Wayne Wang is hardly retired — he’s currently working on a TV series and a documentary — but the 73-year-old Bay Area filmmaker feels it’s the right time to secure his legacy.

He has donated his independent films and personal archives to theBerkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,where he will host a seven-film retrospective of his work over a five-week period beginning Friday, March 11. He will appear at each screening, allowing fans old and new a rare chance to get to know him.

“I decided this was something pretty important,” Wang said during a video chat from his home on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. “I haven’t really done this kind of a retrospective very much at all, so I wanted to do it, and I wanted to be there for all of it.”

The series begins 7 p.m. Friday, with his defining film and first feature,“Chan Is Missing,”the 1982 shoestring-budgeted San Francisco Chinatown-shot indie that became the first Chinese American film to gain national distribution. It is one of two Wang movies to have been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, and it enters the Criterion Collection with a Blu-ray/DVD 40th anniversary release May 31; the remastered restoration, supervised by Wang, will be the version that screens at BAMPFA.

The second film to be preserved by theLibrary of Congress,his San Francisco-shot adaptation of Bay Area author Amy Tan’s“The Joy Luck Club,”screens 4 p.m. Sunday, March 13, followed by a conversation with Wang,Tanand UC Berkeley ethnic studies Professor Catherine Ceniza Choy.

Other highlights of the series include the delightful 1985 S.F.-shot “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” (March 20); director’s cuts of two Hong Kong-set films, “Life Is Cheap … But Toilet Paper Is Expensive” (new restoration; March 26) and“Chinese Box”(April 2);“Blue in the Face”(April 9), his quickly filmed follow-up to “Smoke,” which features an appearance from Madonna; and a Hollywood studio film he is particularly proud of,“Maid in Manhattan”(April 17), starring Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes at the height of their star power in a film that reveals Wang’s love of 1930s romantic comedies.

“It’s a classic Cinderella story, with a really strong focus on the working-class,” said Wang of “Maid in Manhattan.” “There’s a lot of scenes with all the ladies that are cleaning the rooms at the Waldorf Astoria, and some of them are actresses and some of them are real cleaning ladies. And it’s also one of the last few films that were shot in Cinemascope because even at that time, Cinemascope lenses were disappearing. So the film looks beautiful, and we found a good, clean print.”

It’s fitting not only that “Chan Is Missing” kicks off the series, but that Wang donated his archives to BAMPFA. The Pacific Film Archive hosted what was one of the first public screenings of the film on Dec. 10, 1981, and it screened there during the first-ever San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (now CAAMFest) in October 1982.

Over the years, Wang — who was born and raised in Hong Kong but has called the Bay Area home since attending the California College of the Arts in Oakland in the 1970s — has always found a spiritual home at BAMPFA, a longtime supporter of his work.

“It’s an extraordinary honor to include his work and archives as part of our collection,” said BAMPFA film collection supervisor Antonella Bonfanti, who will join Wang onstage for a conversation after the “Life Is Cheap” screening. “He’s a groundbreaking American independent filmmaker. The fact that he has such strong roots in the Bay Area, and also as a pioneering Asian American filmmaker … it’s so important for our collective mission.”

工作与Bonfanti BAMPFA archi电影vist Jon Shibata, noted that Wang’s films will be preserved and stored in BAMPFA’s climate-controlled facilities in the East Bay, and that his work and archives will be available to cinephiles and scholars well into the future.

One film that Wang feels increasingly wistful about is “Chinese Box,” which follows (and was filmed during) the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China as seen through the eyes of a British man (Jeremy Irons), a mainland Chinese woman (Gong Li) and a Hong Kong woman (Maggie Cheung). A quarter century later, with Hong Kong ravaged by the pandemic and China’s increasingly authoritarian approach to the city, many of his fears have been realized.

“It’s really painful,” he said. “All the freedoms and all the good things about the city are slowly being stripped away. I was thinking that this would happen most of the time while I was shooting ‘Chinese Box,’ and I think Jeremy Irons was also of that opinion. After the film was shown in Hong Kong, people were saying, ‘Why are you so cynical about your perception of Hong Kong?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s just how I feel in my gut.’ ”

Wang also noted an increasing mainland Chinese influence in S.F.’s Chinatown, which provided such a memorable backdrop to “Chan Is Missing.” After seeing the neighborhood devastated by the pandemic, he’s sensing optimism with an influx of tech workers into the oldest and biggest Chinatown in the nation.

“I go to a local shop to get my ginseng and my Chinese teas, and I know the owner really well and he says, ‘Oh, you know, we rent out like six or seven units here and they’re all IT guys,’ ” Wang said. ” ‘Chan Is Missing’ was talking about how there’s always arguments and fights between the Taiwan supporters and then the mainland Chinese supporters. It’s been little different for the last 10, 15 years, the mainland Chinese influence and money are very strong and it’s sort of taken over. But then lately, Taiwan money has been coming back in, so it’s kind of a crazy, interesting place to go.”

The ever-changing landscape is a big reason Wang, whose last film was the S.F.-shot“Coming Home Again,”wants to keep telling Asian and Asian American stories in the Bay Area and beyond. He’s working on a television show about a Chinese American family, and he’s also making a documentary about the challenges, and possible solutions, of health care for Asians; he has drawn on the doctors at the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education as a resource.

Wang’s parents had originally wanted him to be a doctor, but the draw to make movies was just too strong. Soon after college, he faced a choice: return to Hong Kong, where there was a thriving commercial industry, or stay in the Bay Area and carve out his own path. He’s never looked back.

“There’s a pretty strong obsession with money in Hong Kong that sort of distorts the whole humanity of the place,” Wang explained. “I just felt like I didn’t want to live in a place like that — that’s why I made ‘Life Is Cheap,’ which is kind of a crazy, rebellious reflection of how I felt about Hong Kong. …

“I’ve shot in Hong Kong, I’ve shot in New Orleans and Prague. So I like cities and I like the way cities are.San Francisco is unique, and is certainly relevant for the films I shot here. It’s home.”

“Wayne Wang in Person”:Friday, March 11, through April 17. $5-$14 per screening. 2155 Center St., Berkeley. 510-642-0808.bampfa.org