Cinevue

Famed opera director (and Gorillaz collaborator) Chen Shi-zheng discusses his debut film, DARK MATTER

Actor Liu Ye and director Chen Shi-zheng on the set of DARK MATTER.

By Hua Hsu

Though DARK MATTER is director Chen Shi-zheng’s first film, he might be one of the most distinguished artists the AAIFF has ever hosted. The award-winning theater and opera director has been a fixture in the global arts scene for nearly two decades, even earning the title of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government in 2000. During this remarkably productive span of time, about the only thing Chen did not do was make DARK MATTER, a film he began thinking about in the early 1990s. While DARK MATTER borrows heavily from the true story of a disgruntled Chinese graduate student who went on a shooting rampage in 1991, the film doesn’t traffic in violence. Instead, DARK MATTER explores issues of displacement and disillusionment, as well as the at-times absurd setting of the university campus. Fresh off the successful debut of his latest work, the Gorillaz-assisted, genre-collapsing opera Monkey: Journey to the West, Chen talked to us about the ups and downs of making DARK MATTER.

Cinevue: First off, I was curious about what inspired you to pursue filmmaking?
Was it a natural progression following from your work in theater and opera, or was it just this particular story that entranced you?

When you say "progression" it implies that one thing follows after another, but for me, stage and film are both possibilities for artistic expression that co-exist, and I try to find the right medium for the story. In the case of DARK MATTER, I always saw it as a story that needed to be told in film.

Cinevue: Can you walk me through the process here: did you originally come up with the idea of DARK MATTER, or was it a pre-existing script? What was it about the story that intrigued you, and how did you come across it?

The idea for DARK MATTER had really been with me since 1991. I was reading articles about the tragedy at the University of Iowa, and besides being profoundly shocked, I remember being deeply stirred by it and trying to get at what might have been the motivation behind such an action. The movie is not about that incident, but about the human experience of disillusionment and despair and confusion that happens when you move into another world, into a culture that is so different from your own.

At the time I had been living in the U.S. for four years, and had a lot of friends in graduate programs who were struggling with some of the same issues. A few years later, I started talking with my friend Billy Shebar, who is a writer and filmmaker, and we started to work out a script. From there it was just a really long, arduous process with a lot of ups and downs, stops and starts, to actually get the film made. In the end we had very little budget and very little time. We shot the whole movie in twenty days.

Cinevue: How was directing or casting for film different from (or possibly similar to) your previous experiences directing for the stage?

Casting was very similar, in that you look for the actors who can deliver your vision and then you hope their schedules will work out. Directing was very different. In theater and opera you start with fewer people and end up with a lot of people on the stage. In film, you start out with lots and lots of people on the set and in the end it's just you and your editor sitting in a dark room all day and all night eating pizza.

Cinevue: In particular I was thinking about the film's score—I really enjoyed Van Dyke Parks' work—as well as the eclectic musical selections. Was it different managing a vision for film, without built-in cues for music?

I had certain music in my head when I was shooting, and had selected a Chinese children's choir because of its purity and innocence, and because that kind of music—Chinese children singing American folksongs—was very popular during the late 80s and early 90s. That coincides with a time when many Chinese students were romanticizing about coming to America. Van Dyke added beautiful orchestrations underneath.

Cinevue: I thought Liu Ye and Meryl Streep were great—had you worked with either of them before?

I had not. I cast Liu Ye in China, and this was the first time he's ever worked in English. He was great. Meryl was a dream to work with. She is the angel behind this whole project.

ACV: Do you have any anxieties about the film being misunderstood or misread, in light of this being a somewhat controversial year for what the news media might refer to as "disgruntled Asian American men"?

No. That's not what this film is about.

ACV: Do you have any future film plans? And how did your current Monkey: Journey To The West project come together?

I hope to make more films and have a couple of ideas I am starting to work on.

I was commissioned by Théâtre du Châtelet to create a new opera. I've wanted to do something with the Monkey story since I was a kid, and I've also wanted to make a circus opera, and luckily they loved this idea. We needed a composer and set designer, and I met Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, a.k.a. the Gorillaz. We went to China together to do a lot of research and felt that we could make something fantastic out of it. Monkey just finished its premiere at the Manchester International Festival and got tremendous reviews.

It's going on tour soon. It's really a new kind of theater, with animation and acrobats and martial arts and opera and folklore and Buddhism...I hope you have a chance to see it.

Hua Hsu is the editor of CineVue. A frequent contributor to Slate, he will join the English Department at Vassar College in the fall.

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The wisest and most succinct description of the documentary filmmaker’s plight came from Alfred Hitchcock: “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.” The six nominees for this year’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award underscore this idea perfectly, as they chased after tales of survival and self-discovery, hula dancers and rogue politicians, family histories and the history of freedom. We decided to let our documentary filmmakers speak for themselves by inviting them to interview each other about the motivations, challenges, and secrets of their taxing yet noble art form.

In-soo Radstake, director of MADE IN KOREA.

Socheata Poeuv: Why do you think going-home narratives are so popular in Asian films and books?

I think the Asian community can relate so much with the whole ‘going home’ issue because lots of Asians live outside their native countries. They live there for several reasons: for a better future, escaped from regimes, war. People made dramatic choices, or had to. Separated from loved ones, they understand what others are going through and are also curious for their experiences of going home, I think.

SP: What does “going home” mean and imply to you?

As far as I’m concerned, ‘going home’ is the Netherlands for me, going back to my old village where my parents live. But it’s the old home. My new home is where I live now, together with my girlfriend. Korea is my native country, but it’s not my home, it has never been. But it has a special meaning for me, because it’s where I came from, and it’s a country that has enriched my life in many ways. But I feel ‘home’ almost everywhere I go, but I like it to go back to the Netherlands after a while.

SP: I’m interested in your experience of growing up Asian in Holland. How do you think it’s different than growing up Asian in any other Western country (such as the United States, for instance)?

When I arrived in Holland in 1980, I grew up in a small village in an all-Caucasian environment. But I myself never felt really different until I was like thirteen years old. Suddenly I realized that I was not white, ha ha. But I never had a problem with it. But I know from people around me they really felt different and sometimes uncomfortable. I think growing up in the bigger cities of the U.S. might make you feel more comfortable, because there are more nationalities and more Asians around you. Although in Holland it’s also a melting pot in the bigger cities.

SP: How does being a Korean or a minority inform your filmmaking?
For me personally I don’t feel like I am a minority. But I do feel that others regard me as that and in some ways that opens doors for me. Other Asians and Koreans are more open to me, because they regard me as one of them and sort of same culture. I do know that being bi-cultural (Dutch and Korean) gives me some advantages and it also gave me new perspectives in different cultures and understanding them.

SP: What are your next projects?
I’m going to produce a short feature film which is a story about hope and inspiration, situated in Rotterdam during World War II. This film will premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam next year. Furthermore I am developing a couple of documentaries and feature films, some as a producer and some as a director. Can’t tell much about it yet, because it’s still in progress.

One feature film I am working on is about the gay issue in South Korea with South Korean film star Hong-Suk Chun, who is gay. The story is based on his life and experiences. I am still working on the funding for it, so if you know some people who want to invest, let them call me hahaha.

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The wisest and most succinct description of the documentary filmmaker’s plight came from Alfred Hitchcock: “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.” The six nominees for this year’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award underscore this idea perfectly, as they chased after tales of survival and self-discovery, hula dancers and rogue politicians, family histories and the history of freedom. We decided to let our documentary filmmakers speak for themselves by inviting them to interview each other about the motivations, challenges, and secrets of their taxing yet noble art form.

Director Socheata Poeuv with her father in her award-winning documentary NEW YEAR BABY.

In-Soo Radstake: When you started documenting your background and family's life, did you have any idea what you were about to start and where it would lead? And will lead to, in the future?

Socheata Poeuv: NEW YEAR BABY is my first film. I just wanted to start capturing my family’s story. I had no idea if it would turn into a ten-minute piece or a feature-length documentary or just a collection of footage.

IR: How did you feel about emigrating to the U.S. and growing up in a non-Asian country?

I grew up in Dallas, Texas—not much of a Cambodian presence there. My parents were so grateful to have a safe and comfortable home in Texas. But I spent much of my childhood hiding my Cambodianness when we were in public. Only when I was a teenager or in college did I become really interested in my Cambodian heritage, I began to feel a bit like a fraud. I had lost my language skills, I never learned how to cook; it was almost too late to be Cambodian.

IR: Your film unfolds a part of history that is a painful memory to the Cambodian community. How did people react to your idea of making a film about it and how did you handle those reactions?

The central conflict of the film is that my family didn’t want to talk about their experience and I want to learn it for the first time. I think my parents eventually became comfortable with the camera because they saw that I was seriously invested in learning their story. Their story raised my respect for them and it brought us closer. That encouraged them to be more forthcoming.

IR: Your project has lead to a community. What is your wish for the future concerning the topic your film handles and the possible power and goals your work can generate?

What I’m working on next is Khmer Legacies, an organization whose mission is to videotape 10,000 testimonies from Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide by having their children interview their parents.

The mission of Khmer Legacies is to create healing for survivors by: preserving the history of the Khmer Rouge from the perspective of survivors, bridging the generational divide between Cambodian parents and their children, and transforming the culture of denial and avoidance in Cambodian communities to one of acknowledgement and honor.

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Redefining a National Cinema

By Christopher Bourne

The history of Malaysian cinema is as complex and contested as the country itself. Malaysia’s unique mix of ethnicities often confounds general notions of national cinema. Compared with other areas of the world, the Malaysian film industry got a rather late start, its first film appearing in 1933. LAILA MAJNUN, based on a classic Persian tale, was directed by B.S. Rajhans, a director of Indian descent. After this film’s success, the Singapore-based Shaw Brothers, best known for their popular martial arts films, began producing films in the late 1930s. In another unique circumstance in terms of national cinemas, Singaporean and Malaysian cinema were one and the same, having been one country, until Singapore’s split from the Malaysian federation in 1965.

In 1948 a young actor, P. Ramlee, made his debut in the film CINTA (LOVE). He would later go on to be a major writer, director, and composer, and is still revered today as the father of modern Malaysian cinema, celebrated for his versatility and popularity. Ramlee’s films, such as RAGGEDY BACHELORS (1955), BETWEEN TWO CLASSES (1960), and MY MOTHER-IN-LAW (1961) began a shift away from the Indian-influenced stylized acting and melodrama that was previously popular, and more toward often comedic tales which more accurately reflected the daily lives of Malay audiences. However, Ramlee, as a director of Malay descent, was an exception at the time—most of directors at this time were Indian, Chinese, or Filipino expatriates.

From the mid-50s onward, Malay filmmakers took over from the Indian and Filipino directors. The late 50s and early 60s, however, witnessed a long period of decline for the film industry, as production costs rose and audiences began abandoning Malaysian films in favor of television and other Asian cinemas, especially films from Indonesia and Hong Kong. In 1975 the government stepped in to try and reverse this decline by setting up the National Film Development Corporation (FINAS) and introducing tax incentives to encourage film production. As a result, the industry began to recover in the 1980s, producing box office successes and generating a class of new filmmakers who began making their voices heard internationally, such as U-Wei Hajisaari (THE ARSONIST), Teck Tan (SPINNING TOP), and others. These filmmakers have made a point of representing ethnicities other than the Malay majority, often creating considerable controversy.

In the past decade an independent film sector, often working in the digital medium, has emerged and found recognition at international festivals. Beyond being simply a “new wave,” these filmmakers are redefining Malaysian cinema itself. Many of the newer Malaysian filmmakers, such as Amir Muhammad (THE BIG DURIAN, THE LAST COMMUNIST), James Lee (THE BEAUTIFUL WASHING MACHINE, TILL WE MEET AGAIN), Ho Yuhang (SANCTUARY, RAIN DOGS), and Yasmin Ahmad (SEPET), have created incisive and compelling works that have posed direct challenges to the hegemonic representation of the Malay majority in their cinema. They have represented for the first time in Malaysian cinema some of the other ethnic groups living in this multicultural, multilingual nation—the largest being Chinese and Indians. Many of these filmmakers, having to contend with a conservative film funding and censor board, must work without government funding or other support, or without distribution in their own country. Many rely on European finding, such as Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, in order to make their films.

However, even with these difficulties, vital new voices are emerging, making Malaysian cinema one of the currently more fascinating cinemas to watch. Two Malaysian films screening at this year’s festival, Deepak Kumaron Menon’s DANCING BELLS (Chalanggai) and Woo Ming Jin’s THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA, are fine examples of these new voices.

Menon’s CHALLANGAI (DANCING BELLS) is set in Brickfields, home to the Tamil Indian community of Kuala Lumpur. The film focuses on a family living in an area about to be demolished for development. Uma (Dhaarshini Sankran) dreams of becoming a dancer, after watching a group practicing in a clearing in the woods near her home, the challangai of the film’s title shaking around the dancing girls’ ankles. Uma longs to be one of them, to escape these circumstances. Her brother Siva (Ramesh Kumar) is a dissolute high school dropout, working at the local car wash, who eventually drifts into petty crime; he is often filled with resentment and anger at the family’s life. Their mother Muniammah (Kalpana Sundraju) struggles to care for them both, selling flowers at a street stand. Muniammah is often sick, much of it due to the stress of raising her children alone, and the precariousness of their living situation due to the land development.

Their struggles are due in large part to the abandonment by her husband Raja (Shangkara) some years before. He reappears periodically to offer his kids a bit of money. Uma is usually happy to see him, but Siva and Muniammah angrily rebuff him. The taciturn Siva often bottles up his resentment, and seems to have no ambition. His one goal is to save up to buy a motorcycle. However, when he gets into trouble by damaging a car entrusted to him by a rich customer (played by director Amir Muhammad), he resorts to drastic measures in order to raise money for the repairs.

Menon paints a vivid portrait of this community that is rarely seen on Malaysian screens; “Just another common Malaysian Indian story,” is the film’s tagline. Menon describes his film as “a cry that would hopefully create a sense of history, self-discovery, and an inspiration to all Malaysians.” This description is quite significant, since Menon wishes with this film to call attention to a minority that is often invisible, despite being in the heart of the nation’s capital. Menon’s film, while rooted in a very specific community, also expresses the universal longing for a home, security, and a place in the world. Menon’s film beautifully captures this, and despite the often somber events depicted (especially in a scene late in the film where Siva visits a friend’s funeral), CHALLANGAI (DANCING BELLS) ends on a note of hope and optimism.

Woo Ming Jin’s THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA follows the parallel trajectories of Ding (Berg Lee), a taciturn young man with a perpetual hangdog expression, and Ng Au (Chung Kok Keong), an older man who has recently lost his wife. Ding and his brother have a nice little scam going: they litter the road with nail-studded scraps of wood to cause flat tires that they can charge drivers to fix. Ng Au’s wife has died from a mysterious disease spreading around the village that is possibly connected to the fish that wash up on the shore. The film’s use of long takes, sparse dialog and its general sense of desolation, depression, and anomie will be quite familiar to those conversant with recent Asian art cinema, including that of Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsaio-hsien, as well as Woo’s Malyasian compatriots (and frequent artistic collaborators) Ho Yuhang, James Lee and Tan Chui Mui (who appears in this film as a fish store shopgirl). However, Woo’s visual and narrative surprises, and a wry sense of humor (note the running gag involving Ding’s encounters with a pair of Indians) add intriguing elements to the mix that make this a uniquely affecting work. Chan Hai Liang’s cinematography also creates a beautiful sense of mood: a lush forest, a desolate beach, and other settings nicely highlight the isolation and despair of his main characters. However, we aren’t led to sympathize entirely with these two men. Their selfishness and casual cruelty also come through, especially in their relations with women.

