When filmmaker Hansen Lin opened the door to a building in the borough of Queens, New York, he didn’t realize he was entering a portal to the immigrant experience in America.
Lin, producer of the award-winning documentary Always, was scouting a film project when he stumbled upon the edifice in the Chinatown section of Flushing.
“It’s completely dark outside, but the inside is really colorful,” he recalls. “It already has this mystery.”
Lin had inadvertently crossed the threshold into a Queens ballroom where Asian American seniors dance, socialize, and preserve something of the culture they left behind in coming to the U.S. That chance encounter set Lin on the quest to make a documentary, which he just pitched at the prestigious CPH:FORUM in Copenhagen. The film, which he’s directing and producing with Siyi Chen, is in a late stage of development.
“We just followed our curiosity… We don’t know who are these people, why this place exists,” Lin tells Deadline in Copenhagen. “We started asking all these dancers from the ballroom how they ended up being here, being in the United States and being in the ballroom. That actually opened a really colorful world that we can’t imagine.”
‘Queens Ballroom’
Queens Disco Production LLC
Spending significant time at the ballroom allowed the filmmakers to identify potential participants in a documentary.
“We were just chatting with them, getting to know them,” Chen says. “It was a very long casting process.”
Ultimately, they settled on three protagonists: “Mary, 70, headstrong and sharp-tongued,” as the filmmakers write in the CPH:FORUM guide. “You wouldn’t guess she used to be a judge in China or that she left it all behind in the ‘90s, including her husband and son, to start over in America.”
Aaron, in his 60s, is “a romantic and a hustler, always dressed to impress or to hide how success keeps slipping through his fingers.” Jimmy, the oldest of the three protagonists at age 83, “lost the love of his life twenty years ago – and with it, a part of himself… The ballroom is the only place he allows himself to imagine another person’s touch – to feel connected and alive – even if only as a silent spectator. Could he find the strength to rise and dance one last time?”
The ballroom is a world of sequins and secrets, the filmmakers discovered — or to put it another way, a place with an active rumor mill.
“Through all this gossip, we hear how some drama happens in the ballroom,” Lin notes. “Hearing more and more gossip, we [try to] find out, is it true or did somebody just make up the story?”
They cite one example. “Someone else gossiped and told us Jimmy’s mattress is full of cash,” Chen recalls. “We know, of course, it’s an exaggerated detail, but it adds complexity like, ‘Okay, this is the person you see now, but we’re so complex.’ …I love imagining that, trying to look at someone and trying to see this person is so much more than just this moment when you sit next to him maybe at the tea house.”
Mary in ‘Queens Ballroom’
Queens Disco Production LLC
Chen says she found herself drawn particularly to Mary, the septuagenarian.
“She’s double my age almost, but I connect with her because she came to the U.S. when she’s 39, and she already had a life in China. She was a judge in Shanghai, and she has a family. So it wasn’t like a terrible life, where she [went hungry],” Chen says. “And for me, it’s the same. I never struggled to eat. My motivation to come to the U.S., maybe I was searching for — I’m not even sure if it’s success or anything, but some sort of freedom, which I cannot really describe. But it was also a really courageous decision [for Mary to leave] because she already had a life there.”
Lin grew up in China as well before relocating to New York. He has faced those challenging life choices common to immigrants.
(L-R) Directors Siyi Chen and Hansen Lin pitch ‘Queens Ballroom’ at CPH:FORUM in Copenhagen.
Courtesy of the filmmakers
“I questioned a lot about my career, like working in this industry and also living really far away from my home in China, how do I see my life in a foreign country?” he says. “I think we collect a lot of really touching moments [in the film] and a story that’s big to us. We feel like we are not the only ones that have that situation or those problems. And it becomes very timeless for me as well.”
Lin adds, alluding to a Greek myth, “I think we have a really beautiful line we wrote in our application. It’s like, how do we find this beauty and romance in our Sisyphean life?”
There’s another poignant aspect to the story – the ballroom patrons recreating a part of the culture from their past.
“It’s very nostalgic. It kind of reminds me of China, but an old version that doesn’t exist in China anymore because when these immigrants, they left China in the ’90s or 2000s, they kind of brought a piece of China with them. But now China changed so much,” Chen observes. “Spaces like that, these ballrooms, there used to be a lot of them. And there’s still some, I think in Shanghai or different cities, but it’s not so easy to find such a place. So, when we go [to the Queens ballroom], we’re like, ‘This is like a little time capsule that reminds us of the ’90s and the 2000s, that vibe.”
The Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, founded in 1748, site of the CPH:FORUM.
Courtesy of Hansen Lin
Clara Vuillermoz and Laurence Buelens, both based in Europe, serve as co-producers on the project. The Queens Ballroom team came to CPH:DOX seeking co-production partners and funds to complete filming.
“We have a treatment that has a lot of scenes that we want to shoot,” Lin notes. “Probably like 15 days of shooting, then we will be done.”
For Lin, participating in the Forum marks a return to Copenhagen. Last year, Always, the film produced by Lin and directed by Deming Chen, won the DOX:AWARD, the festival’s top prize.
“I have this very personal connection to the festival because of winning the award last year here. It’s a huge, huge encouragement for me and for my whole team,” he comments. “A lot of things are really familiar to me, but being here with a different team, a different collaborator, it does feel different… Coming back, I’m feeling a lot of trust, and I want to build on this relationship.”