A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2015
Original Title:
Oriental Silk
Genres:
Documentary
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 30
Part of a long-term project of the same name, Oriental Silk is about touch and tactility, craft and value, and the colors of memory. The Oriental Silk emporium, located in Los Angeles, was the first Chinese silk importing business in the United States after WWII. Established more than four decades ago, the shop, which has risen alongside the Hollywood film industry, becomes a productive place to reflect on the astonishing histories of twentieth-century migration and to critique the idea of the American Dream. Through the worldview of the shop owner Kenneth Wong, the beauty of silk and its wondrous craftsmanship stand for the human pursuits that link people and places—and provide purpose—across time and borders.
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.