Joseph Kwong's Page

While studying for a career in medicine, Joseph Kwong line-produced a documentary entitled “Gravity Is My Enemy” about a friend who was a quadriplegic painter. The film won an Oscar, and Kwong left medicine for movie making. Producing and directing documentaries for PBS that specialize in human rights issues, Kwong won numerous awards including 9 Emmies for documentaries like “Children of the Night” about teenage prostitutes, “Trouble on Big Mountain” about the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, and “Childhood/Parenthood” which documented the lives of teenage parents.

Kwong then moved into dramatic television and films as a producer/writer, specializing in book adaptations. He worked with Anne LaMott to adapt her memoir "Operating Instructions," for NBC, wrote a period film for Columbia Pictures about Chinese slave girls brought to America at the turn of the century, and most recently, adapted Wendy Orr’s novel, "Nim’s Island," for Walden Media and 20th Century Fox, with Jodie Foster, Gerald Butler and Abigail Breslin.

Though those projects are all studio pictures, Kwong has a special love for indie filmmaking. He has written two indies for Francis Coppola and Wayne Wang, and his adaptation of Patricia McCormick’s novel, "Sold," about a Nepalese girl trafficked into a brothel in Calcutta, is slated for production in 2009.

Along the way, Kwong developed an expertise in animation and is frequently called upon to write scripts for animated features (he wrote “Tin Toy Christmas” for John Lasseter of Pixar) and by PBS to oversee their children’s television series. Kwong wrote the pilot for their hit math series “Cyberchase,” was the executive producer/writer of “Dr. SeussTales” (yes, he can write in Seussian rhyme!), and is the creator of a new show for PBS called “Exploratopia,” an animated science show developed in conjunction with the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting recently awarded Kwong a generous grant to create “Flashback,” a mission-based, socially networked, history game show for teenagers that takes place on the Web, mobile phones and on television. It is PBS’s first attempt at convergence media.

Kwong is working with partners like Dr. Clayborne Carson and the Martin Luther King Jr. Institute to adapt Flashback into a game that inspires youth to work for peace and social justice