ABSTRACT
Writer-director S. Louisa Wei explores the pioneering career of female filmmaker, Esther Eng, in her documentary, Golden Gate Girls. Born decades apart, these two women share a common love for the cinema, an impulse to put women's stories on screen, and a talent for crossing national, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Both women act as what Pierre Bourdieu terms ‘cultural intermediaries’ at different points in cinema history. In fact, their transnational networks and diasporic experiences make them cross-cultural intermediaries operating between Chinese and English-language publics. Examining how these two filmmakers function in that capacity as women within the Chinese diaspora highlights the important role cinema continues to play as a commercial enterprise as well as a marker of changing tastes in culture. Moreover, by focusing on women as cultural intermediaries, this analysis underscores the ways in which personal and professional networks enable female filmmakers to operate in male-dominated fields.
