father immigrated to Cuba in the 1920s after his family forbade him to perform opera. Georgina’s father was a famous tailor in a Havana Chinatown, who encouraged her to learn kung-fu and traditional Chinese dance. The daughters spent their youth performing throughout Havana and among other notable singers until their lives were changed by Fidel Castro’s revolution. In their golden years, the two sisters attempt to revive Cantonese opera in a worn-out Cuban Chinatown and, together, make a new wish: to return to their fathers’ Chinese homelands to pay their respects.
HAVANA DIVAS offers a window into over 170 years of Chinese migration to Cuba. Through present-day interviews, precious photographs, and archival footage, director S. Louisa Wei (dir. GOLDEN GATE GIRLS) explores the shifting culture of Cantonese opera through a historical time and place. The film reveals the female spirit of the two stage sisters and makes an important contribution to a growing body of films documenting female artists and performers within the Chinese Diaspora.
S. Louisa Wei is a documentary filmmaker and a member of Hong Kong Director’s Guild since 2018. She is also an award-winning writer and an Associate Professor teaching film related courses in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Wei has four documentary features to date: Storm Under the Sun (2009, co-director Xiaolian Peng), Golden Gate Girls (2014), Havana Divas (2019), and A Life in Six Chapters (2022). She also made three TV documentaries, Writing 10000 Miles (2019, RTHK), Wang Shiwei: The Buried Writer (2017), and Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006, Cable TV HK).
Among her works, Golden Gate Girl portrays the life and times of Esther Eng, once honored “South China’s first woman director.” The documentary has received positive reviews and attention from The Hollywood Reporter, Voice of America, South China Morning Post, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. Elizabeth Kerr of The Hollywood Reporter praised the documentary for its seamless ability to weave history, Sino-U.S. relations and social standards together to allow for inference and context. Havana Divas is a sister work covering the Chinese immigrants’ life and the traveling Cantonese Opera in the Chinatowns of North and Latin America. It focuses on the art of two divas who learned and performed Cantonese Opera in Havana in the 1940s and performed throughout the country. They made their way to Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, China, in their 80s, finding a new audience out of expectation. Both films have travelled to many film festivals around the world.
King-Kok Cheung cheung@humnet.ucla.edu