Dear

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematographer: Steve Cossman, Cynthia Madansky
Performance: Anna Yu, Shu Xia Zhao
Voice: Joanna Lin, Shuxia Tao
Production: Xiao Li Tan
Music: Ikue Mori
8 mm ◊ 15 min.

In 2004 Cynthia Madansky found a diary of a teenage girl in the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, filled with tributes to the then recently deceased Hong Kong icon Leslie Chung. Ten years later, the writing formed the conceptual seed for Dear, a diary film portraying the evolving friendship of two teenage girls (Anna Yu and Shu Xia Zhao) living in Chinatown.

Throughout, handheld color and black and white Super 8mm footage of the teens and of the neighborhood—a world into itself—is shaped and refracted through the protagonists’ exchanged missives, voiced in English and Mandarin. The Chinatown of Dear is polyvalent—it is a site of freedom, of containment, of community, of belonging, of alienation, of gentrification, of dreams.

The relationship between the two friends is similarly mercurial. While structured around their exchanges and adolescent dreams, the piece gradually expands to consider their families and the specific pressures placed upon them, as well as budding romances. Pushed in one direction, and pulled in another, we get the sense of how fragile this bond is, and of the threats placed on it by external forces. To this extent the film can be extrapolated onto bigger scale questions of community and connection, while never abandoning its sense of intimacy.