Mahjong And Chicken Feet

Summary

A group of men in a variety store in Harbin, China candidly discuss a foreigner with a camera amongst them, assuming that she doesn't understand Chinese and forgetting that her camera is recording them all the while. Later in Kaifeng, miles to the south, the woman noses her camera into peoples homes, searching for traces of the city's thousand -year old Jewish settlement while her guide attempts to render her questions polite in translation. The director's own Russian Jewish family history in China at the beginning of the 20th century, a story of tiger hunters, poignant deaths and daring rescues, binds together this lively tale of Chinese Jewish encounters then and now.