Both Woo Ming Jin and Deepak Kumaron Menon are great examples of an exciting cinematic vanguard that uses the materials of its medium to illuminate artistic visions and to present a fuller portrait of its society—a more varied and complete presentation than perhaps has been available in the country’s history. Malaysian cinema is still very much a work in progress, and this in itself is what makes this nation’s cinema one of the most exciting in the world to watch.

Christopher Bourne is a critic and writer on film based in New York City who has extensively covered Asian cinemas. His work has appeared in Senses of Cinema and Offscreen, among other film journals.

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Joy Dietrich on depression, robots and Americana

Director Joy Dietrich at work on the set of TIE A YELLOW RIBBON.

By Rebecca Klassen

Joy Dietrich's feature film TIE A YELLOW RIBBON, centered on the exploits of a Korean adoptee, is a lens into the emotional life of young Asian American women. Dietrich and Rebecca Klassen discussed Dietrich’s road to filmmaking, the isolation of being the only Asian in town, and dealing with depression.

Cinevue: Tell me about your short film ROBOT GIRL (2002)…

It was really experimental. It was about a girl feeling a bit numb, and she felt so numb that she thought she was a robot. Like an actual robot. And in the last scene, she pops out wires—a stop-action shot of wires. It was kind of fun…I learned how to do stop action. Have you ever seen TETSUO, THE IRON MAN?

CineVue: No—wasn’t it scary? (laughs)

Well, but it has a lot of stop action shots in it.

CineVue: No, I love stop-motion.

So we have wires come out of her at the end, and it begs the question as to whether she’s really a robot or not. ROBOT GIRL went to a few festivals. It didn’t have the impact that SURPLUS (2000) or TIE A YELLOW RIBBON has had.

CineVue: And SURPLUS was the first…

SURPLUS was the first short film…

CineVue: And what prompted you to get into filmmaking? Are you a lover of film, and you wanted to…? How did you feel that it would express—

I was in Paris, living in Paris, working as a journalist. And I loved watching film, and Paris is the city of film. There’s a cinema theater every block you walk on. So I went to a lot of cinema and learned a lot about films in Paris by watching it. And then I was thinking, gosh, I love journalism, it’s a good field—you know, it’s a solid field, and thank God I’ve had journalism. Because otherwise, a lot of filmmakers and artists, they work in cafés … and are doing whatever they can to pay the bills. But I was lucky enough to get into journalism, where I have a trade. … So my income, it wasn’t as drastic as people working in cafés and so far I’ve been very thankful that I’ve been able to pay my bills through journalism.

So I was working in Paris, and was going to all these films, and now I really would like to make a film. How am I going to do that? And I was thinking, “God, I cannot go through another year of school,” because I already have two Master’s degrees.

CineVue: Oh, you do? What are they?

I have a master’s degree in international relations, and another master’s in labor economics. Anyway, so then I was like, “How am I going to learn how to do this?” So I decided just to move to New York. By that time I had been living a long time in Europe, and I was missing the States a little bit. So I moved to New York, and just started from the ground up. I worked for other people for free. I didn’t care if I was paid or not. I was passionate about it. And so I carefully observed how everything worked on a shoot, and then I met some people and through those connections—one young girl, even younger than me, told me we should work on a film.

I had only about $5000. And she said, “Oh yeah, we can make a film for $5000 production.” But I wanted to shoot on film, I wanted to shoot on 16—you know, 16mm film. And they go, “We can do it.” Now that I think about it, no one in her right mind would have said that. We were both naive. We shot it and everyone worked for free: all the actors, all the crew. The only thing that we paid for was all the equipment, the food, the transportation—all that cost. Then SURPLUS did so well at the [San Francisco International] Asian American Film Festival, and even at some of the bigger festivals like Raindance in London, and it showed at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival, and [it even] showed in Seoul, Korea at an art gallery. It’s being distributed by the Center for Asian American Media. I’m trying to see if I can get it distributed by television at some point, even though its been seven years. But I’m hoping to show SURPLUS somewhere, because I think it still has some … timelessness about it, right?

CineVue: Definitely, and it has very strong impact. Was that a film that you had wanted to make? From the outset was there a film in mind that you had envisioned creating?

I didn’t have any training, so I didn’t know how to write a script. It was really funny, before I left [Europe for the United States] I went to visit a friend in Norway, and I had these visions in my head. And I wrote SURPLUS in two or three days, in Norway. It was a short story though—it wasn’t a script. It was a short story of barely any dialogue. So I’m sure a lot of people who have seen a lot of traditional scripts saw my script saying, “What the hell is this?” But there was hardly any dialog, so it was all action. So we shot it in my weird format and it was fine, you know? Now that I’ve done TIE A YELLOW RIBBON…now I know what the proper structure is, and how all scenes are supposed to be done. It was only after. I’m still learning too; filmmaking is a constant learning process.

CineVue: What was surprising about SURPLUS—I mean it was a pleasant surprise—was the amount of compassion that you,that the film, shows for the father who abandons the daughter. Is that something that you had to work through yourself, this arrival to compassion?

If you noticed, in TIE A YELLOW RIBBON all characters are portrayed, I believe, compassionately. Because I believe human beings are both good and bad. You know, they do bad things, but that doesn’t necessarily make them evil people. The older I get, the more I see that it’s through ignorance—not knowing what to do—that people do what they do. They can’t see any other avenue, any other choice.…If I have time to develop all the characters, I’m always going to give the bad and the good of a person. Just like in TIE A YELLOW RIBBON, all the characters do some really bad things, but then you’re sympathizing with them too. You empathize with them. Bea constantly calls Sandy names, but then you care about Bea when she gets into trouble. I think human beings are fallible; we are not perfect. I like to portray all of my characters with that dimension.

CineVue: TIE A YELLOW RIBBON, if I’m recalling correctly, was prompted by your discovery of the statistic that Asian American women aged 15–24 have the highest rates of suicide for that age group.

I was already writing some short visionary kinds of things, very little dialog, very visual scenes, and short stories about the Asian American—young Asian American woman—stuff, which I’ve never really seen on the screen, or television, or anywhere. And so then I came upon that statistic—I was just doing some research—and I said, “Wow.” Then I talked to a lot of people like me, and we are all different, and [yet] there was some common thread, a common theme that I couldn’t ignore. So I wondered if we had some sort of common psyche in experiencing things here in the United States. When I was growing up, at least—I think maybe things have changed nowadays, there are role models like Michelle Kwan and Lucy Liu and [Sandra Oh]—all images were of white women or African American women, and there was nothing there for us to aspire to, other than that we looked wrong [or] different. I also grew up in a small town, where there were a lot of racist comments constantly, every day. So that really made me depressed, for a long time, and I think I was probably part of that statistic, that between the ages of 15–24 we have one of the highest rates of depression in the country.

I can’t speak for every Asian American woman, but I know that, talking to people who have grown up in the heartland—not in L.A. or New York—it was a very isolating…you felt disconnected from the community and from society. And I just wanted to explore our place in American society. What are we? I mean, this is why I reference [the song] “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”…I try to reference a lot of the Americana, you know, tying the yellow ribbon and the Andrew Wyeth painting (Christina’s World), which is the epitome of Americana. Where do we fit in all that?

CineVue: Do you have any insights into or theories on what causes depression in Asian American women? You mentioned racism—

I definitely do not want to speak for (everyone)—I would assume family pressure, societal pressure…we are the model minority, you know, to be perfect. I know that I’ve been criticized in my film for portraying two of the characters very stereotypically but that was my point.

CineVue: Which characters? (SPOILER ALERT)

Beatrice and Sandy. But that was my purpose, which was to explore stereotypes of Asian American women. Bea is the perfect “A” student—[her] family wants her to be a doctor. That seems to be a common thread that I hear a lot from Asian American women: Oh yeah, my mom wants me to be a lawyer or a doctor. And then Sandy is the meek Asian character. You know, the model minority, Beatrice—she dies. … And so I’m hoping that people don’t take it just as, Oh, those characters are so stereotypical, but I’m hoping that other people might see that that was the purpose of those characters [and] recognize the stereotype [as deliberate]. (END SPOILER ALERT)

CineVue: How did you come through your own depression? What is your own path—is filmmaking part of it, as a creative catharsis?

I think maturity. It’s a definite bonus…more than filmmaking. To tell you the truth, filmmaking will cause more problems…it is a very hard, hard, hard field to go into. And if I [wanted a creative catharsis] I should have chosen painting or something; not something that requires 200 people to work with you. So I wouldn’t say filmmaking is catharsis. I would say it’s just [about] lightening life. Sometimes you just have to tell yourself, “Okay, I am blue today because I worked a lot. It’s not because of any other reason in my life to be sad about.”

So when I was young, obviously the racism was really depressing me. You know, racism in my community was—at one point I couldn’t bear it, I was always hanging my head or something. I was the only Asian in town. I think just getting out of that community helped me, to see that there was something else, an alternative life. I also come from a very dysfunctional family, so the combination of my dysfunctional family and my community being the way it was, it was very stifling and depressing. So I got out of it. I left my hometown. I haven’t gone back since. …

CineVue: So, what’s next?

Well, I’m developing some ideas with somebody, and I’m hopefully going to be writing and finishing the script this year. And if everything falls into place, get the financing and shoot next year. But you never know how things turn out. Life is a constant surprise.

CineVue: Is your next film also going to deal with these issues of adoption, or Asian American women?

The producer that I’m working with, she doesn’t want me to do that because she wants me to expand to something else. But I do have a project that I think could be absolutely great, and it is another aspect of the adoption phenomenon. SURPLUS isn’t really about adoption, it’s about child abandonment. And it’s sort of like a stairway: connected or tied together loosely. TIE A YELLOW RIBBON obviously has a Korean adoptee lead character. This other project I would love to do, but people are constantly counseling me to do another, very, very different, more commercial project. But you know, again, if someone tells me, here, I can make $10 million to work another Korean adoption story, I would do it! (Laughs) I think it would be fascinating. I have a really good idea for one. And it’s nothing connected with any traditional mother, or birth mother/family search. My films are always a little bit psychological, and a little edgier than most mainstream films, I think.

Rebecca Klassen is an editor of Hyphen magazine. During her senior year of high school, she was the only Asian American in a couple of fur trade rendezvous historical reenactments in Minnesota—she pretended to be French Canadian.

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Bruce is everywhere, from Ben Tanaka to those shiny cars in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT

By Reihan Salam

Recently, I found myself arguing with a friend about a very vital question, namely, “Why is Justin Lin so dope?” We really do talk like that: I’m not proud of it. Anyway, we were breaking down why Justin Lin is so dope, and we concluded that it had something to do with why Ben Tanaka is so wack. Allow me to explain.

Adrian Tomine, one of America’s most celebrated comic artists, has just completed Shortcomings, a three-issue story cycle centered on self-loathing Ben Tanaka, an Asian American unhealthily fixated on Asian American masculinity. Well, that’s one way of putting it. More bluntly, Tanaka really, really wants to sleep with non-Asian (specifically, fair-haired and blue-eyed) women. I mean, really. It could be that it takes great artistic courage to have a protagonist who is so deeply unpleasant as to defy empathy. I can’t really say. All I know is that Tanaka needs help.

But what kind of help? While reading Shortcomings, I couldn’t help but think that what Tanaka needed most was a visit from Bruce Lee. As a free-floating spectral apparition, Lee would kick Tanaka upside the head, knocking the nonsense right out Tanaka’s ears. A new, more powerful Tanaka would then train his body and mind in service to, say, workers’ rights or some other worthy cause.

Bruce Lee has been following me my entire life. (Fortunately, I have yet to be confronted by his ass-kicking ghost.) As a kid, his action-packed meditations on nationhood and perseverance were broadcast Saturday afternoons on WPIX. Then, in elementary school, I was introduced to the notion that all Asians were trained in the martial arts. How this could possibly be a bad thing was a mystery to me at the time, and remains one even now.

By the time I reached high school—in my case a heavily Asian magnet school that drew working- and middle-class kids from the outer boroughs of New York—the Wu-Tang Clan was remixing the deeper themes of Bruce Lee’s kung fu classics with gritty rhymes about urban life, and almost every Asian American kid I knew ardently embraced the result. The day before I left for college my sister, who knows me too well, bought me a hipster-kitsch Bruce Lee wallet that I held on to for about five years. My computer wallpaper for most of college was a Giant Robot image of Bruce Lee manning a turntable. I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly why Bruce Lee has long formed the backdrop to my many misadventures, particularly since I can’t claim to be a kung fu connoisseur. I think it must have something to do with the fact that Bruce Lee was a wiry, compact, Asian American man who couldn’t help but kick ass. Violence doesn’t solve everything, to be sure, but Bruce Lee’s righteous fury was delivered judiciously and well: in this regard, as in so many others, he offers lessons to us all.

My guess is that Lin grew up in a similar milieu. In BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, he portrays four intelligent and thoroughly amoral thugs who literally could have walked out of my high school Calculus class. Unlike the mighty Bruce, these “gentlemen” were not of sound mind and body. These wannabe goodfellas took shortcuts, they embraced the crass materialism of their suburban surroundings, and they always took the easy way out—they were, in short, like almost all American teens, except a little bit smarter and a little bit more ruthless. BETTER LUCK TOMORROW was an instant American classic in the vein of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, a cold, hard look at how kids grow up in a country that manages to be obscenely rich and obscenely violent at the same time. The fact that these kids were Asian American overachievers simply said: we’re just like you—only more so.

Believe it or not, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT was another milestone. Yes, it was a straight-ahead moneymaker, and yes it “starred” about a dozen incredibly fast custom cars. But it also gave us an all-too-brief look at Han, an Asian American don who left home to escape his dark past (quite possibly Han from BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, also portrayed by Sung Kang), who calls Tokyo’s mean streets his “Wild West.” TOKYO DRIFT is about the hip-hop-inflected future, when Asian dollars and American know-how and vice versa will fuel global street culture, and it happens to be the future we’ll all be living in soon. Your kids, by the way, are living there now.

Now Lin has made FINISHING THE GAME, a frankly absurd look at the panic and chaos that reigned on-set just after Bruce Lee’s death, when a financially-strapped production team struggled to make a movie without its star attraction.

Somewhere, Bruce Lee is smiling.

Reihan Salam is a writer, producer, editor, and critic based in Washington, D.C.

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Behind David Kaplan’s psychedelic fairy tale, YEAR OF THE FISH

By Hua Hsu

One of the more unusual films debuting at this year’s festival is David Kaplan’s YEAR OF THE FISH, a playful, animated reworking of an ancient Chinese folk story set in New York’s Chinatown, circa today. We spoke to Kaplan about the film’s dreamy and occasionally bizarre look—achieved through a method of animation called “rotoscoping.”

Cinevue: How did you come up with the idea for YEAR OF THE FISH?

I have had a long-term interest in film adaptations of folklore and fairy tales. YEAR OF THE FISH is my first feature-length film, but I had already made several short film adaptations such as LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (starring Christina Ricci) and LITTLE SUCK-A-THUMB. I have always found these stories to be incredibly rich in terms of content and emotion: they tap deep into the human experience and also seem to be especially ripe for translation into the visual media. In my research of the Cinderella fairy tale type, I came across what is considered to be the oldest known variant of the tale, a Chinese folk story recorded around the 9th century, some 800 years prior to the better-known European versions. Since at that time I was looking for a project to make locally in New York City, it occurred to me to take this ancient tale and transport it to modern-day Chinatown.

Cinevue: How did you decide to rotoscope the film?

