Author name: Sam K Mann

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,

The 13th Annual Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival opens with a martial arts comedy for the underdogs, The Paper Tigers.  In The Paper Tigers, three teenagers endure brutal Kung Fu training under their master’s constant watch. Building up a fearsome reputation of invincibility, they are known as “The Three Tigers.” Life gets in the way, and after growing apart for twenty years, the former classmates are reunited when their master is mysteriously killed. Director Bao Tran joins PAAFF to talk about his first feature’s Seattle roots, what it means for the film to be seen in 2020, and more. As someone whose work has focused on action films, what led you to present a martial arts film through comedy?  Bao Tran: I wanted to have a fun story that reflected the values I had growing up in martial arts. And then explore the experience of falling out of love with it and whether it has any real truth for our lives anymore. Your film is described as a homage to Bruce Lee and the Seattle martial arts scene. For viewers who are unfamiliar with Seattle’s scene, could you tell us more about how the city’s martial arts are reflected in the film? Bao Tran: There’s quite a bit of historical connection. Depending on who you ask, Bruce Lee had to flee Hong Kong because of his involvement in rooftop beimo fights as a teenager. He landed first in Seattle and set down his roots here. His first group of students were incredibly racially diverse, and he really didn’t catch flack for it until he moved to California. So Seattle has this long history of deep martial arts talent and open-mindedness, and the Tigers and their relationship with their master reflect that. The three tigers consist of one Black and two Asian American characters. Throughout the film, we witness the racism the characters face in their everyday lives. Tell me about the writing process for delivering these conversations through action-comedy.  Bao Tran: The Tigers have to deal with appropriations of all kinds, whether it’s with their rival masters and the younger generation. I wanted to situate the audience with the Tigers so you can be part of their journey in dealing with all the strangeness of all these people. The real-life martial arts world can be quite an assortment of characters! Carter is an intriguing character because he represents some of the Western attitudes that Asian cultures have to deal with. His co-opting of Chinese culture is direct and recognizable to all audiences. How did you come up with the idea for this character and the presentation of his ignorance through comedy? Bao Tran: If you’ve done martial arts here in the US you’ve definitely encountered the type. It’s a very recognizable personality. You take on that which you love, with varying results of course. In a lot of ways and in this day and age, a lot of martial arts have been passed on to other countries and cultures that are not Chinese. Carter also presents how far the Tigers have fallen short of the ideal and challenges them to be better. Have this year’s injustices towards Black lives and the rise in anti-Asian sentiment influenced your film’s reception and distribution? What does it mean for this film to come out at this moment? Bao Tran: Our country is going through a painful, but much needed reckoning. If anything, our hope is to provide some respite and levity through it all. For those who understand the issues at play, we hope they can enjoy and smile and be energized by it. For those who don’t understand yet what is at stake, hopefully they see POC in our film in a different light than what they’ve ever seen or known before and there will be an aha moment of recognition and empathy. Tell me about the challenges you faced while directing your film. Bao Tran: For our little independent film, raising money was the hardest part. Getting enough supporters to believe in our film and support it either through our Kickstarter or private funding. Once we were on set, the actual filmmaking and production were challenging of course, but it was a kind of difficult that we’re used to and, strangely enough, even relish. What do you hope the audience will take away from The Paper Tigers?  Bao Tran: We’d want the audience first and foremost to have an enjoyable time; goodness knows that these days we all need a smile. But also I hope we can learn to appreciate those who paved the way for us to be where we are today. Yes, this movie is a love letter to Kung Fu movies but it is also a love letter to our teachers, be it a Kung Fu master or a mentor or a parent who pointed the way. What do you think it will take for marginalized communities to have agency over their stories? Tell me about your hopes or vision for Asian American films in the mainstream.   Bao Tran: Homegrown stories don’t come out of nowhere. I hope as we continue to tell our stories authentically from our own viewpoint, the greater API community will support our artists even more. Not just in ticket buying but also with funding and investing and sharing the message. What stories do you want to tell next? Where do you see yourself going forward?  Bao Tran: I have a lot of more ideas that I can’t wait to get out there, but there’s a lot in the air with film production and safety. So once all that is handled safely and a clear path forward, we can get to work!   The Paper Tigers will screen LIVE on November 5th at 7:00PM EST and will be followed by a live Q&A with the cast and crew. You can purchase tickets to the film here.