Nancy Bannick: Saving Honolulu's Chinatown

Nancy Bannick: Saving Honolulu’s Chinatown premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival in November 2022. It is a timely tale of what can happen when engaged citizens fight to preserve the neighborhoods they love. Nancy Bannick moved to Hawai‘i in 1950 and worked for more than 20 years as the editor of the travel publication Sunset magazine. In the early 1960s when federally funded urban renewal projects began destroying large portions of Honolulu’s Chinatown, Bannick raised community alarm with a series of front-page articles she wrote for the Honolulu Advertiser, accompanied by her photographs. Nancy was a community advocate and activist who led the charge to declare Chinatown a historic district in 1973. This short documentary is an inspiring tale of one woman’s activism as well as an image-rich ode to Honolulu’s past.

Robin Lung is a 4th generation Chinese American from Hawai‘i with an 18-year history of bringing untold minority and women’s stories to film. Lung made her directorial debut with Washington Place: Hawai‘i’s First Home, a 30-minute documentary for PBS Hawai‘i about the legacy of Hawaiʻi’s Queen Lili‘uokalani and her personal home. She was the associate producer for the national PBS documentary Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority, and producer/director of the feature documentary Finding KUKAN, which was selected to be broadcast nationally on PBS World’s America ReFramed series and has won multiple awards at film festivals across America. Lung produced and directed the "Nancy Bannick Photographic Slide Collection" in 2021 and "Nancy Bannick: Saving Honolulu's Chinatown" in 2022.