The film traces the life and times of Esther Eng, the first-ever Chinese-American female director in film history. Esther wore her hair short and was always seen in men’s suit. At the age of 21, Esther rented a studio in Hollywood and produced her first Chinese-language feature Heartaches. In the two decades that followed, she was active in both Hong Kong and Hollywood, and directed 10 Chinese-language films, showing a remarkable and uncommon focus on race and culture awareness and feminism. Outside of her creative works, she also worked towards distributing and promoting Chinese-language films in North and Central America.

Drawing on the marks she left in both the Chinese and English press, this film begins to recover some of her lost stories. Clips from her two surviving films, stills and posters from her other eight motion pictures, photos from her six personal albums, newsreels of San Francisco as she saw them, as well as hundreds of archival images are all collected to present her life and the tumultuous time in which she lived in a stunning display of visuals.

Golden Gate Girls is not just a biographical portrait of Esther Eng; it is also a tribute to pioneer women filmmakers working on both sides of the Pacific, and the courage with which they crossed boundaries of language, culture, race and gender.

Dr. Louisa Wei was born in Dongying, Shandong, China, and was raised in Xi’an, Shaanxi. She left China in 1992 to study in Canada, earning her Ph.D. in film. In 2001, she moved to Hong Kong and began teaching film production, story writing, and media culture courses at City University of Hong Kong, while making films.

In 2005, she co-wrote the script for the feature Show You Color with Cui Jian, the pioneer rocker of China. This script won an award at the 2006 Pusan International Film Festival. In 2012, Cui Jian directed a feature film entitled Blue Bone that was based in part on this script.

As a documentarian, Wei’s first released work was the short musical Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006). She wrote and co-directed Storm under the Sun (2007), a feature documentary on the purge of writers by Mao. In 2010, she wrote the script for Broken Wings: An Incomplete Genius with took mid-century Chinese writer Lu Ling as its subject.

She is currently working on the scripts for two new documentaries: Flower Girl from Havana, about a Cuban lady who performed Cantonese opera in Cuba for ten years and Dream under the Sun, a film about Cui Jian and his fans.