“We Are All Responsible for Each Other”: Remembering, Rebuilding, and Dancing Forward in Chinatown Stories

June 5, 2025

Written by Eseel Borlasa, After Bruce

At LAAPFF 2025, two poignant films, Edmund Soohoo: The Heart of Chinatown and To Dance Again, offer layered portraits of Los Angeles Chinatown as a place shaped by struggle, resilience, and care. One looks back across decades of service through the life of a beloved organizer, while the other captures the present-day work of healing after unimaginable loss. Together, these films move across time and tragedy, illuminating what it means to belong to a community that holds tightly to its elders and its joy.

Both films had significant festival debuts this year. Edmund Soohoo: The Heart of Chinatown made its world premiere at LAAPFF 2025. To Dance Again marked its North American premiere at the festival.

EDMUND SOOHOO: THE HEART OF CHINATOWN

Directed by Walt Louie and Visual Communications

Few names evoke as much warmth and reverence in L.A.’s Chinatown as Edmund Soohoo. In a cinematic tribute, directed by Walt Louie and Visual Communications, Soohoo’s legacy is recounted by the people who knew him best. Friends, family, collaborators, and community members reflect on how they were shaped by his spirit of service.

“The film came out of the desire to honor and to remember an amazing person who represented so many aspects of the community he was born into,” Louie shares. “The son of immigrants in Los Angeles Chinatown, he grew up in a very tight closed community which was formed out of necessity due to harsh social and cultural restrictions.”

When Edmund’s father passed away, he stepped into a role few would expect of a child: protector, nurturer, and advocate. “He persevered to make sure that his mother and those around him would succeed and flourish,” Louie recalls. “Edmund had a selfless devotion to his family and local community and then broadened his outreach to other struggling communities to ensure that when times proved to be difficult, he was there to nurture positivity and growth.”

The film includes a rare interview with Edmund recorded just a year before his passing, along with ten interviews with others whose lives intersected with his over nearly 70 years. “Each story presents a different individualistic image,” Louie explains. “These perspectives showcase the diversity and richness of the people who grew up with Edmund, worked with him, and shared in his positive outlook on what makes a community strong.”

Louie also centers the historical context that shaped Soohoo’s values. “The existence of a restricted Chinatown by definition showcases the colonization of the plight of the early immigrants forced to live in segregated tenement housing,” he says. The result is not just a portrait of a man but a cinematic reflection on how oppression shaped the neighborhood and the forms of care that emerged within it.

Looking ahead, Louie envisions this short film as the beginning of something larger. “This initial project has provided bridges to a vast cross-cultural and cross-generational collection of folks who will continue to document and produce an impactful documentary which will grow to a full-length film,” he shares. His goal is for the film to be screened in schools and to reach the thousands who participate in the Chinatown Firecracker 10K. This signature community race, which Soohoo co-founded, has outlasted even the L.A. Marathon in years of continuous operation.

Louie concludes, “The strength and power of Edmund’s commitment to his community will also spark others to follow suit within their own communities.”

TO DANCE AGAIN

Directed by MG Evangelista and Produced by Simone Ling and Robert Winn

While Louie’s film reflects on legacy and service, To Dance Again brings us into Chinatown’s ongoing journey of healing. The short made its North American premiere at LAAPFF 2025, offering a heartfelt look at the Asian American elder community in Monterey Park and Chinatown following the January 2023 mass shooting at a ballroom dance studio. The tragedy, which occurred on the eve of Lunar New Year, claimed eleven lives and left deep wounds in the community.

Ling and her team approached the project with sensitivity and hope. “Working with both the Elders and the Community Services at MPK and Chinatown Services was a gift to the entire team that also was steeped in community,” she says. “The multiple generations that came together to talk about the event from a healing rather than trauma perspective was key.”

At the center of the film is a ballroom dance class initiated by the MPK Hope Resiliency Center. Dance becomes more than movement. It becomes therapy, ritual, and reconnection. “Healing for this project was the main theme,” Ling explains, “alongside care and joy both for the Elders, and most crucially the service workers and mental health workers who provide such meaningful support.”

From start to finish, To Dance Again was shaped by collaboration across age groups. “Multiple generations were involved in this project from the Elders to Boomers and Gen X to Millennials and Gen Z,” Ling notes. “Cooperation and encounter is a key way to allow intergenerational dialogue to occur and to then pass down.”

The filmmaking process also prioritized trust. “The filmmaking team was lucky to have social workers skilled and willing to help as translators,” Ling says. “They had already established trust with the Elders and so they trusted to share their stories, and the team trusted the translation of those feelings.”

One especially human moment stood out. “The crew lunch was devoured by the Elders because it had been left on a communal table,” Ling recounts. “There was something deeply human, culturally embedded, and right somehow about this unexpected moment.”

Ling also reflects on how the composition of the crew itself mirrored the spirit of the project. “The film has a kind and thoughtful lens,” she says, “representative not only of the participants but also the crew and production houses who supported this grant-driven project. While mostly Asian American, the team included a diaspora of identities ranging from student OPT to first generation to mixed backgrounds. This in itself feels like a way to empower communities to think beyond the often divide and conquer efforts that can be imposed.”

A Shared Ethos: Care Is Legacy

In different but deeply connected ways, Edmund Soohoo and To Dance Again examine what it means to live in community. Both recognize that legacy is not only something we inherit; it is something we build and nurture together. Both films engage with memory, not to remain in the past, but to imagine what becomes possible when we carry forward the wisdom of our elders and the courage to keep going.

“The communal effort is in of itself the most powerful tool our current society offers, as long as it is utilized,” Ling reminds us.

And as Louie shows through Soohoo’s enduring impact, “We are all responsible for each other, especially in times of hardship and need.”

These films do not claim to resolve the complexities of grief, violence, or diaspora. Instead, they return us to the essential truths that sustain us. Meals shared. Steps retraced. Stories remembered. And the radical act of continuing to show up for one another.

Again and again.