A $22,000 film in the Library of Congress

When Wayne Wang was scrambling around the streets of Chinatown in the early 1980s shooting his indie feature “Chan Is Missing,” trying to stretch the most out of the $22,000 he’d scrounged together to make it, even he couldn’t guess that he was making a landmark movie.

[...] it became the first Asian American indie to gain theatrical distribution, and a mere 13 years later — in 1995 — the film was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in its National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Wang, in person, is scheduled to host a 35th anniversary screening at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.