Chinese Films Tossed in a Garbage Bin Are Salvaged

About half of a collection of vintage Chinese-language films that were tossed in a garbage bin near Oakland’s Chinatown have been saved and will be shipped to an archive in Hong Kong.

Film experts managed to rescue about half of the 200 canisters that were thrown away Tuesday to make room for plumbing repairs in the leaky basement where they had been stored for years.

“We estimate there’s about 100 films we’ve salvaged,” said Ruby Yang, who along with her husband, San Francisco film producer Lambert Yam, spent two days rummaging through the cinematic treasure. “The rest may end up in a landfill.”

Other Hong Kong cinema buffs may have picked up some movies after they learned of the bin laden with canisters.

The black-and-white movies, which include features on the Hong Kong folk hero and martial arts master Wong Fei-Hung, are being housed in a South of Market warehouse, secured by Oakland’s Asian Cultural Center.

The films, made in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, are all in Cantonese. They may have belonged to a former Hong Kong film director who used to run a theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Although they may not be worth much commercially, they have considerable cultural value, said Brian Lau, director of the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, who assisted in the salvage project.

“We believe this is a historical record that needs to be preserved, and the film industry of that time deserves to be recognized,” Lau said. “People will want to look back and research these films.”

They eventually will be sent to the Hong Kong Film Archive, which has acquired more than 2,000 films and 35,000 other objects, mainly through donations.