Full Description
Born in China to Russian Jewish parents fleeing Hitler's Europe, Bay Area filmmaker Ron Levaco had long been haunted by his multicultural past. Over a period of eight years he began to examine his roots by retracing his childhood and returning to China. There he visited Israel Epstein, a fascinating family friend who had moved there as a small child with his Polish revolutionary parents. ROUND EYES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM chronicles Epstein's uncommon life as a Chinese Jew. Epstein's father shunned the colonialist perspective espoused by other Westerners living in China, advising his son that "You're Jewish - never take a superior attitude toward anyone." Epstein himself zealously embraced Mao Zedong's communism as early as 1938 and went on to play a key role in the Maoist propaganda machine. Despite his loyalty, however, Epstein was denounced in the tumult of the Cultural Revolution and imprisoned in a dark jail cell. Freed years later and given an opportunity to emigrate to a good life in the United States, Epstein decided that China was his home. With incredible archival footage, home movies, and interviews with Epstein in his current Beijing home, Levaco probes the mystery of his subject's decision in this insightful investigation into history, fate, politics and identity. Winner, 1996 Judah Magnes Museum's Jewish Video Competition.
Filmmaker Bio(s)
Producer-Director Ronald Levaco was born in China in 1940, where his early education was divided between British schools in Tientsin (Tianjin) and Shanghai. Chinese was his first language. Since 1970 he has been on the faculty of the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, a 23 year position he left as a full professor in 1993 to pursue his own fihmnaking and writing projects. He has participated in producing several documentaries, including RESTORATION RAG (30 min.; on the moving of San Francisco's oldest house in the Haight Ashbury district, for KQED); and SCENES FROM A MEDIATION (45 min.; on male- female conflict and its resolution, produced for The Center for the Study of Mediation in Law and distributed nationally). He is presently working on a comedy about Esperanto that he plans to direct himself.
Levaco was the first American film graduate named to the USA-USSR Exchange in 1968-69, is fluent in Russian, and did his post-doctoral research at The Soviet Film Institute in Moscow. He holds a Ph.D. in Cinema from The Center for the Study of Soviet Film, School of Communications, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. In 1974 he published a book titled, "KULESHOV ON FILM" (University of California Press) about the eminent early Russian film director and theorist, Lev Kuleshov. Levaco is the author of numerous articles on filmmaking, published in such journals as Sight and Sound, Film Quarterly, Screen, and Cinema Journal. His current film, ROUND EYES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM, premiered on the opening night of the Hawaii International Film Festival, November 1995, in Honolulu.
