A glance at a few of the short film programs at this year's San Diego Asian Film Festival: gays, animation, and family, sometimes all at once!
"Love is Queer"
The "Love is Queer" shorts program is a toss up of heart-warming ballads, comedy, and coming of age dramas. Some of them discuss pressing issues in the gay community. For instance, Look Again exposes a shortfall in the immigration policy that is hardly heard in public. June and Kelly are a bi-national lesbian couple. Defying the law, Kelly stays with her lover after her employer has discontinued her work visa. When policewomen finally show up at their doorstep, June, a citizen, steps up and takes the fall for Kelly. Though June is later released, as the police realizes they've made a mistake, Kelly makes the painful choice of leaving the love of her life. The film touches on the fact that bi-national gay couples are sometimes inevitably separated by immigration laws that scrutinize foreigners staying in the U.S. for a gay relationship. While immigration and gay marriage are both hot topics in the current California debates, no one seems to link the two together like this film does. If gay citizens have no way to secure legal status for their partners, deportation would be unavoidable. Look Again emerges as a timely piece when the advocacy for Prop No. 8 is underway. But more than that it ties awareness of it to issues of immigration policy.
In this series of short films, there were two major laugh bombs. One of them was You've Got Male, by Chris Nguyen, Nadine Trung, and Ryan Kim. The film was the winning entry for the 4th annual 72 hour shootout program hosted by the Asian American Film Lab in 2007. Contestants had to make a five-minute long film within 72 hours about somebody called Elizabeth Ong, who is relevant but missing and would not appear in the film. In You've Got Male, a lovelorn guy orders a mail-order bride named Elizabeth Ong, only to find out that it is a male-order bride instead. Yet his persistent new guest manages to get in and show him what kind of bride he can be; he cooks him a meal, gives him a head massage, and effortlessly drives him crazy. In this ingenious twist of the Elizabeth Ong challenge, the filmmakers take two characters with unbridgeable differences, put them in an impossible situation, and create a snapshot of disillusioned people sharing each other's heartbreaks.
The other laugh bomb was Soman Chainani's Kali Ma. When an Indian mother finds out that her son was bullied, she marches to the bully's house and bends on teaching the little bastard a lesson. She throws the preppy brat around like a rag doll and finally ties him to a chair and then throws him into the swimming pool. Instead of panicking over what she has just done, she silently seats herself down on a lounge chair, mafia style, and waits for the boy to stop moving. He is later rescued and also learns that when an Indian mom tells you to eat, you better put that sandwich in your mouth. It is one of those films that ends with the bad guy punished and the poor guy saved. Actress Kamini Khanna is delightful vengeful and adorable, and teaches us that the meaning of "never mess with mom" or " moms are invincible," depending on which side of the argument we are on.
Also worth mentioning is the mind-blowing gem Sexy Girl and Carpenter, which according to the synopsis, is claymation girl-on-girl action between an angel and a carpenter. If that is not the epitome of randomness, I don't know what is. This bizarre short begins with an angel taking a bath by a stream, when a sleazy-looking carpenter stops by and secretly rips the wings off her clothes. While the angel realizes that her wings are torn, she has no choice but to follow the carpenter home to have her wings repaired. Then the carpenter reveals her true rapist self and strips the angel naked. Before you can react to that, the angel rips off the carpenter's clothes as well. They then engage in some sort of R-rated wrestling-like action and eventually the carpenter is squashed. While the audience was busy picking up their dropped jaws, the two characters pop up again and declare that they are happily married. Obviously I am at a lost of words for this film. --Winghei Kwok
"ANIMATION: The Illusion of Life"
Most of the 20 animated shorts in the program are light hearted comedies that ranged from traditional 2D animation to CG and even claymation. Woon Han's The Mouse Trap channels a bit of Art Spiegelman 's Maus with its depiction of people as anthropomorphic mice. A routine subway scenes becomes a massacre as a butterfly wreaks an unbelievable amount of chaos. The short's visual traditional 2D imagery are sharp and startling, creating a sense of impalpable tension and mystery. Music buffs will get a kick out of seeing album covers in conversation and conflict with each other in Rohitash Rao and Abraham Spear's Battle of the Album Cover short. They manipulate the album covers to animate stiffly. It's crude, but very novel, amusing, and executed with a tremendous amount of fun energy. Jeff Chiba Sterns' Yellow Sticky Notes is my personal favorite. Sterns created a short using over 2,300 hand drawn sketches and to do lists on yellow sticky notes as a means to reconcile his neglect of the world. It's an engaging simple piece that juxtaposes an artist's personal life with social-political-environmental happenings from the past decade. Yellow Sticky Notes and Battle of the Album Covers are available on YouTube. The longest of the films is Joe Hsieh's disturbingly compelling Meat Days. Loosely based on an old Chinese story, Hsieh illustrates in charcoal-esque black and white, a period in ancient China when people ate people. Ah Orr is a prostitute that buys human meat to feed her child and sick husband. An excellent balance of suspense and macabre horror makes it the most memorable short in the program. --William Hong
"All in the Family"
"All in the Family" is an emotional joy ride, consisting of eight short films that take you from the downright disturbing to the laugh-out-loud hilarious. Crazy mothers, awkward situations, gay cousins, and embarrassing family members are just some of those things that you can't escape if you are Asian, or just human in general.
Also, aliens. In the short film Souvenirs from Asia, director Joyce Wong explores the lives of a pair of Korean adoptees growing up with their over-zealous, Orientalist white mother. Unlike the Korean terrorist-fearing younger sister who is thrilled to be an "Asian" for Halloween, Hanjoo (Jennifer Kim) dons an alien antenna headband everyday with "punked out" makeup. Feeling objectified and foreign in her own home, Hanjoo finally blows up at her mother's art show: "Asia is my vagina," she says. Wong creates a highly believable character in Hanjoo, who is the angry asian girl, yes, but it never feels forced because she is also a normal teenager. Though highly cringe-inducing, the white mother is a loving character whose innocence is so endearing that we excuse her ignorance, just like Hanjoo does at the end.
You can't talk about Asian families without talking about eating. Hence Eat, a collection of three short stories on food, added just the right touch to this Asian experience buffet. Among the three, Jon Maxwell's Laura is a gut-churning thriller that challenges even the strongest stomach. As the movie opens with the careful slicing of a tomato, the sound of a knife scratching the chopping board warns the audience about where this delicious story might be going. As Laura (Cathy Shim) is preparing a "special dinner," her fellow trophy wife friend goes upstairs to look for Laura's husband, whom she has been cheating with -- only to find that the man's mouth is stitched up with surgical thread. Before you have time to swallow that visual, Laura is already pounding on the woman with her big chopping knife. Maxwell successfully keeps the audience on the edge by his careful control of suspense and unrestrained expression of violence. By not shying away from the gore, Maxwell succeeds in presenting emotion that is as raw as uncooked meat. We can almost taste Laura's broken heart as she chops away her enemy's liver.
What do church and Major League Baseball have in common? In David Kim's The Agent, sport agent Tyler Cashman (Shane Yoon) finds the missing link and creates his very own talent agency for pastors. Filmed in a mockumentary style, Kim hits it out of the park, satirizing church politics and poking fun at the uncanny stardom of pastors in the all too believable sports film. Complete with "CC" (Church Central) specials and "CSPN" interviews, the film follows pastor Jun Park who had just been drafted into a new church. Hilarity ensues when the idiosyncrasy of church life fits so perfectly in the framework of sports, and Yoon, the passionate agent/coach, has just what it takes to deliver a good play. --Winghei Kwok
For reviews of feature films playing at this year's San Diego Asian Film Festival, click here.