Can 2011 be the year of the Asian American women filmmakers? On my radar are Motherland and Adultolescence, both first films by two Asian American female directors due out this year that I’m excited about.
Doris Yeung’s independent drama Motherland will be opening in New York at the Quad on March 18. The movie stars Françoise Yip, Kenneth Tsang and Byron Mann. The film originally world premiered at Outfest in 2009, which I thought was a creative choice of platform to launch the film. The film’s protagonist is an Asian American lesbian who’s returning from abroad to America to deal with the aftermath of her mom’s murder. No, there’s no steamy lesbian sex scene even though I told Doris she should put one in. I guess it’s not that kind of a movie. Like me, Doris straddles both the Asian American and LGBT community.
As a friend of Doris, I’ve followed the development of the movie over the years. What many people don’t know (or what hasn’t been publicized) that I find electrifying and shocking about the making of the film is that the story is based on Doris’ own experience of dealing with her mother’s murder. Doris’ mother was murdered in an unsolved home invasion several years ago.
In 2004, two Asian men invaded Doris’ mother’s home and stabbed her to death in the otherwise peaceful and upscale Hillsborough neighborhood in the Bay Area. A suspect of the crime was her stepfather who was going through a bitter divorce settlement with her mom and the robbers might have been hired guns. Read more about the murder on Sfgate.com. In this instance, I particularly find truth more shocking than fiction.
Although Motherland is a dramatized account of what happened, it is also very much Doris’ own way of dealing with a traumatic and painful experience that provided the emotional backbone for the project. The film and the making of it very much illustrated the idea of literature being born out of trauma. According to literary critic Cathy Caruth, literature was born out of trauma because of the author’s need to make sense of the traumatic events by placing them into a sensible narrative—hence a movie!
Taking into the personal backstory, there is an ironic poignancy in dramatizing the story. Perhaps it was necessary for Doris to fictionalize her personal story in order to have some emotional distance from such a painful loss, but I’ve always felt that the movie cannot be read alone. We have to know that it is based on a true story.
Vicky Shen’s Adultolescence will start playing the festivals this year. Adultolescence is a coming of age drama about a young Asian American woman aspiring to be a filmmaker. Vicky Shen starred as the protagonist and co-directed the film with Zoe Bui who first appeared in her brother’s Sundance entry Three Seasons.
I was privileged enough to get a sneak peak at the film. Like Motherland, the backbone of the project is also autobiographical and I think that’s also the strength of the movie. There are some genuinely intense and raw feelings expressed in the film that set it apart from more traditional fictional narrative films. In some way, it is a portrait of the artist as a young Asian American woman.
In a tete-a-tete conversation with Vicky as a filmmaker, I have learned about the challenges that she faced in getting the film into the festivals. As a filmmaker, my heart goes out to her because I know how hard it is to make a film and how hard it is to make your first feature. Not even does she have to deal with distributing her film, she is struggling to get it seen. For me, I don’t understand how Asian American filmmakers and their community can thrive when Asian American film festivals stop thinking themselves as community-based and stop embracing every Asian American filmmaker who comes to knock on the door.
The current landscape of Asian American film festivals feels like the “others” are creating a hierarchy that very much duplicates the mainstream hierarchy that oppresses them. Asian American film festivals were created because mainstream film festivals don’t serve the needs of Asian American filmmakers and their audience. However now it seems that even Asian American film festivals are becoming “mainstream” and competitive that leave young Asian American filmmakers fall by the wayside.
Adultolescence is a poignant Asian American film with a strong female protagonist and I really hope that people will be able to catch it at a film festival very soon. Both Motherland and Adultolescence are very much deserved of our support.
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