Since the story contains some magical elements, I felt we needed a technique to situate the images somewhere halfway between reality and dream. This was the primary aesthetic reason for employing rotoscoping. The visuals are based in "real life" but they are also flowing, painterly, impressionist...it allows the story to veer seamlessly from the modern-day into the fantastic.

Cinevue: Can you walk us through the process of rotoscoping? Most people are probably only familiar with it because of television commercials or Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE. How does it work?

"Rotoscoping" is a catch-all term that defines the process of taking live-action film or video and using it as a guide for painted or drawn imagery, thereby creating an animation based on the original live-action footage. The technique was invented in 1914 by Max Fleischer (the creator of BETTY BOOP and many others) and has been used by Walt Disney (in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES), Ralph Bakshi, and most recently by Richard Linklater in both WAKING LIFE and A SCANNER DARKLY.

In the case of YEAR OF THE FISH, we shot on inexpensive miniDV video and then loaded all the footage into G5 Macs where we then "painted" over every other frame to create 12 frame-per-second animation. We used a program called Studio Artist and employed both frame-by-frame hand animation and a broader, interpolated auto-rotoscoping technique based on research into the cognitive neuroscience of the nature of human visual perception. This way, we were able to accomplish with three people what would normally employ 40 full-time animators. We were also able to enlarge the frame size to high-definition, incorporate the color palettes of artists such as Cezanne and Van Gogh, and apply them to our digital canvases, turn daytime footage into night scenes, etc.

Cinevue: I think the animation gives the film a really nice surreal feel. How do you think the film would have been different had it been done with normal film?

This was a very low-budget film, so I knew in advance that the only thing we could afford to shoot on was video. Film was never an option. And the thing about video is that it has a very harsh, almost hyper-realistic aesthetic. This may be appropriate for some scripts, but this one needed to be dreamy, magical and beautiful. So the rotoscoping allowed us to shoot on video but transform the feel of the film into something very different.

And there were practical considerations as well. We were able to shoot with no lights, a tiny documentary-sized crew, with a consumer-sized camera. This proved invaluable for shooting in Chinatown because it allowed us to be incredibly unobtrusive. We never had to lock up a street and we were able to move very fast and get into some challenging locations. And because we never imposed ourselves on the local shopkeepers in this way, we enjoyed the full support of the local community during production.

Cinevue: Do you have any major influences in film or animation?

Linklater's WAKING LIFE was a huge inspiration in showing how someone could pull off a feature-length animated film on a budget and overcome the aesthetic limitations of shooting on video via rotoscoping, though he goes for a very different style than what we do in YEAR OF THE FISH. Other influences for this film include Camus' BLACK ORPHEUS and Ahn Hung Tran's THE SCENT OF THE GREEN PAPAYA.

Hua Hsu is the editor of CineVue. A frequent contributor to Slate, he will join the English Department at Vassar College in the fall.

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The bizarre love triangulation of Gina Kim’s NEVER FOREVER

Andrew (actor David McInnis) and Sophie (actress Vera Farmiga) in Gina Kim's interracial melodrama NEVER FOREVER.

By Ed Park

Gina Kim’s NEVER FOREVER, a hothouse of italicized emotion and pregnant pauses, received its world premiere at Sundance this year. Star Vera Farmiga, best known for her role in THE DEPARTED, told the New York Times it was “one of the most visceral love stories I’d ever read;” intensely present in nearly every frame, she’s as compelling a wit’s-end heroine as you’ll see on screen this year. Ed Park interviewed Kim via e-mail.

Cinevue: NEVER FOREVER’s "plot keyword" on IMDB is "interracial relationship"—a label that's pretty reductive and yet right on the money. On the one hand, you have the story of a well-to-do woman (Sophie, played by Vera Farmiga) whose successful, infertile husband (Andrew, played by David McInnis) has become suicidal and withdrawn, complicating her desire to become a mother. This leads her to hire someone to inseminate her, a situation that could certainly work as drama, without the element of race. But the story is deepened by the fact that Sophie is white and both her husband and her lover (Jihah, played by Jung-woo Ha) are Korean. (When Jihah tells her that Andrew resembles him, there's a little VERTIGO frisson.) Was the issue of race integral to the film’s conception, or did you have the dramatic kernel of the story first?

The race element was definitely one of the jumping-off points for NEVER FOREVER. The story came along when I started to teach at Harvard University. I had never lived on the East Coast before and was struck by how Boston lacks ethnic diversity. I became more conscious of my own race than ever before (having been born and raised in Korea, I had very little awareness of race). I became intrigued by how Asian people are perceived in the mainstream culture. I was always aware of how Asian women are overtly sexualized in American pop culture, but had very little knowledge about how Asian men are perceived. Most of them are completely de-sexualized, and are very rarely portrayed as subjects of desire. But of course there are exceptions, who often “happen” to be good-looking, successful professionals (lawyers, doctors etc.) who went to ivy league schools. When I investigated the distinction, I realized that it is a class issue more than anything else. Asian working-class men, who are poor first-generation immigrants, are often completely desexualized—unlike, say, Latino laborers. On the other end of the spectrum, the upper-class Asian men are the ones who are supposed to be desirable enough to get Caucasian women. I wanted to subvert this stereotype. Jihah is the poor immigrant, but I wanted to portray him as a sexually-charged man. Andrew is the perfect sexy Asian man but his sperm is weak and therefore, he is de-sexualized on the most basic level.

Cinevue: Were there films that influenced you in terms of tone or subject matter? Given NEVER FOREVER’s thorough melodrama and engagement with race, were you thinking of films like IMITATION OF LIFE or FAR FROM HEAVEN? Given the "secret patrimony" angle, were you giving a nod to all to the Korean soap operas that are so popular around Asia and the diaspora these days?

Douglas Sirk’s films influenced me greatly, as did some European films such as BELLE DE JOUR. But the most inspiring ones for me, in writing NEVER FOREVER, were Korean films from the 1960s. I was teaching Korean cinema at Harvard when I first conceptualized NEVER FOREVER. I was fortunate enough to get some 35mm prints of classic Korean cinema for the class screenings. I of course had seen all of them long ago, but when I watched them again to teach, I was impressed with how subversive they were, both aesthetically and thematically. Films such as MADAME FREEDOM (Han Hyong-mo, 1956), THE HOUSEMAID (Kim Ki-yong, 1960) and THE HOUSEGUEST AND MY MOTHER (Shin Sang-ok, 1961) moved me deeply with their vivid depiction of female characters. Each one is driven by her own desires and struggles for them. The endings of these films are often less than satisfying, but they inspired me nevertheless. I started to wonder what would happen if I put the same woman character in contemporary cinema without sacrificing her integrity at the very end. The result was a melodrama that strictly focuses on the psychology of a woman character, rather than the plot of a love affair itself.

Cinevue: This is a great role for Farmiga—she's in practically every scene, most of them intense if not downright traumatic, and we live for those few glimpses of her smiling. How did she come to be in your movie? What was it like working with her and with your other actors? (How did you find Jung-Woo Ha, who plays Jihah?) Often, she's plunged into scenes where every other actor is Asian/Korean—during the scenes with church members, was she aware of what was being said in the script?

NEVER FOREVER is not a dialogue-heavy film, so I was desperately looking for the right actor for the role of Sophie, someone who not only could ‘play’ the role but also ‘become’ the role. I first saw Vera in DOWN TO THE BONE and was blown away by her performance. She has the ability to disappear into the character she plays. So, I sent her my script and we met at a small café in Soho. I was convinced that Vera was the Sophie that I’d been looking for the minute she walked into the café. Vera is both transparent and mysterious. Her body always creates a cinematic tension within a frame. Her face is like a map with which we can explore a character’s heart. Thanks to her tremendous cinematic presence, I had a relatively easy time creating the Sophie character without having to explain much with dialogue. The chemistry between Jungwoo and Vera as two actors and fellow artists were beyond belief. They actually didn’t want to meet each other before the shoot so that they could retain the mystery until the first day of shoot. I wanted to shoot the sex scenes in a sequential order, so that we could exploit the awkwardness and tension in real life. Of course, it was extremely risky but it ended up beautifully working out. I could tell the intimacy growing between the two actors from one scene to another!

Cinevue Though Jihah is from Korea, he lives in Chinatown (rather than somewhere else in the metro area with a greater concentration of Koreans). Was this simply a practical matter, or a comment on Sophie's perception of "Asianness"?

It was to portay Jihah as a total outsider. He, of course, suffers from extreme isolation in the U.S. since he is an illegal immigrant. But he refuses to be part of the Korean (or Korean-American) community as well, and chooses to live in Chinatown. Things can be easier for him if he chooses to compromise. But he stubbornly goes his own way in terms of pursuing his American dream. I wanted Jihah to be a man of strong will, who is not afraid of loneliness and not willing to compromise his integrity by pretending to be someone other than himself.

Despite the full-bore melodrama, the film subtly shifts our sympathies, and even the plot is left with an erasure of sorts. The title is evocative and yet elusive; the delicate ending is fascinating in its ambiguity. In your mind, is there a clear narrative connecting what's happened in the movie to this final scene? (Semi-spoiler alert—maybe read this after you see the movie.)

I think it is quite clear that the baby in Sophie’s belly is Jihah’s, but I didn’t want to show Jihah, because it would diffuse the real question. For me, the real question was “Is she happy? Did she achieve what she wanted?,” not “Who is she with?”— which differentiates this film from the typical melodrama. (End spoiler alert)

In NEVER FOREVER, who Sophie ends up with really is not the point. In this context, NEVER FOREVER can be considered a coming of age story —a bildungsroman—more than a melodrama. For the ending, I wanted to make it clear that she fulfilled what she longed for, and therefore achieves happiness at the end. The best way to imply that is to make her pregnant again, since pregnancy has a different meaning for Sophie than it does for other typical female melodrama characters. For Sophie, the fetus is an agency that makes her realize what she really wants out of her life. It is her desire, dream, and ultimately, her life.

So, in the climactic confrontation scene with Andrew, when Sophie says, “This baby is mine,” she is not talking about motherhood but rather is explicitly expressing the desire to live her own life. The irony is that it all started as a sacrifice for her husband, but ended up becoming her self-fulfillment. In a way, Sophie became a whore by becoming a mother and ultimately, blurs (and hopefully negates) the boundary between the two stereotypes of women: the mother and the whore.

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former film critic at The Village Voice. He blogs at The Dizzies. His debut novel, Personal Days, is forthcoming from Random House next year.

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The Overlooked Genius of Patrick Tam Ka-ming

By La Frances Hui

This Hong Kong filmmaker is a master of film language whose stylish and innovative use of light, color, frame composition, and camera movement create a world of visual exuberance. His editing approach features back-and-forth shifts from real time to slow motion and freeze frames to create arresting effects. His emphasis on mise-en-scène has redefined the meaning of art direction in Hong Kong cinema.

You might think that I am talking about Wong Kar-wai, but no, before Wong, there was Patrick Tam Ka-ming.

Overlooked at home and abroad for many years, Tam is returning triumphantly with the celebrated film AFTER THIS OUR EXILE (2006), his first directorial effort in seventeen years. A film about a father who instructs his young son to steal, AFTER has garnered major film awards in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan and has been touring the international festival circuit. The film, along with a retrospective of his earlier work, is part of the 30th Asian American International Film Festival and should offer a perfect—and necessary—moment to reexamine Tam’s artistic significance.

Born in 1948, Tam was still a high school student when he started writing film reviews. In 1967, upon graduation, he joined Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), the television channel credited with training some of the world’s renowned film talent, including Wong Kar-wai, Chow Yun Fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung and many more. At TVB, Tam worked as screenwriter and director, among other roles. In 1975 TVB sent him to San Francisco to study filmmaking. He returned to make television films. He was recognized for creating original dramas, including Seven Women and the police drama C.I.D. He was also part of the first generation of music video directors in Hong Kong.

But Tam’s most notable achievements came in film. Along with Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Allen Fong, and others, Tam was part of the Hong Kong New Wave, a film movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unlike filmmakers of earlier generations who kept close ties with mainland China, New Wave filmmakers came of age in Hong Kong. Their work, influenced by European art cinema, was bold, innovative and reflected an emerging Hong Kong identity in what was then a British colony. Many of their films tackle the crime and social problems rampant during Hong Kong’s fast socio-economic development in the 1970s and 1980s. Tam’s NOMAD (1982) is a perfect example. A film about young people, it deals with economic disparity, the love/hate relationship with foreign cultures, youth alienation, and sexual liberation.

It is thanks to his stylistic innovations that Tam stands out. A formalist with a keen interest in popular genres, he experimented with lights, colors, and cinematography in a most meticulous manner and became a celebrated film editor. His unconventional and stylized editing for Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1991) and ASHES OF TIME (1994) helped shape Wong’s distinctive—and much imitated—style. In fact, the two filmmakers’ connection goes a long way. The young Wong, who some consider Tam’s protégé, was a screenwriter for Tam’s FINAL VICTORY (1987), a film about a man falling in love with his best friend’s lover in a world of gang violence. It is no coincidence that Wong’s long-time collaborators cinematographer Christopher Doyle and art director William Chang also participated in earlier Tam projects.

Tam’s bold use of film language was already apparent in his first film THE SWORD (1980), a martial arts period piece. Featuring fantastically choreographed and superbly edited swordfight sequences, the film also has a tightly-structured and well-developed narrative. In an argument sequence involving two female characters Hsiao Yue and Ying Chi, two 180-degree camera movements, coupled with a few calculated steps made by the characters, turn what could have been a trivial argument into a well-choreographed confrontation. First we see a close-up of the two women, Hsiao Yue on the right and Ying Chi on the left. As the camera rotates around Ying Chi, Hsiao Yue disappears from the screen, only to magically re-appear on the left side of Ying Chi moments later, while the camera continues to turn to bring on new surprises. This well-rehearsed and painstakingly calculated trick adds tension and motion to what could have been a static and predictable scene.

Color and light are important formal elements in Tam’s films. It is hard not to notice the blue tone of MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE (1989), a film about a woman forced to become a gang leader’s mistress. Much of the story takes place at night or in dimly lit spaces. The blue tone accentuates a sense of loss and melancholy. Spots of golden orange light expose faces otherwise hidden in the shadows. Changes in color and intensity, more typical of stage design, create atmospheric effects. No other Tam film, though, features as bold a use of color as FINAL VICTORY. In its underground world, characters frequent mahjong parlors, nightclubs, bars, and streets drenched in neon lights. Elaborate lighting and set design, along with contrasting costumes and makeup, bring forth saturated blues, reds, greens, yellows, and pinks. The result is a deep and vivid visual impression.

Tam has made himself a truly admired film editor. His cuts are clean and precise. In action sequences, he focuses on the core of the action—close-ups of guns, close-ups of faces, shots of people hit by bullets—all placed together by rapid cuts, heightening tension and generating surprises. Tam has openly acknowledged his admiration for the editing style of Robert Bresson, whose minimal and direct approach to editing seeks to eliminate excesses. His visual strategy focuses on the essence of the human soul and what he calls the “truth.” Adopting this same editing technique but not exactly the ideology behind it, Tam has created a visual style to another effect. In his films, the cuts are showy, drawing attention to themselves. In the first fight sequence of Wong Kar-wai’s ASHES OF TIME, which Tam edited, we see only blades, flashes of the fighters, splashes of colors and lights, with an occasional quick focus on parts of a body. Actions dissolve into abstract patterns. What you see is a moving impressionist picture.

