Sewing Woman is a 1982 American short documentary film directed by Arthur Dong about one woman's journey to America, from an arranged marriage in old China to life in San Francisco. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1984."Sewing Woman." www.deepfocusproductions.com. Retrieved November 9, 2017.
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"Arthur Dong: Awards." imdb.com. Retrieved November 9, 2017."56th Academy Awards: DOCUMENTARY (Short Subject): Sewing Woman-- Arthur Dong, Producer (Nominee)." www.awardsdatabase.oscars.org. Retrieved November 9, 2017.
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Sewing Woman is oral history of the filmmaker's mother, Zem Ping Dong, who immigrated from China and worked in San Francisco's garment industry for over thirty years.
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According to the Nihon Shoki, all the seamstresses of the village of Kume (來目) in Yamato province hailed from a sewing woman, Maketsu (眞毛津) who was given as tribute by the king of Baekje to the Yamato court.Tokyo National Museum, p.3.
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A ten-year-old girl visits a sewing woman to have a cheerleading outfit made. As the woman works, the girl observes her unflattering make up and pitiful living conditions. A postcard hung on a wall depicting Florida and a television playing "Queen for a Day" in the background serve to further amplify the feelings of longing and misfortune present in the story, and stand in contrast with the young girl's naive and relatively carefree perception of the world.
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Pieter Brueghel the Elder made peasants and their activities, very naturalistically treated, the subject of many of his paintings, and genre painting was to flourish in Northern Europe in Brueghel's wake. Interior with Sewing Woman, c. 1800-1810 by Wybrand Hendriks Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade, Jan Steen, Adriaan Brouwer, David Teniers, Aelbert Cuyp, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch were among the many painters specializing in genre subjects in the Low Countries during the 17th century. The generally small scale of these artists' paintings was appropriate for their display in the homes of middle class purchasers.
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In 1982, Dong founded DeepFocus Productions, Inc, where he continues to serve as producer, director, writer, and distributor. He received a nomination for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1984 for Sewing Woman, a film about his mother's immigration from China to America; a Peabody Award in 1995 for Coming Out Under Fire, which documented the US military's WW2 policy on gays in the military; and two Sundance Film Festival Awards for his profile of convicted murderers who killed gay men, Licensed to Kill. Other honors include five Emmy nominations, the Berlin Film Festival's Teddy Award, the Golden Horse Award from Taiwan, as well as being selected a Sundance Documentary Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow in Film, and a Rockefeller Fellow in Media Arts. For television, Dong was an associate producer for KGO-TV in San Francisco from 1981 to 1982 and a producer at KCET in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1992 (producing for Life & Times).
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In Kindred, Butler portrays individual slaves as distinctive people, giving each his or her own story. Robert Crossley argues that Butler treats the blackness of her characters as "a matter of course", to resist the tendency of white writers to incorporate African Americans into their narratives just to illustrate a problem or to divorce themselves from charges of racism. Thus, in Kindred the slave community is depicted as a "rich human society": the proud yet victimized freewoman-turned-slave Alice; Sam the field slave, who hopes Dana will teach his brother; the traitorous sewing woman Liza, who frustrates Dana's escape; the bright and resourceful Nigel, Rufus's childhood friend who learns to read from a stolen primer; most importantly, Sarah the cook, who Butler transforms from an image of the submissive, happy "mammie" of white fiction to a deeply angry yet caring woman subdued only by the threat of losing her last child, the mute Carrie.In Kindred, by Octavia Butler.
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