Coming to the World Channel’s Doc World series this Sunday, May 14:
FINDING SAMUEL LOWE
Director:
Jeanette Kong
Premiere:
Los Angeles Pan African 2014
Select Festivals:
Urbanworld, Trinidad & Tobago, San Diego Black, ReelWorld
About:
A woman of mixed Jamaican/Chinese heritage tracks down the long-lost Asian side of her family.
Together with her siblings, Paula Williams Madison, a successful television executive, traces the history of her family, and, specifically, the Asian background of her Jamaican-born mother, partly out of a desire to reclaim African American heritage that doesn’t exclusively begin with slavery. She learns about her maternal grandfather, a man named Samuel Lowe, a Chinese immigrant working on Jamaica’s plantations, who returned to his homeland when Paula’s mother was only a young girl. Through her investigations, she eventually finds information which leads her to discover a large extended family of relatives in China. Kong’s film yields a few moments of curiosity, but otherwise takes a conventional, workmanlike approach which robs the story of conflict or drama.
what (not) to doc 