Organizer: Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA); New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) Film Club
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
Join the Museum of Chinese in America and the New York Asian Film Festival for a screening of Yellow Rose, a coming-of-age musical drama that follows Rose Garcia (Eva Noblezada), a Filipina teenager growing up undocumented in a small Texas town. The screening is followed by a talkback with Director Diane Paragas, MOCA’s Curator Herb Tam, and NYAFF’s Executive Director Samuel Jamier.
About the Film:
Yellow Rose (2019)
Directed by: Diane Paragas
Runtime: 94 minutes
Yellow Rose is a coming-of-age musical drama that follows Rose Garcia, a Filipina teenager growing up undocumented in a small Texas town. When her mother is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Rose is forced to navigate an uncertain future while pursuing her dream of becoming a country music singer. Starring Eva Noblezada in her feature film debut alongside Lea Salonga, the film explores identity, belonging, resilience, and the pursuit of the American dream through the unexpected lens of country music.
Premiering at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in 2019, Yellow Rose received widespread critical acclaim and became one of the first Filipino American films to receive a wide theatrical release from a major Hollywood studio. Balancing intimate storytelling with timely social issues, the film offers a deeply human portrait of the undocumented immigrant experience while celebrating the power of music to provide hope, community, and self-expression.
Starring: Eva Noblezada, Dale Watson, Princess Punzalan, Lea Salonga
About the Speakers:
Diane Paragas is an award-winning writer/director and producer of narrative features, documentaries and commercials. Paragas began her career in documentaries. In 2012, she co-directed Brooklyn Boheme, a feature length documentary about an African American arts movement that she co-directed with Nelson George. The film premiered on Showtime and went on to win the Black Reel Award for TV Best Documentary. In 2019, Paragas completed her debut narrative feature, Yellow Rose, about an undocumented Filipino-American teen pursuing a dream to become a country music singer. The film won over a dozen Grand Jury and Audience Awards and was distributed by Sony Pictures theatrically in 2020 to critical acclaim inuding several best of the year awards from Variety, Rotten Tomatoes and Entertainment Tonight. Yellow Rose made history by being the first Filipino American film theatrically distributed by a major Hollywood studio.
Herb Tam is the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America. He recently co-curated “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving,” an exhibition that explored the construction of Chinese American identity through MOCA’s archival materials. In 2012, he curated “America through a Chinese Lens,” which surveyed photographs of America by contemporary artists and non-professional photographers of Chinese descent. Tam was previously the Associate Curator at Exit Art and the Acting Associate Curator at the Queens Museum of Art. Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at San Jose State University and earned a masters in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Samuel Jamier is the president and executive director of the New York Asian Film Festival Foundation and a Korean-French cultural curator. He has worked at the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, the Japan Society, and the Korea Society, and has served as a professor of English literature at Sorbonne University. He was the first Asian American graduate of École Normale Supérieure.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please purchase tickets here.