Tam made a total of seven films in the 1980s. He took a break from film directing after MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE. He shot commercials in Taiwan in the early 1990s. In 1995 he moved to Malaysia to teach filmmaking. This is where he started developing the student script that would eventually turn into AFTER THIS OUR EXILE. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Hong Kong City University where he remains until today. He continued to work as a film editor for some smaller film projects until Johnnie To’s ELECTION (2005). AFTER THIS OUR EXILE marks a major comeback for Tam and a departure from his signature style. Shifting away from his emphasis on visual elements, Tam shows a deeper interest in character and plot development. Ironically, it took this latest work to bring overdue attention to his earlier career achievement.

La Frances Hui is the Senior Program Officer of Performing Arts at the Asia Society. She has over a decade of experience presenting dance, music, theater, and film in New York. La has served on review panels for the Asian American International Film Festival, National Endowment for the Arts, and Dance Theater Workshop. A native of Hong Kong, she has an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University.

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Satire, pansexuality, and how KING AND THE CLOWN captivated the most wired nation in the world

By Pete L’Official

It seems that in South Korea, good things come either in sets of three or twelve million. Over one quarter of South Korea's population, or about twelve million people, lives in its densely-packed capital, Seoul. A similar number—more than a quarter of all of South Koreans, a percentage that leads the world—are served by broadband Internet. And, in 2005, just about the same amount of people bought tickets to see Lee Jun-ik's Chosun Dynasty drama, KING AND THE CLOWN—the highest-grossing film of that year and, until 2006 (and the release of Bong Joon-Hoo's THE HOST), the most successful Korean film in history.

Research into whether such record-setting attendance was the result of what would certainly be the most successful spamming of a digitally plugged-in capital city's residents the world has ever known is, as of yet, inconclusive. Whatever did stoke the cinephilic flames of the nation's audiences—the film's elaborate, gracefully chromatic evocation of the era, or perhaps the pansexual attractiveness of its breakout star, Lee Jun-Ki—the film's wild success still seems anomalous, as homoerotic period pieces about minstrels and the monarchs who love them don't exactly scream "epic blockbuster." Perhaps that is precisely the film's greatest triumph: though it has the shape of what you know to be mildly charming, thematically-challenging art-house fare, fit almost impossibly within is a well-engineered piece of pop entertainment.

Adapted from the Korean play Yi, the film follows two talented minstrels, the bold Jang-Sang and the beautiful Gong-Gil, who first find great success in mocking the king and his favorite consort. Then, once discovered by the authorities, they are threatened with death for their public parodies—that is, of course, unless they can draw a laugh from the tyrannical king, Yeonsan. Though the delicately-featured Gong-Gil can make the whole kingdom, from peasant to potentate, swoon with a shimmy of his hips, when compared with the childhood-traumatized (his mother was forced to commit suicide), emotionally capricious king, he's just another pretty face. Yeonsan, whose bloodthirst is equaled by his penchant for the ribald joke, is a blood vessel waiting to burst, and his astute prime minister, recognizing the value of having a fearless, in-house truth-and-honesty commission that can also put on a fine hand-puppet show helps to hasten the explosive process.

It is well-known, and no less true here, that court jesters were historically given wide latitude to speak truth to power as long as they couched their truth-telling as jest. This figurative fine line between being risqué and literally risking your neck is cleverly made literal in the film—the two minstrels are expert tightrope tricksters. Yet KING AND THE CLOWN probes slightly deeper into the intimate dynamic between lampooner and the lampooned as the profoundly insecure king, sensing in their performances both a newfound liberation from the formalities of his court and an outlet for his own repressions, becomes disastrously obsessed with the troupe, forcing them to become bit players on the stage of his damaged psyche. Though the political import and expediency with which their riotous act influences instant—and sometimes gruesome—governmental reprisal may seem a little far-fetched (though American audiences can only wish this were so), the film's scorn for secrecy, and faith in the therapeutic, expressive power of artistic performance is both well-placed and comforting.

The quality of any political humor is often directly proportional to the fallibility of the government being mocked. The more barbaric—or incompetent—the more potential for laughs exists, generally. The same is true within the simple logic of the film: the less rational the king becomes, the higher the stakes, but also, the sharper the humor, and the deeper the pathos. The minstrels' work, in effect, proves the old adage that comedy is merely tragedy, with time.

Pete L'Official is a writer living in New York. Pete has written about film, music, and books for The Village Voice, Vibe, and The Believer, and he is currently doing research for a book on racism in socc-, or rather, football.

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Roger Garcia pays tribute to Tam’s new classic, AFTER THIS OUR EXILE

Aaron Kwok in Patrick Tam's masterpiece AFTER THIS OUR EXILE.

By Roger Garcia

The Hong Kong New Wave began in the late 1970s and one of its first masterworks was the debut feature by Allen Fong, FATHER AND SON. The film deals with the troubled relationship between an authoritarian father, who is a lowly janitorand his son, whom he hopes will prosper in business instead of following a childhood ambition to become a filmmaker. It remains one of the few Hong Kong films in the late 20th century to capture the mood, spirit, and feel of growing up in Hong Kong as Hong Kong itself grew up—and into an integral part of the global economy.

One generation later and the Hong Kong New Wave has come full circle. One of its original members, Patrick Tam, has now confirmed what was not so clear thirty years ago—that he is the undisputed master filmmaker of that New Wave, and the one filmmaker apart from Allen Fong who has remained true to the vision, concept, and philosophy of that singularly important and innovative moment in Hong Kong cinema. Like Fong, Tam has only been sporadically active in recent years. Instead he has been overshadowed by filmmakers on whom he was a seminal influence, and who have compromised (if not insulted) the legacy of the Hong Kong New Wave as some innocuous and inoffensive moment of internationalism.

Now, after some seventeen years' absence, Tam has happily returned with a new film. AFTER THIS OUR EXILE is the first masterpiece of Hong Kong cinema of the 21st century and reminds us that Tam is probably the most important Hong Kong filmmaker of the last twenty-five years.

Set in 1990s Malaysia, the film follows the troubled relationship between a loser father who cooks in a cheap restaurant, and his son, who has the instincts of survival that his father has lost. When the man's wife—and son's mother—desserts them, their lives drifts across the thin line that divides survival and collapse, evoking a dialectical discourse of manipulation, morality, and class tension. Escaping loan sharks, the father takes the son to live in a seedy, small-town hotel, and eventually pimps the woman next door. When that ends in recrimination, the father encourages his son to sneak into bourgeois homes and steal whatever valuables he can find.

Inevitably this too ends badly—especially in contrast to the life of the mother, who is now married, pregnant, and living a comfortable, middle class, urban life. Just as Fong's FATHER AND SON ends in the present day (the son has graduated from film school in the US), so too with AFTER THIS OUR EXILE. The son is now grown and returns to the place of his youth, the place where he lost his innocence and where his future was intertwined, for better or worse, with the fate of his father.

Tam captures the seedy and oppressive atmosphere of small-town Malaysia; the setting reflects the dead end of the father's tragic trajectory, revealing a social condition that one either accepts out of frustration or resists out of instinct. AFTER THIS OUR EXILE reads as Tam the filmmaker's passage from the former to the latter, his resistance to authority giving him strength and liberation. With a deft touch, Tam constantly shifts the narrative’s point of view from son to father and vice versa. In doing so, the film becomes a profound reflection on the process not exactly of aging, but of maturing and wisdom. And in its profundity it transmits not only the energy of the image, but also a dialectical current—a melancholic treatise on the author’s control (or otherwise) of his creation.

It is a process that was nascent in the Hong Kong New Wave as filmmakers inflected the identity of a new Hong Kong and its relationship to a patriarchal mainland China. In Tam’s hands it now becomes something of a dialogue with power, and a reflection on morality and beliefs. This consciousness—indeed, this responsibility—has been vapidly absent from much of recent Hong Kong cinema whose compromises pale against the rigor and honesty of Tam’s vision.

The fact that Tam shot this film in Malaysia and not Hong Kong deserves some comment. He is no stranger to shooting outside Hong Kong, having set his first feature, LOVE MASSACRE, in San Francisco and BURNING SNOW in Taiwan. But Malaysia represents not only a place of exile (Tam taught there for a few years after his last feature) but also a place that is both familiar and strange: it is Chinese but not the Chinese that we would associate with China or Hong Kong. It is in fact like a childhood memory—lived from the inside but also seen from the outside. This spaltung is fundamental to Tam's cinema and sharply defined from the outset in films like his early costume actioner THE SWORD, whose hero embodies the dialectics that have constantly informed his work.

Thank you, Patrick Tam, for reminding us what the Hong Kong New Wave was meant to be, and for showing what Hong Kong cinema can truly achieve.

Roger Garcia was director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival at the time of the Hong Kong New Wave. Since then he has produced films in Hollywood and Asia, and published books on cinema including Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, and programmed film festivals in the U.S. and Europe

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Oliver Wang interviews Justin Lin

Director Justin Lin on the set of ANNAPOLIS.

My first interview with Justin Lin was in 1997, when he and Quentin Lee were promoting their debut feature film, SHOPPING FOR FANGS. Along with Rea Tajiri (STRAWBERRY FIELDS, HISTORY AND MEMORY), the three chatted about the state of Asian American filmmaking in a cramped studio at KALXFM in Berkeley, CA. At one point I asked if they, as independent filmmakers, would ever consider doing a studio film. Justin replied, half-joking, half-serious: “If I had the chance to make MIGHTY DUCKS 6, I would make the best MIGHTY DUCKS 6 I can.”

When Justin and I sat down in a Silverlake café a decade later, two unlikely things had happened in the intervening years. 1) The Mighty Ducks, now called the Anaheim Ducks, had just won the Stanley Cup a few weeks prior and 2) Justin had indeed directed a sports film for Disney: the boxing flick, ANNAPOLIS, in 2004.

The success of Justin Lin has come as a surprise, not least of all to Justin himself. Since the release of 2003’s BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, he has become the premier Asian American filmmaker, balancing both major studio films (ANNAPOLIS, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT) and independent features, such as this year’s FINISHING THE GAME. Ten years ago, he was still in film school, editing documentaries for the Japanese American National Museum. Five years ago, he was carrying six-figure debt and living off oatmeal dinners. Today, his last three films have collectively made nearly $175,000,000. That dramatic turnaround is how we opened our conversation.

ACV: It occurred to me that it’s been five years since our last interview—not since BETTER LUCK TOMORROW. At the time, doors were starting to open for you and you had certain ideas and ideals about what you wanted to see happen. How close have your vision and your reality coincided?

JL: Having been through film school, you do sit around and you talk a lot. Now that I’ve lived it, I realize...unless you actually get in these (board)rooms, everything is assumption and speculation. I’ve been to enough film festivals and it’s always funny when you talk in speculation like “Oh, would you go do a studio movie?” as if you go to Sundance, everything’s (waiting for you) over there. It’s not, it doesn’t work that way.

ACV: You made BETTER LUCK TOMORROW in 2002, promoted it through 2003, then started ANNAPOLIS in 2004. How dramatic a shift was it going between those two films?

JL: Oh, it was very different because, you know, studio films are market-driven, they’re marketing-driven. You’re talking about (brand)…and my first studio movie was with Disney and you talk about branding…logic doesn’t play in branding, it doesn’t. And these are things that I didn’t understand. I mean, I understood the general idea of what a studio film is, but when you’re fighting branding, that’s a whole other thing… It wasn’t even called ANNAPOLIS when I signed up, it was called THE BRIGADE and it was a boxing movie and somehow the trailer ended up having exploding battleships and stuff.

ACV: You probably didn’t have to make the same compromises with your indie films.

JL: I would say at the end of the day it’s the same thing, two hours of someone’s time projected on screen, but at the same time, it’s completely different, and it’s different agendas of why these films were made. And for me it’s always been trying to find that sweet spot where, in my life I’ve never been creative without worrying about how am I going to pay rent next month, and I wanted to hopefully put myself in a position where I can be creative without thinking “Oh my God, how am I going to…” But it is a totally different way of filmmaking, it’s packaging, and I think as a young filmmaker going into that world, you don’t have a lot of leverage except the fact that you can fight the fight and you try to pick the right situation, the right people, but even then, you’re not going to be perfect.

ACV: Did it feel overwhelming at all?

JL: No, more frustrating at times. Honestly, it was pretty amazing to walk on set that first day and that first day, I remember, was the big “academy scene.” It was like a thousand extras, and you realize (for) lunch, “I’m going to spend the whole budget of BETTER LUCK TOMORROW.” So, it is, in that sense, I was more in awe but having come from the indie world, that’s nothing. I think when you’re somehow trying to trick the police into staying a little longer so you can get your car shots, that’s pressure.

ACV: You had great critical buzz coming out of BETTER LUCK TOMORROW but ANNAPOLIS was more or less savaged by the critics. How was that experience?

JL: When I signed up for it, there was something that really attracted me to it and I wanted to make a Disney kind of sports movie, but... I know as an independent filmmaker, when you come out of nowhere and (critics) support you, they expect you to continue and make this unique voice. But I didn’t want that (expectation) to be my deciding factor. So I knew that going in, and I’ve seen that those films aren’t well reviewed as a whole. But it is hard, you’re a human being and it got personal, at times it did feel like an ambush and I didn’t realize that my name was going to be the thing. When you read reviews about movies like ANNAPOLIS usually they’ll just say “the movie sucks” whatever, but I was amazed at how much of the focus was on me.

I learned a lot about accountability, because at the end of the day … if you hate the movie, I’m accountable. I don’t care if I had to put certain scenes in it …because that was the mandate of the brand, it’s still on me. I don’t work for Disney, I made that movie, I got the title as director, so everything that came and people want to bash me, it’s on me. I will take full accountability. But, I have to say, I feel that some of it was the situation of going from an edgy movie into a studio movie. And (ANNAPOLIS) wasn’t an edgy studio film, it was a very Disney sports movie.

ACV: Maybe this goes back to the MIGHTY DUCKS 6 joke from our 1997 interview but, in saying that you wanted to work on a Disney sports film, what is it about that genre that appealed to you?

JL: I felt like it grabbed me, it was like a fairy tale for guys. It was really about this working class kid who saw something and thought “Oh, if I go across the river, that’s my dream.” So it was actually my most personal movie. Because (with) BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, I was very removed, even the style is very removed in a way, and that was more of an observational piece because I’m not those kids. I didn’t grow up like those kids.

ACV: Let’s briefly talk about THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT, a.k.a. FF3. Did that come your way before or after ANNAPOLIS?

JL: Well, I’ll tell you why it came. ANNAPOLIS was getting all this buzz before it came out. When we finished it, the buzz was really hot. I was shooting in London and (Universal) tracked me down, and I turned (FF3) down, I didn’t want to do it because I read the script. Stacy Snider, the head of the studio, said, “You’re rejecting me for a summer movie? Why?” and I felt like it was an opportune time for me to say, “This is exactly how I feel.”

In the original script, first of all, it’s offensive, it’s dated and I had a lot of issues with it and she’s like, “Well, what would you do differently?” and I said, “Well, (in) Japan, you don’t draft temples and Buddhas and girls in kimonos and shit, it’s more post-modern than that.” I had all these ideas, and to her credit, she thought about it, she’s like “Well, then you’re the guy to take us there.” I remember I went home and thought “I don’t know” and then I remember, when I thought about it, it’s funny, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars but this is what tipped it over for me: I thought “Fuck it, I want to create a coolass Asian American male character that ten-year-old Justin would be like, Oh, that’s cool”—and that became the deciding factor for me.

