November 14, 2020

How do you use imagination to survive in this time of uncertainty? In our queer shorts program Queer Futures, documentarians and narrative characters explore brighter futures through humor, education, resistance, letting go, self-discovery, and thinking far outside the box. Some of the filmmakers and actors from this program chatted with us about their films, their artistic roots, and their dreams. Graduation Director: Robin Wang Without spoiling anything, describe your film in 7 words or less. R. Wang: A film about loving too much. Do you have a favorite memory from making this film? Were there any challenges that you had to overcome? R. Wang: I am a rain god when it comes to filming exterior night scenes. It happened twice when we were trying to shoot the exterior yard scene and the rooftop scene that we were put off by the rain — even when the weather forecast said it was going to be clear. But my friends were really supportive and we managed to sneak out filming bits and parts whenever the rain stopped for five minutes. Eventually we got it done! What do you hope to see in the future for the film industry? How do you see yourself and your work playing a role in this future? R. Wang: I hope to see more diverse Asian voices in the film industry, more stories, and storytellers, especially those that are doubly marginalized and struggle with intersectionality (APIQ, immigrants, women, etc.); I want to dedicate myself to telling stories about the diversity of pan-Asian community and address the dilemma of how we fit ourselves in these confusing times. Stories matter. Authentic voices matter. And we definitely need more genuine storytellers in this business. What’s next for you? R. Wang: I am working on turning this short into a feature, as well as working on several other short scripts for my advanced productions at USC. Parental Guidance Suggested Director: Dane Neves Without spoiling anything, describe your film in 7 words or less. D. Neves: Puppet show for parents with LGBTQ kids. Do you have a favorite memory from making this film? Were there any challenges that you had to overcome? D. Neves: Working with puppets is always a joy…but it’s also no job for a weakling. Directing while performing a puppet is one of the hardest challenges I’m still overcoming. What do you hope to see in the future for the film industry? How do you see yourself and your work playing a role in this future? D. Neves: I hope that serious filmmakers, including myself, are open to evolving their craft and finding value in undiscovered audiences and alternative platforms. I’ve seen myself changing my mindset from believing that a film I make should be as exclusive as possible to believing that a film I make should be accessible to all. What’s next for you? D. Neves: I’m currently producing a YouTube virtual talk show hosted by a ghost puppet named Lonesome as he explores the new (para)normal. Bind Director: Emory Chao Johnson Without spoiling anything, describe your film in 7 words or less. E. Johnson: Gender, culture, adolescence meet over a binder. Do you have a favorite memory from making this film? Were there any challenges that you had to overcome? E. Johnson: BIND was the first time I developed, produced, and directed a scripted short film so I was feeling very anxious as our shoot date approached. But on the morning of the shoot, I did my best to talk myself into relaxing and to have fun, and I think it worked! I was really proud of our set. All of our team members exuded diligence and openness on set. It was an honor to have helped facilitate that set atmosphere and to have participated and witnessed our team’s collaboration. What do you hope to see in the future for the film industry? How do you see yourself and your work playing a role in this future? E. Johnson: One of the reasons I decided to put this story out into the world was because I didn’t really see any scripted content like it. Since the time I started developing this film, however, I feel like more creators are sharing these trans and nonbinary Asian American slice of life stories. It’s really inspiring to see. What’s next for you? E. Johnson: I’ve been honored and moved by the opportunities to share BIND virtually with audiences through supportive and resilient film festivals. In the coming months, I’m excited to be wrapping up a short documentary film, which continues my interest in diving into the thickness of non-cis Asian experiences and feelings. Kapaemahu Director: Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu Without spoiling anything, describe your film in 7 words or less. H. Wong-Kalu: Mind, body, gender and healing are one. Do you have a favorite memory from making this film? Were there any challenges that you had to overcome? H. Wong-Kalu: When we discovered the original handwritten manuscript of the legend in a dusty archive – a connection to the ancestors and a script for the film. What do you hope to see in the future for the film industry? How do you see yourself and your work playing a role in this future? H. Wong-Kalu: Filmmaking is just one method of storytelling, which will never die. What’s next for you? H. Wong-Kalu: A film about Koko Head crater titled Kapo Mai Lele (Kapo’s Flying Vagina). To watch this short film program, Queer Futures, you can purchase access here. This program is available from November 5th – 15th.  Watch the recorded Q&A here, conducted on 11/14 at 7:00pm EST over livestream with the featured filmmakers of this program.

