The Salty Series: Michelle Sui – Seaweeds

Filmmaker and performer Michelle Sui invites audiences into Seaweeds, a cinematic, ritualistic performance blending live music, original film, and poetic narrative. Sui’s work moves fluidly between dream and memory, drawing on mythic archetypes and personal storytelling to create an atmosphere that is at once intimate and otherworldly.
Blurring the lines between cinema and live performance, Seaweeds reimagines the lost ending of The Toll of the Sea—the 1922 silent film that introduced screen legend Anna May Wong (1905–1961) in the first-ever Technicolor motion picture. In Sui’s bold re- envisioning, actors audition for Wong herself, who breaks free from the script and takes off to Paris and Tijuana in search of her on-again, off-again girlfriend. Past/present and onscreen/offscreen selves begin to blur as performers slip between roles and realities. An Asian-American cast conjures a world where time folds in on itself and stories are rewritten and reclaimed.