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The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) and the Mellon Foundation announce a $1M grant to support CAAM’s Memories to Light initiative that digitizes and archives Asian American home movies and makes the footage available to filmmakers and the public. Over five years, this investment will help the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization build its infrastructure and financial resiliency to sustain this critical audiovisual archive.
“CAAM is grateful for this generous support from the Mellon Foundation, especially at a time when Asian American stories, along with those from many diverse communities, are at risk of being lost,” says CAAM Executive Director Don Young. “Memories to Light is an important archive for joint remembrance and authentic voice, building shared social and cultural representations of Asian America directly from the community itself.”
Since its inception in 2013, CAAM’s Memories to Light has preserved footage from over 50 families, spanning the 1920s to 1980s and currently including Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese backgrounds. Since nonfiction media representations of Asian Americans from this era were rare, these community-sourced videos are crucial to recording this history that is an inherent part of the U.S. experience.
This infusion of funding will start CAAM on the process of strengthening its infrastructure to meet the influx of content that will be forthcoming as the community seeks to archive the more prolific media from the late 20th century, and as images from the mid-20th century recorded on 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm film formats are at increasing risk of deterioration and loss over time.
One example is the trove of photographs and movies captured by San Francisco photographer Bob Hsiang, including Super-8 footage of Asian Americans at the March on Washington in 1971. Hsiang’s contributions also include negatives of photographs taken at early Asian American film festivals in the Bay Area, a predecessor of the current CAAMFest annual presentation of films from Asian America.
Many Memories to Light images are already viewable by the public and available for licensing by filmmakers seeking historical images. Memories to Light footage has already been used in acclaimed documentaries such as the PBS Asian Americans series, the Emmy Award-winning documentary Free Chol Soo Lee, and The Chinese Exclusion Act. Footage donated by the Bohulano family of Stockton, California was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Archives in 2023, proving the historic significance of these moving images.
Highlights of the Memories to Light archive can be found on the YouTube CAAM Channel, Prelinger Archives (on the Internet Archive), and California Revealed.