The weekend I finally decided to do it, I was up in Seattle with my (then) girlfriend and she’s laughing at me because she said “Remember when we saw the first FF at the AMC Santa Monica and we both walked out going, “What the fuck, the Asian guys, what the fuck was that?” I was actually teaching a class in Asian American Studies and there were these kids doing a documentary about the rice rockets and I remember I was like, “Wow, that would be an amazing movie. This is a perfect environment to organically put Asian Americans in.” And what happens? They become like the gangsters. So, in a way, it was kind of cool too…in six or seven years’ time, to go back and at least to infuse, however you want to put it…there was an Asian American touch in this third one.

ACV: You’re talking especially about Han, the character played by Sung Kang. He was not in the original script?

JL: No. You can nitpick all you want, but that character has somehow resonated with certain people. We have been going to all these festivals, me, Sung and Roger (Fan). You see businesswomen running up to Sung, hugging him. You see little kids in Barstow, running up to him.

I was in Barcelona in February, I was doing the short for Sundance, and I went to the Picasso Museum and there was this field trip, Spanish junior high kids were walking by, and this kid walked up to me and he (motions like he’s steering a car) and is like “FAST AND THE FURIOUS?” I’m like, how does he know?

ACV: Yeah, it’s not like you’re in the film.

JL: And he couldn’t even speak English and he recognized me in Barcelona, this Spanish kid, not even an American kid, Spanish kid. So that’s the reach of that movie.

ACV: Speaking of issues of race, representation, and Asian America—let’s talk about FINISHING THE GAME. One of the things that I liked most about the film was how self-aware and affectionate it was to the experiences of Asian American actors. At times, it almost felt like a love letter to Asian Americans in Hollywood.

JL: Oh yeah, very much. I feel like that idea has been with me for a while but it felt like it was the right time for it to come out. We had just wrapped FAST AND THE FURIOUS and I just felt like that energy, I had to somehow articulate it. And having come from where we came from, which is very much film school, Asian American Studies and the film festivals, I felt like it was appropriate.

ACV: Did you always want to make this an independent film or did you think about shopping it to studios?

JL: I could have gotten a big budget and it could have been a kung fu movie right now. That’s what they wanted to make it into you know.

ACV: Which, to me, would really miss the point of the film.

JL: Yeah. The set-up is funny enough that they want to make it like KUNG-FU HUSTLE. They keep saying that, they want all these crazy…you can just see them salivating. And for me to pull back, you know as a business (decision), it’s not a good move, but I don’t give a shit.

ACV: This is sort of your first comedy you’ve worked on. I mean there were comedic elements to SHOPPING FOR FANGS but you’ve done three dramas in a row and this is the first comedy. What was it like doing a comedy for a change? A lot of people say it’s easier to write drama than comedy.

JL: Oh, comedy’s tough, because also comedy is very moody in screenings. It’s happened to me where I’ll watch a movie and maybe I’m having a bad day, like NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. I went to the Tastemakers screening at MTV and I remember I saw it and I came out and I was like, “this is fucking stupid.” And I really thought that and then a year later I saw it on TV and I was laughing non-stop. For it to shift–it’s so subjective and it is really tough. Drama, I think with filmmakers, there’s always this joke that if you want to take the easy road then you find something historic then you make the drama and you kill something, you know that’s always been the joke in film school. But with comedy you’re leaving yourself totally naked and that’s why, talk about being scared, that is the hardest thing. The thing that I loved about it is what comedy does come out of drama. There’s a lot we have to say but we don’t even have to openly say it and I feel that I’ve kind of grown with Roger and Sung and everybody now, these are things that we’ve experienced together too so to be able to bring that all, and to work on the subtext and everything, that was definitely a treat. It’s really more of a testament to them because I wanted the movie to have its own life and stylistically this is actually a harder movie to shoot than THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, design-wise.

ACV: You got to get the 70s hair right…

JL: But even in the camera movements, a lot of times to really get a sense of authenticity or sincerity you don’t want to over cut so the actors have to hit those beats.

ACV: How long have you had this basic idea for the film?

JL: Since I was 12. Remember KTLA, they had the Kung Fu Theatre? That’s how I grew up, but they never shot the real Bruce Lee they had Bruce Li? So I got introduced to Bruce Li and all that. As a kid you’re like “Whoa” with the Flying Guillotine and all that, you’re like “That is awesome.” But then I remember when I first saw ENTER THE DRAGON, that’s when you’re like, “This is another level, who is this guy?” That’s when VCRs were coming out, when I was introduced to it, and you went to CHINESE CONNECTION you watched that like “Wow.” Then you watched GAME OF DEATH and as a kid I was confused. I was like, “Who is this other guy walking around?” because I didn’t understand the concept of a body double.

ACV: But you knew it wasn’t him—that was clear.

JL: Yeah. Then through the years I found out the back stories of it but I was always fascinated by who that guy was and how he got the job. So it has been with me for a while. I even had ideas of making this movie in other forms than a documentary form.

ACV: Why a documentary format? You had said you played around with other kinds of styles of how you could have done it.

JL: I was making all these documentaries at the museum, that’s actually what I did before BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, I was making all these pieces and I was editing Nathan Adolfson’s doc (PASSING THROUGH), so I was editing a lot of docs. I really love documentaries but I realized it wasn’t for me. Documentary is always about using quantity and trying to find those spots and trying to go with those moments and then try to find quality. Narrative is totally different, you’re working differently. I’ve always loved the style of documentary so it was kind of the best of both worlds and also it gives it just enough of the sense of the whole self-reflexive elements to … not wink at the audience but get a sense that this is something that it might be in the seventies but it’s exactly the same. We’re still doing the same shit, nothing has changed.

ACV: I’m curious, and this sort of goes back to what I was saying before about the film being a kind of love letter, not just to contemporary Asian Americans in Hollywood but really historically, too. When George Takei shows up, it’s just genius in that respect.

JL: I remember my parents doing that mom n’ pop fish n’ chips (shop) and so we never had dinner until 10 pm, on school nights even. And I remember on KTLA, 11 pm, Star Trek comes on and you’re like, “Man, this guy’s got to get laid.” You just want to see him get laid, you know? You know Captain Kirk is fucking everyone and even Spock gets action. I think there’s one episode where he almost gets some.

ACV: One of the other films that really came to mind in watching this was Robert Townsend’s HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE—obviously thematically they’re really similar and also just the time periods. And both films are riffing on 70s films because Townsend’s dialoguiing with a lot of the blaxploitation that came out in the 70s and 80s. Was that much of an inspiration, or an influence, in terms of thinking of how to put yours together?

JL: I saw it so long ago, it might be subconsciously, I can’t totally say no. I remember seeing that, I remember when HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE came out I was like, “What are short ends?” I wasn’t in film school yet, I didn’t know what that meant but that was a big deal because he had made all the films. It’s always been an inspiration for me as a film maker but I think the 70s there’s something really–I love that period. And obviously this had to take place in the 70s and it gives it that look and that feel and I think it adds a lot more to the discourse.

ACV: What is it about the 70s that you like so much?

JL: For me, it’s interesting, because the 70s for me was in Taiwan so my 70s is always through media and stuff like that. I remember in Taiwan, my family would get together, because Taiwanese TV back then was only three hours a night and I remember we would get together and watch Dance Fever and that’s 70s to me. But having grown up here in the 80s I—I don’t know if it’s true or not—I always romanticize the 70s as that time that almost broke but then it didn’t. It went to the 80s and then the corporations took over and now we’re at this really weird post-modern (stage) where everything is being controlled. So the 70s for me is a sense of real liberation and being able to try anything you want and that’s a personal thing, I don’t know if it’s true or not.

ACV: It sounds like you’re nostalgic about this era that you never actually lived through but you have this idea of what it was like. In fact, more on a technical side, how did you pick the person who was basically responsible for the art direction and the personal styling, as well as the music?

JL: That’s Brian Tyler, he’s awesome. The fact is when you go and make Asian American movies, especially the ones that I want to make, and to have control, you go back to no-budget territory and FINISHING THE GAME is so connected to THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS you wouldn’t believe. Doing a period 70s movie for (our) budget is impossible. But because of my relationships, I was able to get the film for free pretty much, the camera from Panavision because I shoot all my studio movies Panavision so they gave me the camera for free. Universal would literally take me into pre-sets, load them, drive them to our set, leave them for us and we’d make them into our sets. I had guys at Universal calling—prop and wardrobe, getting all that for free. This is a labor of love and these are the connections you have, this is the reality of Asian American films.

One of the things I wanted to make sure of was, I wanted also to provide opportunities in this movie. Here’s what’s so great: I made really good friends with a lot my crew in the studio world to the point where they’re like “I don’t even need to get paid, if you shoot something, call me, I’m there for you” and I appreciate that but at the same time, I felt like this is a journey where we want to give opportunity to people. Like Greg Louie is this young guy who did cutting stuff for us and he’s a great editor. I just feel like, he just needs the opportunity, he has the talent. So instead of hiring other people, I gave the job to him. And Candi Guterres, who’s a very good production designer. Even down to the PAs. We would go to get students and stuff because those were the things that I never had. And to be honest, what fucking pisses me off, and this still happens—a lot of Asian Americans, when they make films, they’ll fucking pay the white crew and they won’t pay (the Asian Americans), they use the community guilt. They’ll pay the Asian American less or no money and they fucking hire white crews and pay them. Fuck that! This is a favored nation all the way across.

ACV: How difficult was it to be able to get that aesthetic down right to be as historically accurate-were those things that really mattered in terms of those things, making sure that the sense of the 70s was communicated as accurately as possible?

JL: Candi did an amazing job. That’s one of the things about that movie was, even if we had no money, I didn’t want the feeling of “Let’s mock the 70s!” If you watch the movie, hopefully, you get a sense of the characters that live in that environment, that exist in that environment. We’re not trying to make it more than it is, even though the 70s was very loud and had certain things. It was a fine balance and on a very shoestring budget she did an unbelievable job, I thought.

ACV: It’s true, especially with the 70s, that line between parody is so easy to cross over because there’s something about the 70s itself that is self-parodic.

JL: And I think that also that would be a disservice to the issues we’re trying to, even if we’re dealing with humor. Ultimately you want to feel like those characters did live in that time or else if you wink at the audience, you lose everything you’re trying to accomplish.

ACV: Now how did you cast for this film? Obviously you used, a lot of the people you’ve worked with in the past show up in there but in terms of everyone else who played a role in that?

JL: We did extensive casting and again, Brad Gilmore is this other young casting director, and really great guy and he found us. And you’re really only as strong as your weakest performance, right, and he did an amazing job of filling everything down to Breeze Loo’s parents and all these little roles.

ACV: Was Dustin Nguyen someone you had in mind for the role that he played? Or is that something that happened during the casting process?

JL: It happened during the pre-production of it. I didn’t know him and I found out later he was always trying to meet up but we just never crossed paths. Again, it was one of those instances and I won’t go into specifics but when I made that decision to go with the best people for the roles, he was the best for that role. And he’s also one of the best human beings I’ve ever met. It’s good to know that you can make friends while working sometimes.

ACV: It’s funny because when I think, or anyone thinks of Dustin Nguyen, at least anyone who knows his history, thinks 21 Jump Street. So when his character has that cop show, was that deliberate or just coincidence that his character and the actor playing him have that history? Sounds like it was a coincidence actually.

JL: In that case it was more of a coincidence. Obviously he was, when I was looking at the names, you’re like “Well, he would be perfect.” At certain points I thought, “Is it too obvious?” But it was far removed enough that I felt that it worked.

ACV: It’s been a while since I’ve seen him in a film. To me he really was the pathos, the heart of it. For a comedy he was the one who had some sort of emotional tragedy.

JL: He got it. I’m so glad that he’s in it.

ACV: We’ve been talking about Sung Kang throughout. Of all the actors, especially those that you worked with on BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, his career has really blossomed the most in terms of he’s gotten the most high profile work since then. A friend of mine recently told me about WAR, that new movie with Jet Li that he plays a role in as well. What drew you to work with Sung to begin with? Did you know him previous to BETTER LUCK TOMORROW?

JL: I didn’t know him. Actually for that role of Han, we were looking and there weren’t that many that had kind of attitude. It’s funny, he came last, at the very end. He came in and I remember I was like “Whoa, this is the guy.” But he had this crazy manager that was like “No! You have to get the lead only because it’s a no-budget movie!” I was like “You want to play Ben?!?” So he actually came in for Ben because his manager was like “You’re not going to get paid, so you got to be the lead!” Which makes no sense. And he did an amazing job as Ben but he was obviously Han.

ACV: This is a whole film about Asian American actors–male actors–out on audition and even though it’s a parody of that process, I imagine a lot of the jokes hit home.

JL: Oh yeah, there’s times on there where it was like, I could feel the pain and it’s almost like therapy for all of us.

ACV: Because they’re sort of playing the role they’re actually forced to do in real life, right? To audition for stuff?

JL: Oh man, if you talk to the actors, it is so funny how before BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, those guys hated each other because they didn’t know each other. All they knew from each other was that they would go into these rooms and they were all there. It took a while, it was awesome to see them all grow and they were like “You know what? We shouldn’t act like enemies, because we should go in there and be who we are.” It was amazing for people to see them grow and to be a part of that. Now, when we travel everywhere, we’re like a family and that means a lot.

ACV: So your films have had very interesting, very compelling Asian male characters. If I may say, I don’t think that same can be said for the female characters that you have done, and I’m wondering, do you find it harder to write female characters?

JL: Look, you’re driven by ideas and this is also a town that when you’re good at doing something, they don’t want you to do anything else. Believe me I’ve actually been looking, and it’s hard to get into these rooms to do movies with lead female characters because after BETTER LUCK TOMORROW I was like the ‘male’ guy. I would also go talk and people would accuse me of “Why didn’t you have Asian American females?” and I’d be like, “Well that movie is not about Asian American females, what do you want me to do?” That movie is a very specific Asian American male perspective. I can only try and serve the idea. I have a couple projects and I feel like it’s going to be up to me, if I feel like I’m compelled enough I’m going to have to go indie again to prove that I can make a movie with female characters.

ACV: Is that what you want to do, that sort of female-centric?

JL: Of course. But if you look at Hollywood as a whole, there’s not a lot of female movies. So I feel like I get it, hopefully we can have this conversation 5 or 10 years from now and my works will show it. Because I’m only as good as the body of work.

ACV: Speaking of which, the obvious comparison to your balance of studio films and independent films would be Wayne Wang. Have you interacted with him much?

JL: I actually got a call from Wayne Wang a few months ago and he’s like, “Let’s have dinner,” so I flew up to San Francisco and we had dinner and we just talked but it struck me and I actually got kind of emotional. We weren’t talking about the film business but he’s the only other guy who can understand a little of what we go through. [?]

ACV: I’m really curious because I was actually going to ask you later on in terms of using Wayne Wang as this model of comparison, but what did you guys talk about during that conversation?

JL: It wasn’t really about any—because he had wanted to do an indie no-budget and I’m always up for it so we were just going to hang out it wasn’t really anything concrete or anything. It was an amazing call because I watched his stuff when I was in film school and when I was in college and to be able to just hang out. We went to this hole-in-the-wall and had Chinese food. It was nothing really verbal but you just got the sense that when we talked about oh, studio this and that there are a lot of things unsaid and you just get it.

ACV: I want to close with bringing this back not just to FINISHING THE GAME but the same conversation we’ve had the last two times we’ve talked, in the different eras. I think your film comes out of a really interesting time in American history. Let’s just start by talking about Bruce Lee, you said at other interviews, you said at the CAAM Festival that growing up he was kind of this double-edged sword because on the one hand his presence and his physicality crushed some stereotypes but also created this whole other set of stereotypes so there’s this whole duality that you’re stuck with. Not to make too bad of a pun here but I think of the battle in the hall of mirrors when you smash one mirror but you still have another fourteen that you’re framed in. In the end do you see him as more of a positive source or does it end up balancing, a sort of wash, what he contributed in that sense?