South Asian Americans make up a large percentage of spelling bee winners, and Monica Chowdhury became one of them after she won the 2005 Scribbs National Spelling Bee. Fast forward fifteen years later, as former spelling bee winners work at NASA and build start-ups, Monica is living with her mother in her hometown and coaching the next generation of spelling bee champions. Sujata Day’s directorial debut, Definition Please, explores the taboos of mental health and how this shapes one Asian American family’s relationship to one another. In this interview with PAAFF, Writer/Producer/Director Sujata Day discusses her debut feature film and the significance of presenting serious topics through light-hearted humor. Your debut feature film takes issues that are taboo in the South Asian community and puts them at the center of an Indian American family’s everyday life. Tell me about your vision for the film. When did you realize it? Sujata Day: It started in fourth grade when I won my class spelling bee. Then, I went to regionals and lost in the first round on the word “radish.” I spelled it with two d’s instead of one. Since then, I have watched the national spelling bees on ESPN and noticed that most of the winners were South Asian American kids. In 2015, I was in a UCB sketch writing class and wrote a sketch called “Where Are They Now?: Spelling Bee Champions.” Most spelling bee winners are working at NASA, winning poker tournaments, and they’re probably even working on the COVID vaccine right now. The button of my sketch was that one of these champs turned out to be a loser. A couple of years later, in 2017, I started writing Definition Please, loosely based on this comedy sketch premise. Are there characters or scenes in the film that you deeply resonate or connect with?  Sujata Day: Some of my favorite scenes are with Anna Khaja, who plays Jaya in the film. They provide a welcome break from the tense scenes with Ritesh Rajan, who plays Sonny. I loved the quiet scene in the bedroom between Monica and Jaya. You really get a sense of how close their relationship is. The treehouse scene between mother and daughter was also really touching and fun to shoot. We see humorous moments amidst serious scenes. We see it when the main character, Monica, is checking out the doctor while her mom is in the hospital. We see it when older brother Sonny embarrassingly chases his sister’s romantic interest away. Why was it important for you to tell this story with lightheartedness and humor?  Sujata Day: Real life is full of drama mixed with comedy and Definition Please is the Chowdry family’s slice of life. As human beings, we experience a roller coaster of emotions all in the same day. I came from a grounded, authentic place in constructing this story and stayed true to how each character would react in whatever situation they happen to find themselves in. In several scenes, we see men through Monica’s gaze. Hollywood Reporter’s Beandrea July wrote in their film review, “these seemingly random camera pans are usually reserved for scantily clad women in mainstream Bollywood movies, but here… it’s the men who are served up as fine cuts of meat”. Tell me about the significance of showing men through a South Asian woman’s gaze.  Sujata Day: All of my work is told through a South Asian woman’s gaze. In Bollywood films, there’s a specific trope called the “item number” in which a stunning woman, with no connection to the plot whatsoever, performs a sexy dance for a room full of boisterous, drunk men. I wanted to flip the script and subvert stereotypes. I think it’s important to note that all the good-looking guys in Definition Please happen to be Asian American or men of color, and that’s not by accident. Sonny faces a mental health illness that significantly affects his relationship with his family. In a community that stigmatizes men’s mental health, what significance does his character hold? What was it like writing and developing such a character?  Sujata Day: In Asian American culture, mental illness is seen as a weakness, especially in men. In Definition Please, I strove to portray a real person dealing with his mental illness and the reactions of his loved ones. I pulled from multiple personal experiences to write and develop Sonny’s character. Through many rewrites and with the help of friends who gave notes on my script drafts, I made sure to make Sonny a fully-formed person, outside of his mental illness. Ritesh comes from a family of many doctors and did his own research on the role. He brought a lot to the character on his own. We collaborated and came to a mutual understanding of the way he would play the role, especially with all of Sonny’s highs and lows. What are some challenges you faced while simultaneously directing and acting in this film? Sujata Day: Raising money was the biggest challenge. As the writer/producer/director/star of the film, balancing the multiple creative roles of the process was easy because I was working on something I really believed in. I gathered the most talented crew and cast to pull it off. Convincing people to believe in me monetarily was a whole other story. It was emotionally exhausting, but honestly I let any potential investors know I was going to find a way to make this film, with or without their help. Luckily, in the end, we ended up with passionate investors who trusted and allowed our creative team to flourish, with very little artistic interference and a whole lot of financial support. What do you want the audience to take away from this film?  Sujata Day: I made an American film that happens to have a South Asian American lead cast. I want to inspire others to feel empowered to tell their own specific stories because I was inspired by folks who created before me. All of our authentic stories are important, so let’s tackle every genre, whether it’s horror, or rom-com, or children’s

