Finding Kukan dir. by Robin Lung (review)

In Finding Kukan, documentary filmmaker Robin Lung positions herself as an intrepid detective, dedicated to solving the mystery of Li Ling-Ai. Who was this Chinese American female filmmaker, and what was her real involvement with the award-winning 1941 documentary Kukan? Lung wonders why no one has heard of this pioneering woman who was erased from film history, like so many other women. To add to the mystery, all copies of the film itself have been lost, despite the fact that Kukan holds an important place in American film history as the first feature-length documentary recognized with an Academy Award. Thus begins Lung’s quest to locate and restore to prominence both the film and its enigmatic heroine, Li Ling-Ai.

Finding Kukan skillfully deploys lessons from Asian American history to illustrate the broader context surrounding Li Ling-Ai and her Chinese American family at the turn of the century. This includes brief discussions of racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act that limited immigration, anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited romantic relationships between whites and Asians, and the way these policies increased anti-Chinese sentiment. Li Ling-Ai is frustrated with being a target of racist slurs and passionate about finding ways to improve the image of China in the minds of American audiences. Her solution is to enlist the assistance of white male photographer Rey Scott in documenting the suffering and perseverance of China and its people in the wake of Japanese occupation during the 1930s. Together they create the eighty-five-minute color documentary Kukan.

While many of the clues about the fate of Kukan are held by members of Scott’s living family members, this documentary wholly belongs to Li Ling-Ai. She passed away in 2003 before Lung learned of her, but raw footage from a 1993 interview is heavily relied upon throughout Finding Kukan to capture her exuberant nature and self-aggrandizing sense of humor. Coupled with clippings from numerous magazine spreads and news photographs capturing the beauty of her youth, we can clearly sense Li Ling-Ai’s presence as a larger-than-life diva. Nonetheless, discovering the truth about Li Ling-Ai is far from easy, and Lung’s journey into the past is perilously obstructed by dead ends, red herrings, and personal doubts.

Indeed, Finding Kukan asks a number of questions that seem simple at the outset but eventually prove thorny. First of all, is it possible to locate the lost film Kukan? Although Lung immediately gets her hands on VHS and 16-mm copies of the film, the restoration process is ultimately wracked with disappointment. This helps the viewer consider what it really means to reconstruct a complete history and why we feel compelled to do so in the first place. In her failure to piece together a complete copy of the film, Lung reminds us that the repression of marginalized narratives can indeed be an insurmountable hurdle and that we may need to be satisfied with the mysteries of an incomplete record. Themes surrounding the persistence of ambiguity throughout the documentary are visually highlighted through the deployment of gorgeous shadow theater, with silhouetted actors and dancers creating shapes against the screen. As viewers use their own imagination to fill in the details, we are reminded that it is sometimes impossible to fully shed light on historical truths.

The second question, of how much credit Li Ling-Ai deserves for her role in creating Kukan, proves even more uncertain. It seems clear that her treatment is partially due to the toxic combination of racism and sexism that have always minimized the role of women of color in American history. Even Li Ling-Ai’s own family members are dismissive of the possibility that she could have been an important historical figure. Lung works to highlight the uncredited work that Li Ling-Ai took on as the film’s producer and uncovers many details about how it was her initiative that pushed the project forward from the beginning. Yet media studies scholars...