JL: I think it’s totally positive. As long as he was doing what he loved and he was passionate. If you want to be Long Duc Dong, go be the best Long Duc Dong. There’s going to be consequences, obviously, to what you do but it also should drive me if I have a problem with that then I should go and create other representation in the media. Ultimately it’s not about censorship, it’s not about let’s not do this, let’s do this; it’s about being free to do whatever we want, and then people can judge. I think that’s so important. Obviously I have personal feelings when I see someone doing some buck-toothed joke and I’m like, that’s fucking bullshit, but at the same time if that person is Asian American and they really want to do it I actually want to support them fully as an artist. Because if I have a problem with that then I should go and create something. It’s like the Han (character) in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, personally, that means a lot to me. We all have different values and systems but I think ultimately it’s about quantity, if we can have all these different points of view, perspectives, if all these filmmakers can go out and make movies—cause what’s our cinema right now? It’s still in its infancy, there’s not that much point of view. Ultimately I just want to support everybody. Whatever you want to do, go fucking do it. That’s the idea.

ACV: The Asian American film community has grown insanely much bigger than ten years ago when it was amazing to have four films, now we have sixteen and no one blinks an eye. Do you still pay a lot of attention to a lot of other Asian American films? You do the festival circuit: do you get a lot of opportunity to see them?

JL: I try to, it’s hard.

ACV: It’s hard, there is a lot to see.

JL: There’s a lot. I hate to say this but ultimately it’s going to come down to branding. When we did BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, the grassroots campaign, it’s such a mouthful when we’re saying, “Look, it’s not about supporting this movie because you’re Asian and we’re Asian, it’s about taking that five minutes to look at the trailer, look at the reviews and judge it.” Right away people think you’re telling me to support it because you’re Asian and that gets so cluttered. I think it becomes the boy who cried wolf syndrome. No one likes to be like, “I’m supposed to support you because we look the same?” It has to come down to some sort of quality control.

Still, it’s an exciting time now. Sometimes when you get too close, when you get in these rooms and you really learn how the business is done, you see how sometimes the discourse out there is kind of off. Because everybody has that agenda. I guess just as an Asian American film viewer I just want to see more stuff like (Richard Wong’s) COLMA: THE MUSICAL.

ACV: I was reading the O.C. Register and saw that you were able to retire your parents. I’m very curious, when you first expressed an interest in going into filmmaking were they supportive of that?

JL: Yeah. I mean I wanted to go the NBA so….

ACV: They’re like “Any alternative…”

JL: They’re fucking crazy and goofy. I love them because whatever I wanted to do, they never said no. They’ve always said go for it as long as you work hard and love what you do. And that’s something that they instilled in me. I really appreciate that. That’s a crazy thing to say, “I want to go to film school”--I didn’t even know what that meant. It’s good to be able, after twenty-six years, to shut them down, take care of them. Say whatever you want about FAST AND THE FURIOUS, I was able to retire (them) before I was thirty-five. They worked every day, except for Thanksgiving, for twenty-six years.

ACV: What’s the horizon?

JL: Because of the independent stuff I’m doing I have to somehow pay the bills. Somehow I started doing commercials and now I’ve become the car guy, it’s the funniest thing. These last two weeks, like, Cadillac is launching the new CTS and they want me to do the whole campaign, Honda is doing the Accord they want me to do—and I just find it funny because I’m not into cars at all.

ACV: I got to ask this because we’re in L.A. and you’re doing two car commercials: what do you drive?

JL: Oh, I have a (Infiniti) G35. I sold my truck, my Ford Ranger, to finish BETTER LUCK TOMORROW. I was so lucky because Quentin, who’s such a good friend, gave me his old Honda to drive ‘cause I had no car. Finally when I was able to almost get out of debt I was like man, I grew up driving Pontiacs and crap cars, Buicks, so Roger Fan was like, “You got to!” And so I got the G35 and it’s so awesome because when you do THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS…they totally pimped out my ride, I have these rims, they look pretty cool. I didn’t know how cool they were but when I go to a gas station kids will be like staring at my rims.

Oliver Wang has written and taught about Asian American cinema since 1998. A sociology professor at California State University Long Beach, he also contributes to the LA Times, Vibe, and NPR. He is preparing to launch the Asian American film blog ChasingChan.com.

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Desmond Nakano speaks on his ode to the internment-era baseball leagues

Director Desmond Nakano of AMERICAN PASTIME and WHITE MAN'S BURDEN.

By Matt Briones

Desmond Nakano’s AMERICAN PASTIME revisits the Japanese American internment through the lens of internment league baseball games, jazz-band swinging, and interracial romance. Interspersed with historical footage depicting Topaz Relocation Center and its prisoners, the film faithfully portrays both the indignities suffered and the dignity earned by Japanese Americans during this trying era. Matt Briones spoke to Nakano about some of the ideas, inspirations, and challenges behind the film.

ACV: I was lucky enough to see the featurette after the film—festival-goers may not be as fortunate. In the featurette, Aaron Yoo (who plays “Lyle Nomura”) encapsulates the film wonderfully, saying, "(There are) more important things in life, but sometimes it takes a game to understand them." Would you mind elaborating on that theme?

Two-thirds of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent taken from their homes and put into the camps were American citizens. The other one-third had all lived in the United States for at least sixteen years because of immigration laws. So these people were thoroughly Americanized. Particularly the young people were like “all-Americans,” in love with baseball and jazz. I wanted to show that rather than being “different,” they were the same as other Americans, enjoying the same pastimes.

One of the pleasures of baseball is that everyone knows the rules and the game has its own code of ethics that apply to all who play, regardless of where they’re from, their race, or their color.

ACV: I particularly enjoyed your characterization of the film as one deeply steeped in the notion of "family": Lyle's family, Billy's family, interned families as a whole. Could you say a little more about how playing baseball or even Lyle's mastery of the sax (or Lane's participation in the 442nd) says something about Japanese Americans' joining (or being denied) membership in the American family?

Most of the Japanese Americans while, of course, aware of their heritage, embraced the American lifestyle. They combined it with the Japanese tradition of family. They had both a strong sense of personal family and a view of themselves as being of the American family.

ACV: These might be more general questions: Did you come across any surprising aspects of the internment leagues while researching for the film?

For me, the leagues were not a surprise. They played baseball as all Americans did, and they were highly organized, so it was natural for them to form leagues. One of the aspects of the camps that I didn't elaborate on was that the internees built up the camps to be self-sustaining, growing their own food, having their own inner-governmental structure, improving their surroundings, educating themselves and helping each other.

ACV: How did you come up with this idea for the film?

Because both my parents and their families had been put into the camps, I'd wanted to do something about the camps for a long time. One of the producers, Barry Rosenbush, had found a book on the history of Japanese in baseball, Diamonds in the Rough, and brought it to me. It was a non-fiction survey of how Japanese had come to be involved with baseball. I thought baseball would be a way for a general audience to get involved in a story about he camps, so I came up with the story, using many of my own family members’ histories as the basis of characters.

ACV: Were you a baseball fan, or jazz fan, before filming?

I was a baseball fan when I was very young, and I used to be a musician. A couple friends and I wrote all the music that Lyle's character plays in the film.

ACV: I personally loved the cinematography, the way in which you cut the historical footage in beautifully with shots of the film's version of Topaz. Were photographs of the camp/landscape by Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange influential in any way on how you wanted to render the camps?

Both the Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange pieces served as great research photos, though because they were both authorized by the United States government, they were pretty cleaned up. A great deal of the video footage was shot by David Tatsuno, who had snuck a camera into the real Topaz camp and got excellent footage that gave a real feeling for the life inside the camp.

ACV: You imbue your female characters with such strength and presence - was this a conscious consideration on your part, given the time period and certain expectations of gender (esp. when one thinks of war and baseball, two such masculine domains)?

I wanted to show the consequences of war on two families, and the females as well as the men certainly had to deal with great loss and hardship. Japanese families, while patriarchal, often have a woman as the backbone—in my own family, my grandmother ruled the roost. Also, for young Katie's character, she is in the center of the entire conflict, so it gave the story a center.

ACV: Lastly—how in the heck did you get John Kruk to be the announcer? Brilliant!!

Producer Barry Rosenbush is a huge baseball fan, and contacted John Kruk, who is obviously well known to fans as both a player and a commentator on ESPN. Kruk came in for half a day and did his entire part. He was very good and very funny, both as an actor and a guy.

Matt Briones is Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. His forthcoming book focuses on the diary of a Japanese American internee.

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One writer’s childhood search for the perfect role model

The infamous mirror scene from ENTER THE DRAGON.

By Jenn Fang

I was a late-80s and early-90s child, and in the brightly-colored worlds of that era’s Saturday morning cartoons and after-school specials, I found the heroes who could inspire my imagination. Though faced with hundreds of televised protagonists who resembled G.I. Joe’s blonde-haired and blue-eyed Sgt. Duke, I gravitated towards those who resembled the Asian side-character, Quick Kick. Playing make-believe, my secret games transformed me into those favored characters that represented the best of who I could be. I spun wildly through the house engaged in desperate battles invisible to all but me, much to my parents’ barking dismay over the safety of second-hand couches and antique coffee tables.

Exiled by my mother to the wet grass of our backyard where only the flowers were fragile, I called down the power of the mighty Sabre-Toothed Tiger Zord as the Yellow Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger, only to have my lemon-yellow spandex morph into a full-length raincoat as I channeled the mutant powers of the X-Men’s Jubilee. In battling the ninjas of The Foot and the agents of Cobra, I moved through the shadows like Brandon Lee's Crow and harnessed the agility of The Jungle Book’s Mowgli to flank my assailants with the screaming Lightning Leg kicks of Street Fighter’s Chun Li. Afterwards, exhausted from an afternoon of spirited play, I would retire to the den to watch DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY.

Yes, I am of the generation of Asian American youths who grew up thinking that Jason Scott Lee was Bruce Lee.

Even reenacted by proxy, I was entranced by the story of this slender Asian man who shrieked defiant battle cries in warrior poses. Bruce Lee confronted real and imagined demons with equal resolve, emerging victorious by both impressive athleticism as well as a tactician’s mind. He did not allow physical, professional, or emotional injury to alter the course of his ambition. This man—who looked like me, who spoke like me, who could be me—not only outfought but outthought his challengers. Being a short, over-weight, runny-nosed ten-year-old girl with large horn-rimmed glasses, I wasn’t about to outfight anybody. And so, I vowed to be a thinker.

I met the real Bruce Lee in my college dorm room, hours past midnight, watching an old VHS copy of ENTER THE DRAGON. At that moment, I realized Jason Scott Lee wasn’t Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee was more myth than man; his fighting skills were his metaphor, his fluidity was his strength. He slipped and coiled like a snake, adapting his stances according to the villains he faced, only to have their bodies break against his sudden immovable might. In the final scenes of ENTER THE DRAGON, Bruce Lee encounters a dizzying maze of mirrors while in pursuit of the villain. Hundreds of false Bruce Lees dart before the screen, only to disappear as soon as confronted. Wavering for only a heartbeat, Bruce Lee shatters the distorted reflections and emerges from a shower of splintering glass as his true self.

Talk about metatext.

It has been more than three decades since Bruce Lee’s passing, and yet he has left an indelible mark on pop culture. Generations of Asian American youths like myself are rediscovering Bruce Lee for the first time in old original videotapes and new DVD re-releases of Lee’s instant classics. He speaks to us: the children who know him only as legend, not simply as a man who achieved the peak of martial arts skill, but as an inspiration. We—as Asian Americans, as immigrants, as simple men and women—can only strive to be ourselves, but in ourselves we can be anything we dream to be.

Jenn Fang is a graduate student in physiological sciences at the University of Arizona. In her spare time, she blogs at Reappropriate where she comments on race, gender, current events and pop culture in the Asian American community.

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CAMPAIGN director Kazuhiro Soda.

The wisest and most succinct description of the documentary filmmaker’s plight came from Alfred Hitchcock: “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.” The six nominees for this year’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award underscore this idea perfectly, as they chased after tales of survival and self-discovery, hula dancers and rogue politicians, family histories and the history of freedom. We decided to let our documentary filmmakers speak for themselves by inviting them to interview each other about the motivations, challenges, and secrets of their taxing yet noble art form.
Lisette Marie Flanary: Aloha Soda, Hey, how did those screenings in Japan go? Just back from the Maui Film Festival (fun!). Looks like we are supposed to interview each other for CineVue. Frankly, I think it's awesome that we got paired up, considering I know you from waaaaaaaaay back. No questions about KILL KIMONO, please!

I know you are currently in Japan showing CAMPAIGN right now and am curious to hear your thoughts on the response the film is getting there. How have audiences reacted to the film in Japan? How are they different from the response you have received at screenings here in America? I'm sure you must be really busy with press for the film in Japan AND starting to shoot the next doc. What are you up to next, if you don't mind me asking? And how's the festival circuit treating you (I know you've been getting around…by the way, did you know both our films played at the Sydney Film Festival together?)?

Lisette, the responses from audiences and media have been spectacular. CAMPAIGN is opening in theaters in about twenty cities across Japan, and the box office is going strong, having many sold-out screenings. It was our intention to open it right before a big national election in July, and our strategy seems to be working out. I’m writing this response from a bullet train because I had to move back and forth between Tokyo and Oakayama today (it takes 3.5 hours one way!) to accommodate interviews. I’ve been so busy that I didn’t know our films played at Sydney Film Festival together! Amazing.

What’s a bit surprising is that the length of the movie (two hours) is not so much of an issue here. In America, a lot of people told me that it’s too long. But in Europe and in Japan, people seem to be more patient! Also, the Japanese audience seems to have a bit of mixed feelings because CAMPAIGN shows the reality in Japan they might not be so proud of. Some people told me that the movie is funny, but they cannot really laugh. I’m shooting my next documentary on mental illness in Okayama in the same observational style as CAMPAIGN, without writing any materials before the shoot. I think it’s going pretty well, although I have no idea when it’s going to be finished!

LMF: Both of our films follow characters that had uncertain outcomes leading up to a big event. In my film, NA KAMALEI: THE MEN OF HULA, I follow Robert and the men to the “Super Bowl” of hula competitions in Hawai’i and in your film, you follow Kazuhiko leading up to the election. Many people have asked me what I would have done if the guys DIDN’T win anything and if it would have changed the film. For me, it was much more about the journey getting to the competition (or in your case the election) than the outcome. Did you ever worry that a victory or loss would change your film for better or worse?

I didn’t really worry about the outcome because my intention was to observe the election without any preconceived ideas. If the outcome of the election was different, the movie would have been very different, but that’s that. It’s also something I cannot control! But I do like the film ended the way it ended, personally.

I thought it was really interesting that you decided to self-finance this film and basically were a one-man show from beginning to end. Hats off to you, man! Personally, after paying off credit card debts from short films I made in film school, I vowed to never again just use my own money to fund my work. I would be broke, otherwise! How do you think not having to seek funding affected your experience as a director of this documentary? And will you do the same thing for the next project? Please tell me your secret…

Yes, my next project about mental illness is also totally self-funded. Because of the (modest) success of CAMPAIGN, there are some people who showed interest to fund this project, but I don’t know if I want to take them. I loved the creative freedom I had too much while making CAMPAIGN. And I can recoup my investment by selling rights to distributors and broadcasters. Also, it’s kind of unrealistic for somebody to give me money when I have nothing to show on paper! As I explained before, I do not like writing anything before I shoot because I tend to be locked up by my own ideas if I write. I like jumping in to the locations with a camera, shooting spontaneously whatever I feel interesting. The challenge is to minimize the cost to be able to keep going without funding. But so far, I’m debt-free and alive.

