Re:Vision: My Name Ain’t Suzie

THU, SEP 24 | 7 PM Roxie Theater

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This screening will open with Len Lye’s animated short film RAINBOW DANCE. The film was restored by San Francisco Film Preserve and scanned utilizing Scan2Screen’s multispectral scanning technology. The original elements are preserved at the British Film Institute. This restoration was undertaken in close collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and Ngā Taonga National Archive.

In My Name Ain’t Suzie, Angie Chen offers a powerful rebuke to the colonial imagination of films such as The World of Suzie Wong (1960), bringing post-war Hong Kong to life on her own terms. Shui-Mei (Patricia Ha), a “salt water girl” from the outskirts of the city, finds a way out of poverty in the Red Light district of Wan Chai. Over the years, she rises through the ranks, discovering a world of equal hardship and sisterly camaraderie, where colorful characters abound – among them Jimmy (Anthony Wong, in his debut role), a mixed-race kid looking for his father in the crowd of thirsty American sailors.

Penned by John Chan Koon Chung (My Heart Is That Eternal Rose), My Name Ain’t Suzie brings a New Wave sensibility to the waning years of the Shaw Brothers Studio with a decade-spanning epic that resourcefully reconstructs a bygone era of Cantonese cinema. A rags-to-riches story blending romance and brothel drama, Chen’s film is above all a tale of feminine resilience at the nexus of historical events and shifting colonial powers. — Kani Releasing

Restored in 2026 by Kani Releasing at L’Immagine Ritrovata Asia laboratory, from the original 35mm camera negative and a 35mm print with burnt-in bilingual subtitles. Grading finalized at qooop laboratory. DCP provided by Kani Releasing. Courtesy of Celestial Pictures Ltd.

My Name Ain’t Suzie will screen with the following short:

SHE SAID WHY ME (May Fung, Hong Kong, 1989) 7m, DCP
In She Said Why Me, a blindfolded woman feels her way along the facades of late colonial Hong Kong architecture, anxiously journeying between historical trauma and personal identification in this pioneering video artwork. The video was shot in 1989, not long after the deadly massacre at Tiananmen Square and is situated within Hong Kong’s passage from the hands of one colonial power to another. Fung was interested in the way that women were framed in archival footage, in flashes of protest and in the shapes of everyday walks in the city. Her selections center on the risks taken by these women, who include picketers in the 1967 uprisings and the Chinese political figure Soong Ching-ling. — Elise Schierbeek

Digitized in 2011 by Videotage from VHS.

Runtime
1h 41m

Year
1985

Director
Angie Chen

Format
DCP

Country
Hong Kong

Language
Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles

First Showing
September 24, 2026

Categories

RE:VISION — FESTIVAL OF RESTORATION AND REDISCOVERY
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Roxie Theater

3117 16th Street
District: Dogpatch Area: San Francisco