As New York City’s Chinatown faces an existential crisis following the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of young Chinese American innovators emerges as a beacon of hope. Chinatown Futures chronicles their journey over four years, as they build the community’s very first small business innovation hub.

Raise support and funds for the remaining production of Chinatown Futures and preparation as we move into post. Currently, we have filmed with the Welcome to Chinatown team for over a year, including the demolition and build of the Small Business Innovation Hub. We hope to continue filming with the team as the Hub officially opens to the Manhattan Chinatown community.

Project Sypnosis

The Covid-19 pandemic was a difficult period for cities across the country. And in New York City, few neighborhoods were hit as hard as Chinatown. Before the coronavirus even touched down in the US, xenophobia was driving people away from Chinatown, driving down business’ revenue as early as January. Vic Lee, a born and raised Brooklynite who had lived in Chinatown for 10 years at that point, saw this and noticed that the streets were eerily empty. As the entire city was shut down in March, Vic saw store after store shuttered, and the few restaurants that stayed open were struggling to survive. Never one to shy away from taking action, Vic wanted to put together a plan. She recruited her longtime friend Jen Tam, also a Chinatown resident by way of Houston, Texas. The two called their project Welcome to Chinatown. After a few false starts, Vic and Jen decided to raise funds via a GoFundMe to purchase takeout meals from Chinatown restaurants that would then be donated to healthcare workers at local hospitals. A few hundred dollars rolled in from friends and family. However, when a reporter helped them get the word out about the project, that few hundred dollars snowballed into tens of thousands.

In the summer of 2023, the team signed a lease for a physical space, named the Welcome to Chinatown Small Business Innovation Hub, or the Hub. The Hub will be the first of its kind in Chinatown, allowing small businesses the resources to innovate and plan long-term strategies, a luxury that few small businesses can afford. The team held a “soft opening” ribbon cutting celebration in the summer of 2023, which was attended by community members and elected officials from US Congress, New York State, and New York City. After 8 months of pilot programming, in the spring of 2024 Welcome to Chinatown underwent a full renovation and began construction on the next phase of the Hub. The documentary will dive into the inspiration and design plans, and see the buildout from raw space to state-of-the-art facility in service of the community. 

Ultimately, we will document the highs and lows of creating and building a grassroots community organization. We watch as Chinatown businesses work through new ideas with Vic and the Welcome to Chinatown team, and ultimately put those ideas into practice. We follow Vic and the team to Houston to learn from Jen’s hometown and the efforts taking place in the community space far from New York. The film’s guiding question is: when the dust has cleared from a crisis, what does it actually take to build off that groundswell of support to create lasting change? How do you build a social support system so that a community thrives in the long term?

Artist Statement

There is an undeniable magic in Chinatowns. My earliest memories engaging with my Chinese heritage are of weekend trips to Boston’s Chinatown, about an hour’s drive from our quiet, homogeneous Massachusetts suburb. These pilgrimages consisted chiefly of dim sum with a strong emphasis on my favorite dish, shrimp cheung fun, or rice rolls. There was also the fragrant bakery serving sponge cake and the grocery store stocked with innumerable sauces and dried goods. It is these memories that form the foundation of my pursuit of Chinatown Futures. As a resident of the New York City area for 20 years, Manhattan’s Chinatown holds an endless fascination to me as a destination in this restless city. I was first able to dive deep into this community in a 2019 short documentary I directed for CNN’s Great Big Story that featured the store Wing On Wo and its young owner Mei Lum. She introduced me to others who, like her, were young and were working at their family’s businesses in the historic neighborhood. Though I wasn’t able to feature them in the short CNN profile, I was moved by their passion, and knew that someday I would revisit this place in my work and shine even more light on this unique community. And when the neighborhood was hit by unprecedented hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic, I knew I had to act. This film will be expanding my practice through an expansion of that short film. My career has consisted largely of producing documentaries and videos that are less than 10 minutes long. While this professional trajectory has given me an unparalleled opportunity to workshop the various crafts of filmmaking across years of work, expanding and developing a longer form documentary piece is an exciting challenge and one that I am ready for. For my independent work such as Chinatown Futures, success is very simple: do I feel that I’ve told the story I wanted to tell in the way that I wanted to tell it? And do the participants feel they’ve been portrayed accurately or, even better, well above their own expectations? I believe that any additional success will not just be supplemental to these simple questions, but will very much be because of them. If the work speaks to myself as a filmmaker and to the participants, then I believe the audience will be there ready to receive the story. I feel that my primary creative challenge is figuring out how to bring a new perspective to covering Chinatown in New York City. There have been so many wonderful pieces about the neighborhood and its businesses, organization leaders, and activists in recent years that have tackled so many different angles. Through following this first-of-its-kind Hub, I believe this story offers a unique perspective on this longstanding neighborhood that showcases how to build towards a future while honoring one’s past. 

Director Bio

Dave Yim is a documentary filmmaker, director, producer, editor, and podcaster. As an independent creative, Yim’s work has appeared in outlets such as NBC, PBS, Bloomberg and Vox, and he has worked directly with clients such as Stripe, Amazon and IDEO. As a storyteller, Yim’s work covers a huge array of interests, ranging from the environment, the Asian American experience, the arts, and urbanism. From an early age, Yim showed an interest in his family’s VHS camcorder, an inclination that grew as he co-led his high school’s film club. After attending NYU’s Tisch School of Arts, Yim worked his way up through various assistant jobs, eventually becoming a staff producer at Bloomberg. He later joined CNN’s Great Big Story, where he helped the team take home an Emmy Award, Webby Award and Telly Award. Chinatown Futures is Yim’s first independently produced documentary film.

Producer Bios

Kitty Hu is a queer, Chinese documentary filmmaker and impact producer. As the daughter of immigrants, Kitty’s work applies community-centered documentary tactics to amplify character-driven stories that reflect the work of our social movements, looking at topics like labor, housing, culture, migration and climate. She recently directed L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement (PBS Artbound) and produced Taste the Nation (Hulu), Wild Hope (PBS), Take Out with Lisa Ling (HBO Max), America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston (PBS). Her personal short documentary, Golden Boy, played in festivals nationally including DOC NYC and LAAPFF. Kitty has served as a juror for the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival and Asian American International, and is a mentor for Cinema Next. She also supports impact and advocacy opportunities at Brown Girls Doc Mafia and is a proud member of the Asian American Documentary Network.

Shannon Sun-Higginson is a first-generation Chinese American documentary and docu-series producer and director born and raised in New York City. With over a decade of experience, her films and shows focus on criminal justice, politics, culture, immigration, and racial and gender equity. Her work has screened at Sundance, SXSW, and Berlinale, and aired on PBS, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, CNN, and HBO. She is a 2021 Sundance Fellow.