You said that you believed CAMPAIGN was a subjective documentary. In what ways do you think your views influenced the film? You also said that you felt strongly that CAMPAIGN was an observational film, which suggests a rather ‘detached’ approach to your subject. How did you strike a balance between the observational and the subjective???

Yes, CAMPAIGN is a subjective movie in spite of the fact that it has no narration, no talking heads, no super-imposed titles, and no music. When shooting, I subjectively choose what to shoot in which angles and what not to shoot. In the editing room, I picked and chose 120 minutes worth of footage to include in the final cut, throwing away 58 hours of footage. It’s very subjective! And the subjective does not contradict with the observational because observation only occurs when there is someone who observes. In other words, different observers can have different observations while “objective truth” is supposed to be only one. (I don’t really believe there is “objective truth” though—I think it’s a fiction!)

I met you over ten years ago now, when you were studying film at SVA (School of Visual Arts) and I was studying film at NYU (New York University). How we met is slightly a haze in my head, but I remember you were such a great help to me on my thesis film. Yeah, the one that I needed translated into Japanese because I don’t speak Japanese. (Thanks again!) I also associate you with a strange art exhibit of honey bears. Does that ring a bell? I’m just curious what the heck you remember from that shoot…I can’t even watch that film now! Oh, and the rest of the question: What have you been up to for the ten years we lost touch, between KILL KIMONO and when we bumped into each other again at the IFP (Independent Feature Project) Market last September?

Of course, KILL KIMONO and honey bears ring my bell. I remember that you acted in your own film wearing a T-shirt with the Japanese word “me” or “eye.” I also remember we shot some scenes on the rooftop of your friend’s apartment and I felt like it was a picnic. For the ten years we lost touch, I graduated from SVA, got married, joined this production company that produced documentaries for Japanese TV stations, and I directed about 50 documentaries. While I enjoyed directing docs for TV, I started to feel that I wanted more creative freedom, and decided to self-produce a feature documentary (CAMPAIGN), which hooked me up with you again at the IFP Market last September!

Posted by Hieu Ho at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NA KAMALEI: THE MEN OF HULA director Lisette Marie Flanary.

The wisest and most succinct description of the documentary filmmaker’s plight came from Alfred Hitchcock: “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.” The six nominees for this year’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award underscore this idea perfectly, as they chased after tales of survival and self-discovery, hula dancers and rogue politicians, family histories and the history of freedom. We decided to let our documentary filmmakers speak for themselves by inviting them to interview each other about the motivations, challenges, and secrets of their taxing yet noble art form.

Kazuhiro Soda: Hey, Lisette, it's such a happy coincidence that they paired us up. Incredible! Everything is going fantastic in Japan. I'm so crazy busy dealing with media concerning CAMPAIGN and shooting my next doc.

Here are my questions for you. I consider my documentary movie CAMPAIGN as an observational film, so naturally, I kept some distance from my subjects and observed them as if I observed exotic animals or insects. How about you? I felt that you had a different approach from mine.

I think you’re right, and we did have very different approaches to making our documentaries. For me, I need to be passionate about an idea, and making a documentary is like a love affair in a way…getting to know someone, building trust, feeling a relationship blossom, unfold, and evolve. There is something so exciting, unique, and beautiful about the way the story reveals itself. And like love, sometimes it can sneak up on you and take you to places that you least expect! Before I even begin shooting, I like to meet with the people that I am going to be focusing on, get to know them a little bit and hopefully, they get a sense of who I am as well so that when I do show up with a camera and crew, I’m not some intimidating stranger that is prying into their lives.

Those first meetings sometimes feel like first dates…a little timid, at times awkward, everyone sizing each other up. Eventually, the goal is to establish a relationship built on trust, and for everyone to get so comfortable with my presence that they forget I’m even there. With the Hawaiian community, there is this feeling that you eventually become ‘ohana, or family—that is so amazing. In making NA KAMALEI: MEN OF HULA, I felt so honored to be allowed into this small window of Robert and the guys’ lives as they prepared for the competition to celebrate their 30th anniversary. The truth is I miss them a lot and just loved hanging out with all the guys. From the grueling rehearsals to backyard gatherings with family and friends to the tense final preparations for their performances on stage, we were there to capture everything for the film, but I also ended up feeling so close to everyone in the process. I mean, I had so much fun just talking story with the guys, drinking Budweisers (Why does Bud taste better in Hawai’i? I don’t drink it anywhere else but it’s tastier there…maybe it’s the water!), and being along for the roller coaster ride that was competition. Recently I was back in Hawai’i and Robert and the halau were celebrating the 32nd birthday of their school up on the North Shore at Paumalu. I had shot them there almost two years ago now just before the competition so it was great to return (without a camera) and just hang out with them all again. Swimming in the ocean, eating, drinking beer, and talking all day…It doesn’t get any better than that! Whereas you feel that you maintain a distance as a filmmaker, and observe your subjects as ‘exotic animals’ or ‘insects’ as you say, I am much more emotionally connected than that and never forget that these are real people with real lives, and in the end, I would call ‘friends’.

KS: The main character of CAMPAIGN, Kazuhiko "Yama-san" Yamauchi was
quite angry when he saw the finished movie for the first time because I kept some scenes which he (found) embarrassing—scenes where he was being scolded by a member of the Liberal Democratic Party or arguing with his wife. I thought I needed those scenes to fully portray Yama-san as a character, and he finally understood my intention after long, painful discussions. Did that ever happen to you with your subjects? Are they totally happy about the way they are portrayed?

Yes, that did happen to me, both with this film, and with my first film, AMERICAN ALOHA: HULA BEYOND HAWAI’I. And similarly, after discussing why I thought the scenes were important to the film, they understood my intentions were not to embarrass them or to make them feel bad. In NA KAMALEI: THE MEN OF HULA, the rehearsals right before competition were intense. And Robert can be a tough teacher, even though all of his students swear that he has mellowed out over the years and used to yell, scream, and curse a lot more when he was younger. Well, in one particular rehearsal, he flew off the handle and yelled at a dancer (by name) and threatened to throw him out of the line if he messed up again. To me, the scene shows how tense things get just before the competition and was not about that one particular dancer, but Robert pushing all of the men to do their best.

Now, I do something rather unusual as a filmmaker and send every single rough cut (and there are many!) to the subjects in my films so that we can discuss any issues that may arise during the editing process. So when they see the final cut, they aren’t surprised and we have already ironed out anything they might be uncomfortable with. In this case, when the dancer saw the rough scene of him being yelled at in rehearsal, he felt really bad that he was being singled out. We discussed it, and he saw why I wanted to leave it in. Frankly, I think everyone knows what he is feeling in that scene and feels sympathetic to his character. Because the guys saw how things changed from cut to cut, and were involved in the process, I think they were ultimately happy with the way they were portrayed in the film. I had set out to make something Robert and the men could be proud of, and I think they are. I will say that when we did a surprise birthday screening for Robert of the first rough cut (which was really, really rough), he wasn’t thrilled with it. My heart almost fell out of my chest when he told me he liked the short trailer for the film better! I explained that this was just the beginning, and using the analogy of their rehearsal process leading up to the performance, that rough cuts are like rehearsals and the final film is like a performance so it takes a lot of work to finally get it right. And he totally understood that, gave good feedback all along the way, and was infinitely patient with me trying to figure everything out.

KS: I feel that most documentary filmmakers including myself are quite "evil" in a sense that we tend to become happy when we captured something our subjects are trying to hide or something they find embarrassing. What do you think? Do you share this feeling?

Evil? Yikes, Soda, I wouldn’t say we are evil! Quite the opposite. I would say that we are blessed. I don’t know that I am happy when something a person is trying to hide comes out or they reveal something that is embarrassing, but I will say that there are many times when someone has been totally honest, shared a memory, or cried from being moved by a story they are telling that makes me feel like I have the most amazing job in the world. For instance, when I heard that the guys would be going up to the volcano to make offerings to Pele, I really wanted to shoot them at such a sacred place. At first, Robert said no because he didn’t think it was something that should be filmed, and while I accepted his decision, I was really heartbroken because I knew it would be great for the film. Eventually, after having spent a lot of time shooting, and his seeing our trailer, he understood that my intentions were good and gave me the okay to follow them. It’s some of the most spectacular footage in the film. I felt so blessed to have been there, truly honored. And just as Robert and the dancers had to remove their shoes on the sacred land, so too did the crew! Barefeet on lava rock…ouch! But so worth it…

KS: I personally do not like to prepare any synopsis or shot lists before I shoot because I'd like to minimize my pre-conceived ideas on the subject matter. When shooting CAMPAIGN, I did not prepare anything before hand, and simply jumped in with my camera to shoot whatever I felt to be interesting. How do you feel about writing materials before you shoot?

Wow, we are totally the opposite on this one. You didn’t write anything before shooting, huh? I do love the philosophy you have behind that of not having any preconceived notions before shooting, but I tend to write A LOT before shooting a project. One of my favorite parts of the process is in pre-production, when you can dream and imagine what you want the film to be, before you get too bogged down with raising the funds and realizing what your budget limitations might be. Before I start writing, I do extensive research…love visiting the archives at the Bishop Museum, reading articles, collecting pictures, listening to music, etc. I come up with lists of questions that I want to ask, figure out a treatment for the film. While the finished film always ends up being different than that first initial treatment that I write, the core is the same. I think I do a lot of problem-solving and creative visualization as I write…and since I do have a Masters in Creative Writing, it certainly comes in handy in creating a written treatment during the grant-writing process.

KS: Do you think a documentary can be objective? I personally think it's impossible. I believe documentaries can be only subjective and that's totally fine. CAMPAIGN is definitely a subjective documentary. How do you consider yours?

No, no I don’t think a documentary can be totally objective, and in a way, all docs are subjective. Let’s not forget there is someone behind the lens, crafting a story in the edit room, or deciding what goes in and what comes out. I even think our senses of humor come out in our films even though they are documentaries. There are times when I get a little frustrated in all the ‘explaining’ I sometimes have to do. Since so many people are not familiar with the hula dance, Hawaiian history, or the language, it does sometimes feel like I am making a film that has to ultimately speak to two audiences, one being Hawaiian, and the other being someone who may know nothing about Hawaii at all. And a lot of the things that I think are important about the hula, or Hawaiian history, end up becoming integral parts of the story.

I don’t know if I made any sense on answering that one!

KS: Do you think a documentary should convey a strong message? I feel it's unnecessary. In CAMPAIGN, all I did was to portray the world in the way I saw, and it's up to the audience how to interpret it. I even feel happier when different viewers have totally different opinions on what they saw. How about you?

I don’t think that documentaries need to send a strong message in the sense that say, after-school specials did on TV when we were kids. But I do think that in portraying the world the way we see it in our films, a certain responsibility, or kuleana, comes along with that. I too love the fact that the film will be interpreted by the audience, and people can draw their own conclusions from it. But many of the things that I feel are important, such as battling stereotypes or misconceptions about the hula dance, are important conclusions that I hope people realize in watching my work (without banging them over the head with it or maybe without them really realizing it). I do feel a certain responsibility to educate. I mean, with my first film, I was just really annoyed that people kept asking me if I wore a grass skirt and coconut bra when I danced hula (or worse, “Where’s your hoop?”!) so I decided to make a film that showed how much deeper the hula really was than the kitschy mainstream stereotypes that have become icons in America. And with NA KAMALEI: THE MEN OF HULA, I was shocked that so many people had no idea that men even danced the hula, and wanted to make a film that put the spotlight on just the men. Because there are so many strange ideas out there about the hula and Hawaiian culture, I feel that my films can serve to educate a wide audience on what it means to be Hawaiian. I hope that message comes across…

Posted by Hieu Ho at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Olaf Moeller

In his assessment of the merits and mistakes, legend and legacy of the Hong Kong New Wave, critic Li Cheuk To suggests that Patrick Tam Kar Ming's relatively low profile—despite his obvious excellence—resulted from his lack of adaptability. At first this sounds slightly peculiar, for Tam tackled a new genre with just about every film he made: his debut feature, THE SWORD (1980), was a noir-ish wuxiapian (a genre of epic often involving Chinese mythical heroes and flying swordsmen); LOVE MASSACRE (1981) was a thriller/slasher film; NOMAD (1982), a youth film; CHERIE (1984), a screwy, outré comedy; FINAL VICTORY (1987), a melodramatic gangster farce (go figure); the Taiwan-detour BURNING SNOW (1988), a comparatively straightforward melodrama; and MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE (1989), a stylish spray of heroic bloodshed. Tam's comeback-monument, AFTER THIS OUR EXILE (2006), adds a Cantonese father-and-son-melodrama to the list.

Yet none of these films (with the possible exceptions of THE SWORD and MY HEART…) are mere genre exercises—it's more like he's tinkering with his most private attempts at striking that ever-so-precarious, often-elusive balance between high modernism and socially alert realism, experimentation and agitation, while using a few genre tropes and signifiers. This torn, shredded, break-beat poetry of expressive tensions—a sequence of questions and possibly unrelated answers—wasn't to be expected from the beauty of Tam's earlier achievements in television. But it was there—just elusive.

This is why it is important to not overlook Tam’s groundbreaking work in television in the late 1960s and 1970s, before he achieved fame as a filmmaker. Signs of his later genius can be found in television series like Seven Women (1976) and 13 (1977)—milestones of their form.

First and foremost, the Hong Kong New Wave was an expression of a sense of place and culture; a language; an experiment in belonging. And Tam, like so many of his fellow New Wavers, used his apprenticeship in television as research into the sounds and shapes of his city, and most importantly, its mores—for Tam this often meant a glimpse into the lives of women. It’s logical that (more or less) true crime was one of the New Wave's genres of choice—how better to traverse classes and boroughs, sketch a time's likeness? There was ICAC and C.I.D., Dragon, Tiger, Panther, Police Drama, and Operation Manhunt; more generally, realist series like Social Worker, The Underdogs, or Seventeen often told stories of individual collapses, violence, ruptures in the social fabric.

Despite being the brainchild of writers/researchers Ma Tsoi Man, Chung Chai Sum, Ng Ho, and Wong Chee, C.I.D., in its early stages, was defined by Patrick Tam Kar Ming. The famed "Missing Girl" episode of C.I.D. sets the tone: a sensuously surreal prelude with a blood-splattered man running through a downtown crowd, his thoughts flowing stream-of-consciousness like the paranoid free jazz so much New Wave works riff on. From there, a somewhat cozy beginning, with a senior police officer—the elder of the four-man squad at the heart of C.I.D.—being asked by a friend to look for his missing daughter; soon, on a parallel track, the daughter's story enters—how her delinquent boyfriend coaxes her into turning tricks, and how she leaves him for the boss of a rival gang. It all climaxes in a bloodbath between the two gangs, with Pink Floyd blaring and the camera rising high above the carnage, contemplating this picture of downfall children felled. (Might the man in the prelude be a survivor, the film an abstract flashback?).

Save for Tam's final, finely fragmentary C.I.D. masterpiece, "Dawn, Noon, Dusk, Night"—four instances of ordinary abuse, absurd violence, melancholia, loss, and an overall sense of futility—none of his other episodes, "The Robbery," "Two Teddy Girls," or "Wai Chai," comes close to the aesthetic schizophrenia of "Missing Girl.” Above all, it seems to set the general tone for the whole endeavor, to bitchslap the viewers into realizing that all bets are off—even if the story itself is all about upholding rules.

