On April 13, 2022, CHA and the Coronado Island Film Festival celebrated the first-ever screening of The Dragon Painter (1919). 

This much-celebrated film was inducted into the prestigious National Film Registry in 2014 and stars silent-era heartthrob Sessue Hayakawa. In this romance drama, Hayakawa plays an artist desperate to find a sought-after princess muse, played by Hayakawa's wife Tsuru Aoki. This black-and-white film features the exquisite Coronado Japanese Tea Garden as a lush backdrop for the couple’s happy moments with many scenes also filmed in Yosemite National Park.

Despite being filmed here in Coronado's Japanese Tea Garden over 103 years ago, this film was screened for the first time in Coronado at the historic Village Theater. The screening of this film was in collaboration with the Coronado Historical Association exhibit Uprooted: The Story of Japanese Americans in Coronado and the County of San Diego proclaimed April 13, 2022, Japanese Heritage Day at the event. 

Daisuke Miyao, Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego, introduced the film and conducted Q&A. Miyao is the author of Japonisme and the
Birth of Cinema (Duke University Press, 2020) and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke University Press, 2007). He is also the editor of Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (2014).

 Kyoko Takeda beautifully played the Koto at the film and reception. 

The film was screened in conjunction with CHA's exhibit, Uprooted: The Story of the Japanese Americans of Coronado.