What is paradise? How do we find it? A mortuary worker, a restaurant with karaoke singers, an immigrant father, a class of high school students—these four stories take place in San Diego, a refugee city situated next to a militarized border. The Paradise We Are Looking For presents the Vietnamese, Korean, and Filipino Americans of San Diego and their stories through an experimental documentary, in collaboration with four filmmakers. Brian Hu, a producer on this film and Artistic Director at Pacific Arts Movement in San Diego, spoke to PAAFF about the significance of bringing these stories together and the idea of a “Paradise”. What is the origin of this project? How did four filmmakers come together to collaborate on this documentary? Brian Hu: There were two initial impulses. One was to reflect upon Asian American histories in San Diego. What were the relationships between the younger and older generations? What are the stories we tell of the community, and which get buried and forgotten? The second impulse was to highlight neighborhoods in San Diego with significant Asian American populations. These tend to be areas that are overlooked when it comes to city development, tourism attention, or what constitutes San Diego history. That these neighborhoods tend to be less white is no coincidence. The four filmmakers are all ones we’ve been following for many years. I invited them to contribute, knowing their personal ties to the city, their thoughtfulness when it comes to community, place, and home, and their general adventurousness when it comes to documentary style. All of them jumped at the opportunity to make something in San Diego, which some of them hadn’t done in quite a while. Why did you decide to stitch together four different documentary styles? Is there a reason for how the four documentaries are sequenced?  Brian Hu: The four filmmakers were encouraged to define “documentary” however they wished and I was pleased by how different they all were, whether they were essayistic, observational, or personal. They were even in all different aspect ratios, something we did not anticipate or ask for. The sequencing takes the viewer north to south across the city. But we also wanted to start with a palate cleanser. Norbert’s film, with its quiet, non-expository style, resets any preconceptions about what might follow. We wanted to end with R.J.’s film, which was most consciously about looking back to look forward, an appropriate gesture to how these histories can be meaningful in the future. How does this experimental style shape how you tell the stories of Asian Americans in San Diego?  Brian Hu: It was important that we did not homogenize Asian America in San Diego, a city where Asian Americans have arrived for vastly different reasons — the military, as refugees, through UC San Diego — and with different experiences of privilege and access to telling their own stories. We wanted every break between shorts to feel like another reset, with new possibilities of emotion and experience written upon the last, not with any obvious continuity but as yet another way to tell an Asian American story. If there is any continuity, it’s that none of these filmmakers do traditional documentary history. There are no interviews with scholars or leaders, or animations or maps. They’re all grounded in the people and places of these neighborhoods without reference to the historical authority that the film is in some ways critiquing. Tell me about the reference to a paradise. How did you decide on this concept for the documentary?  Brian Hu: The title of the film is firstly a reference to lê thi diem thúy’s novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, probably the most prominent creative work about Asian Americans in San Diego. We wanted to honor her legacy of telling one’s own history here, to build upon her acute and lasting etchings of growing up a refugee, demanding to be looked at as more than a remnant of war. “Paradise” is a reference to the neighborhood of Paradise Hills (or the “PH”), which has a huge Filipino population, and which is around where Joe’s karaoke film is shot. Beyond geography, that notion of “paradise” tied nicely to the dreams of success, expression, refuge, and happiness expressed by the characters in the films. In the case of a Korean man who lost everything tragically, “paradise” was a cruel illusion. For others, it is created through personal will or in community spaces of pleasure or mourning. I think many immigrants work through this vexed notion of America as “paradise.” Think of all the Asian languages that call America some variant of “beautiful country.” We also hope to conjure something utopic that perhaps is still possible in San Diego. After all, we’re here anyway. What challenges did you face while putting this documentary together?  Brian Hu: The biggest challenge is that filmmakers from San Diego, or who studied in San Diego, tend to leave eventually. The city is not a huge media town, and Los Angeles is just a temptation away. When the film was produced, only one of the four filmmakers was living in San Diego, so the directors were coordinating everything from afar and had short windows during which to shoot locally. If the film has a nostalgic, bittersweet quality, it’s because these filmmakers have perhaps developed an arm’s distance from the city in their years since moving. It’s a place where their family and old friends are, or where they have memories rather than everyday encounters. For us, it also became a moving way to think about history too; how is the city remembered when you take a short step away? What do you hope audiences take away from this documentary? What do you hope audiences who are unfamiliar with San Diego’s community take away?  Brian Hu: At the very least, we hope that audiences learn about some folks whose experiences they find meaningful or memorable. Beyond that, we hope to show how complicated San Diego is politically and demographically. The city has a reputation for sunshine and conservatism,