Tam's finest C.I.D. episode, "Two Teddy Girls"—an offhand homage to Lung Kong, Tam's main source of inspiration for his work on this series—is probably his most perfectly-realized piece of realist filmmaking pre-AFTER THIS OUR EXILE. But there's little in Seven Women and 13 as well as his two excellent guest-directing stints on Social Worker ("The Girl Who Disappeared," 1977) and The Underdogs ("The Story of Ah Suen,” 1977), not to mention his feature films from the 1980s, which are so decisively on-the-edge. Nothing rivals this gem's pitch-perfect sense of flow, its seemingly instinctive grasp of every essential detail, its general unease, with sorrow looming.

Tam's last major work for television was 13, a series of explorative plunges into madness, with stories about the disintegration of the ordinary, reality's ruptures. The stories come straight from the pulp fiction arsenal, even if they're based on random news items or literary classics: a religious, challenged girl terrorizes a lodger until he leaves ("A Saintly Girl"); an obsessed photographer stages scenes of violence but feels he has to face death for real ("Suffocation"); a doctor worshipping the corpse of his dead wife grows obsessed with a student who looks exactly like her—it’s like vertigo at the altar of the dead ("Flower Calamity"); and a violated daughter slaughters her rapist father, then plots to fell her mother, the crime’s silent accomplice ("To Murder Father").

At first glance, Tam seems to have achieved an equilibrium between modernism and realism: 13’s glory is its generally detached sense of direction, Tam's cool mastery of the craft. A work like "Suffocation," a vignette on existential angst at its most claustrophobic, is as flawless and economical as it gets. Yet Tam seems to choke, caught in his own maze of despair and delusions, of paranoia as reality: Tam seems to feel a need to rip apart the all-encompassing, vain opaqueness of his own mastery, and like the photographer at the center of “Suffocation,” one guesses Tam doesn't like what he feels either. So, even if Tam claims otherwise, the awkwardness of 13’s tenth and final episode, "Traces of Her"—so many women vanish in Tam's TV-works—seems premeditated, including the spiritually frigid socialist realist solution which finds the girl working as a teacher in the countryside. In contrast to the other episodes, "Traces of Her" doesn't really tell a suspense story: a girl is missing and three people close to her voice their suspicions, if indeed they care to have any. For example her ex-boyfriend—played, significantly, by fellow director Yim Ho, is a brainlimpdickish intellectual who got his kicks from projecting Godard-stills onto her body—couldn't be bothered.

After C.I.D., Tam created and directed the series he's best known for: Seven Women (save for episode five, which was directed by Law Kar). Conceptually speaking, Seven Women is similar to the series in which Tam debuted, Superstar Special (1975): each episode is a showcase for an actress to whose personality each screenplay is tailored.

As a whole, Seven Women is a kind of kaleidoscope of women and styles. Tam, it seems, had a high old time with his innermost cinephile passions: Tam went all-out Godard with episode two, "Miu Kam Fung," until the show turned into an implicit vivisection of his master's tropes, a meditation on the applicability of modernism under Hong Kong’s colonial conditions. Tam played Hitchcock—and/or Chor Yuen, perhaps—with episode six, "Lam Kin Ming," a tight thriller about a woman under the influence of a recording which seems to know every step she takes, not to mention her doubts and feelings, in advance—it is a nasty little parable about patriarchal powers; with episode seven, "Lisa Wang," Tam pays homage to—and hemorrhages—Bergman. Episode four, the shot-in-a-day-on-video digest of August Strindberg’s Fröken Julie "Lee Si Kai," takes on the whole nineteenth-century-Scandinavia-complex, maybe in praise of Lee Sun Fung; episode three, then, "On Sai, Yeung See Tai, May Lee," is the series' summary (wasn't it Godard who said something about beginning-middle-end—but not necessarily in that order?), with three stories about divorce and desire which may or may not comment on each other, all told in different degrees of realism; episode one, finally, "Liu Wing Seong," is the only straightforward realist narrative in this whole jolly mess—and the only one (except for, maybe the "Yeung See Tai" segment) in which the woman gets what she desires: both her men. Mark the arc: from happiness and progressive enlightenment, a life of possibilities, to madness and damnation, an existence in a paranoia-loop.

What is quite remarkable about this construction is the notion that realism alone seems capable of speaking sensibly about emancipation, while modernism, in the now classical sense, can only talk about suppression, subjugation, and sublimation; at best, the modernism of Godard et.al. can make an ass of men and a wise-ass of women while realism, at its best, can talk about the way things could and should be. Significantly, Tam's work in cinema can be described as a quest for realism: from the formidably formalist prelude THE SWORD to AFTER THIS OUR EXILE’s realism as reconsidered/reinvented through the experience of modernism.

Olaf Moeller. Colognian. Writes about and presents films.

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A scene from Edward Yang's first feature ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH (7th AAIFF 1984).
By Daryl Chin

On Saturday night, June 30, 2007, an email from Norman Wang came announcing the death of Edward Yang at the age of 59. An immediate sense of sadness was my response, but soon that sadness became a general state of despair. Of all the major Chinese-language directors to emerge in the 1980s, Edward Yang had inadvertently become the director most closely associated with the Asian American International Film Festival.

The AAIFF showed his first feature film, ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH, at the seventh AAIFF in 1984. (That film is now referred to as THAT DAY ON THE BEACH.) Two years later, at the ninth AAIFF, his second feature film, TAIPEI STORY, was shown. His third feature film, THE TERRORIZERS, was shown as part of the "Cinema and Society" series that Asian CineVision would create. And, of course, the fifteenth AAIFF showed A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY in 1994. (This proved problematic: the film, which is four hours long, was edited to three hours for international festival screenings. ACV had been assured that the full-length version would be sent, but when the print arrived a few days before the scheduled screening, it turned out to be the print that had shown in Europe, at three hours. It would take almost two years before the full-length A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY would screen in New York, but when it did, it would be under the auspices of another film organization.)

From 1984 until 1994, ACV would prove to be the only forum for Edward Yang's films. There is a reason this was strange: not to be rude about it, but Asian CineVision was never in the foreground of film organizations in New York City, let alone nationally. The reason was financial—there was never enough money to really rival organizations such as the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, or Japan Society. Yet, for a scrappy little neighborhood organization, ACV did pretty well with its programs, never more so than with the annual Asian American International Film Festival. The number of genuinely important artists, both nationally and internationally, whom the AAIFF helped premiere is impressive. But what often happened is that, soon after premiering at the AAIFF, these filmmakers would find their ways into the programs of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, the Toronto Film Festival, etc. (It is hard to remember now that the film festival circuit is so enormous, but two decades ago there weren't that many film festivals around, and the AAIFF was a significant player.)

From the moment ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH showed at the seventh AAIFF, it seemed apparent that here was a filmmaker with an unmistakable personal style dealing with themes of modernity. This style was amplified in the films which followed. Yet what was it that was holding back interest in Yang's work? Not that I should complain, but it seemed strange that other festivals (including Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Montreal, and San Francisco) just were not picking up his work.

It seemed to me that here was a major artist who was creating a significant body of work. It was true that his work might not have been the most “innovative,” but it felt new in the context of world cinema. And who was innovative, anyway? Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese had reputations as major film directors of the 1970s and 1980s, without ever doing anything that was even remotely innovative—and the same was true of Alexander Sokurov, Theodoros Angelopoulos, and Bela Tarr. "Innovation," which had been one of the critical terms used to define many of the film artists of the 1960s (Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais), had become less reliable as a critical signifier in the last two decades. But that still did not explain the decided lack of interest in the work of Edward Yang.

In the obituary that appeared in The New York Times on Monday, July 2, 2007, Manohla Dargis tried to account for the initial disinterest in Yang's work by quoting Pierre Rissient:

Pierre Rissient, a former consultant for the Cannes festival, explained that in the early days Mr. Yang and Mr. Hou (Hsaio-Hsien) served as something of a team. Their approach to cinema may not have been new, at least in the international context, Mr. Rissient said. But in Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia, he continued, it 'was extremely fresh and extremely intimate and, at the same time, had a distance.' This much-remarked-upon critical distance—evident in Mr. Yang's beautiful long shots and leisurely takes—allowed characters and viewers the space and time to breathe and think. The influence of European modernists like Michelangelo Antonioni on this work is undeniable, as is its cultural specificity.

I hate to mention this, but the condescension inherent in those remarks is rather outrageous. It reminds me of a lecture I went to on the occasion of the "Primitive" exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art; an art historian from Italy was talking about how "crude" and "vulgar" African art was, but that it had to be acknowledged because African art had proven to be an inspiration to Picasso and Braque for their Cubist “innovations.” That was in the 1980s, and it is amazing to see that these same attitudes, which bespeak a Eurocentrism and imperialist mindset, have continued, informing the critical reception many artists from Asia have received.

The films coming from the People's Republic of China in the mid-1980s, such as Chen Kaige's YELLOW EARTH, Zhang Yimou's RED SORGHUM, or Wu Tian-Ming's OLD WELL were "period" films, with exotic settings and elemental stories. But the films coming from Taiwan were contemporary dramas that showed people living in a post-technological society. These directors—not just Yang and Hou, but Chang Yi, Ko I-Chen, Tao Te-chen, Jen Wan, Zeng Zhuang-Xiang,and Wu Nien-Jun—were dealing with the changes that a "traditional" society was undergoing when confronted with cellular phones, computers, and the Internet. It wasn't just that the means of communication had changed, it was that communication itself had changed. The society wasn't just post-technological: it was post-alienation.

And Yang was developing a modernist style to go along with these changes. He had a sense of composition that de-emphasized his characters, placing them in the landscapes and cityscapes, often at a distance, so that they were frequently swallowed up by the spaces surrounding them.

This was strikingly apparent in ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH. In that film, Yang took what seemed to be a simple anecdote of a love affair's demise, and stretched it out to what appeared to be inordinately attenuated lengths. There were scenes in which the landscape of the beach was held until the characters entered, and then their scene seemed to consist of minutely observed trivia, with little overt dramatic action. And then they would leave, and the camera would seem to linger on the emptied space. Yes, there were resemblances to Antonioni (ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH has many echoes of Antonioni's first feature, CRONACA DI UN AMORE, as well as L'AVVENTURA) but there was also a sense of something distinctly different, of some new mood—a new vision.

The early films directed by Hou Hsaio-Hsien were far more "traditional:" they fit into already-established popular genres (such as juvenile delinquent dramas, as was the case of THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI). Yang's films were obviously influenced by European filmmakers, and why not? Yang was educated in the west (actually, in the United States) and he had seen many of the European and American films which tried to establish modernist styles and themes. As the Taiwanese economy transformed itself in the 1980s, becoming a mecca for new technologies—cellphones were more widespread there than in the U.S. or Europe in the 1980s, with only Sweden as technologically adept—the problems which had faced post-industrial societies (communication, family disintegration, alienation) became prevalent in Taiwan, and Yang set out to chart this development in the trio of films which became known as his Urban Trilogy (ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH, TAIPEI STORY, and THE TERRORIZERS). And his movies dramatized these changes with amazing acuity and precision. THE TERRORIZERS was a devastating portrait of disparate groups of people who become connected through a series of cruel prank calls made by a gang of teenagers. The ways in which our modes of techno-communication can be used against us have never been so viscerally dramatized. I thought THE TERRORIZERS was one of the creepiest, most insidiously threateningfilms I'd ever seen, yet it was passed over by almost all major film festivals and film organizations.

This was starting to get depressing—and if those of us working on the AAIFF felt depressed by this lack of recognition in Yang's career, it's hard to imagine how he must have felt. But the Locarno screening of A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (even at three hours) was a turning point: suddenly, Yang was getting some critical attention.

In his obituary on Yang that was published in The Village Voice, Godfrey Cheshire wrote:

…(W)hile mainland filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai found a ready path to American art houses, Yang, like his contemporary Hou Hsaio-Hsien, faced a host of business and cultural obstacles to U.S. distribution. The result was that one of modern cinema's most fascinating careers passed largely unseen by American cinephiles.

Godfrey Cheshire, in the 1980s when he was writing for New York Press, was one of the only critics who took an active interest in the Taiwanese cinema, as well as the Iranian cinema. At that time, the Taiwanese government was trying to promote Taiwan's arts and culture. The Taiwan government opened the Taiwan Cultural Center in the Rockefeller Center area, which featured a theater and a gallery. The Taiwan Cultural Center was only too happy to promote their filmmakers. The Taiwan Cultural Center helped ACV to get the prints of Edward Yang's films but there was never any money to help get him to fly in for the festival. ACV never had enough money to offer any sort of amenities, so, though we showed his films, Edward Yang never actually attended the festival in person. But Edward Yang did become friends with a number of the people who worked on the AAIFF, including Norman Wang.

After A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (which had taken five years to make—it was a true epic, in every sense), Yang's next two films, A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION and MAHJONG, were shown at the New York Film Festival. Of course, just to prove how contrary critical opinion was, many of the critics who had ignored Yang before were suddenly saying that his two latest films were not up to par with his earlier work.

Finally, YI YI, released in 2000, marked a turning point: it was shown at Cannes and at the New York Film Festival; it received a commercial release in the United States; and it was a critical hit, not just here but internationally. Yet during the period of press coverage, Edward Yang was saying how YI YI would most likely be his last film, because the conditions of financing and film production in Taiwan were changing. Yang mentioned how the success of Ang Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON had turned the Taiwan film industry into a chimerical chase to enter the international film market with action films, and he was convinced that his type of film was increasingly doomed.

And now, he has been proven correct: YI YI was his last film, though, earlier in the year, there were announcements about a collaboration with Jackie Chan on a film to be called THE WIND. Perhaps Yang would have been able to achieve the popular success he deserved. But, as it stands, he will have to be remembered for seven feature films, marking one of the most cohesive bodies of work in contemporary cinema.

Still, the reception of Yang's first four films still rankles: why weren't his films featured at Cannes or Venice or Berlin? What was wrong? Consider Yang's biography, and it becomes clear. During the 1970s, after doing his postgraduate work in engineering, Yang went to Seattle to work in the microcomputer industry. When he started making films in Taiwan in the 1980s, his Urban Trilogy was about the ways in which people were learning to live with the new communication/information technologies. If Taiwan was a country where, by the mid-1980s, about 80% of the population had a computer and a cell phone, then France, Italy, and Germany were technologically backward. And so Edward Yang's films must have seemed anathema to the people at the European festivals, because it showed a non-white society that was more technologically advanced than Europe.

And so the claim was that Edward Yang was not stylistically or formally “new” was obviously self-justification, allowing imperialist superiority. In fact his work, in dramatizing these developments, was very "new"—almost too much so. Yang's work was so new that it was a threat. (It is significant that the critical breakthrough happened with A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, which is a film set in the 1960s! The more "traditional" Taiwanese society depicted in that film was far less threatening to European festivals; it should also be remembered that many of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films, such as DUST IN THE WIND and CITY OF SADNESS were also set in the past, and Hou was embraced by the European festival circuit much earlier than Yang.)

For Asian CineVision, Yang's death is particularly poignant. In the last few years, we have been besieged by other organizations trying to promote Asian cinema. There is the constant denigration of ACV, as if our commitment to Asian American and Asian artists is suspect because we’re not a repository for every single type of commercial cinema coming out of Asia. The various horror films, kung-fu epics and Bollywood musicals that are finding some commercial distribution in the U.S. really don’t need our help. But artists like Edward Yang do need that help, and the fact that ACV was able to support the work of Edward Yang is one of the salutary triumphs in the AAIFF's 30-year history.

Daryl Chin co-founded the Asian American International Film Festival in 1977; he is a critic and writer whose blog, Documents on Art and Cinema, can be found at www.d-a-c.blogspot.com.

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