ASIAN AMERICAN FILMOGRAPHY

OIT=Office of Information Technology (Central Classroom)
EASC=East Asian Studies Center (318 Oxley Hall)
OSU=Main Library, Ohio State University

Greg ARAKI

The Living End
Totally F***ed Up [OIT]

Eric BYLER

Americanese (2006) (107 mins)
Adaptation of Shawn Wong's American Knees. Raymond is a forty-year-old, divorced Chinese American college professor struggling with his recent break-up with the younger, half-Japanese Aurora. For Raymond, Aurora needed some hard lessons on recognizing her own Asian identity; Aurora, however, would have preferred a lover, not an Ethnic Studies lecturer. As Aurora begins dating a Caucasian man, Raymond embarks on a new relationship with a Vietnamese co-worker (Joan Chen in a pivotal, haunting role) with a troubled history of her own. Struggling with their own pasts, lonely in their respective presents, each character seeks something more for the future, with—or without—their prior loves. Byler is the rare American filmmaker who trusts his audience, investing objects and spaces with emotions and memories, and capturing the pregnant silences that say far more than words.

Tony CHAN

Combination Platter (1993) [Grandview]

Shu Lea CHEANG

Tim CHEY

Fakin' Da Funk

Michael CHO

Animal Appetites (1991); documentary

Renee CHO

Jazz is My Native Language: A Portrait of Toshiko Akiyoshi (1983) (58min) [OIT]

Christine Choy

Ha Ha Shanghai (Christine CHOY, 2001) is a very personal documentary directed by the extremely personable and forthright Christine CHOY, also the director of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Her mother (whose life has included travels from Vladivostok to the USA) had owned a house in the French Concession of Shanghai prior to the Cultural Revolution, and Ms CHOY wanted to investigate regaining ownership. She took video diaries of her visits to the city of her youth, and of her search for the title for the house through a variety of bureaucratic offices. In the process she met up with childhood friends and family members who lived through the Cultural Revolution, and she shares with us her ideas about memory (from Lisa Roosen-Runge, "The 25th Annual HK International Film Festival--A Report." Senses of Cinema 14).

De-Construction of a Korean Housewife (2005)
A middle-aged Korean housewife comes to New York University looking for Christine Choy to make a movie about her dead uncle, but instead she finds herself as a writer.

Who Killed Vincent Chin? (see Renee Tajima)

Christine CHOY and Renee TAJIMA

Yellow Tale Blues [OSU]

Christine CHOY and Nancy TONG

In the Name of the Emperor (1998, 50 min 28 sec)
Abstract: December 13, 1937. The Japanese army marches into Nanjing, China. Over the next six weeks, more than 300,000 men, women and children will be massacred -- many of them after being raped. The Japanese government denies to this day that it ever happened. Weaving together rare footage of the Japanese occupation, diary entries from Western witnesses, and the confessions of Japanese soldiers, In the Name of the Emperor documents one of the more horrible chapters in this century of horrors. In the Name of the Emperor makes a marked contribution to the history of the exploitation and suffering of civilians -- particularly women -- during wartime. The video raises crucial questions that are particularly relevant today, given the frightening atrocities that continue to be committed in the name of "ethnic cleansing" and nationalism.

Curtis CHOY

The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983) (58min) [OIT]; documentary about the losing battle to save SF's International Hotel; the battle "culminated on August 4, 1977, when the remaining residents were forcibly removed in a pre-dawn raid by over three hundred city marshalls. Choy's camera captured the eviction and the moving demonstration by thousands of protestors who formed a human wall around the hotel. As collective memory, [it] is poetic and powerful. In one beautifully composed sequence, a camera travels through the lonely corridor of the hotel, lit only by a bare bulb and moving to the cadence of Al Robels' poem to the manong. . . . The camera reaches a window and then looks down on starting scenes of thousands chanting 'We won't move.' The film culiminates with mounted police storming the human barricades that had mobilized overnight, through a remarkable feat of community organization that tried to protect the hotel." (Tajima, "Moving the Image", p. 18)

Joy DIETRICH

Tie a Yellow Ribbon (2007): The feature-length narrative film TIE A YELLOW RIBBON gives a rare view into the emotionally complex interior of young Asian American women, featuring a Korean adoptee who needs to come to terms with her damaged past. Joy Dietrich won the Director Prize at CineVegas Film Festival for TIE A YELLOW RIBBON, her first feature film.

Loni DING

Nisei Soldier: Standard Bearer of an Exiled People (1983)

The Color of Honor (1987), both on Japanese internment

Ancestors in the Americas: Coolies, Sailors, Settlers [OSU]
A 2-part (124min) film by Loni Ding. Part One: the untold story of how Asians--Filipino, Chinese, Asian Indian--first arrived in the Americas. Film crosses centuries and oceans from the 16th century Manila-Acapulco trade, to the Opium War, to the 19th century plantation coolie labor in South America and the Caribbean. 1996. 62 min. (Director's cut; revised edition, 2000); Part Two: relates the history of Chinese immigrants in California.

Arthur DONG

Licensed to Kill (1997) (80min) [OIT]

Marlon FUENTES

Bontoc Eulogy (1995)
Tells the story of a contemporary Filipino American's search to find out what happened to his grandfather, a Bontoc Igorette, who disappeared after being exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Richard FUNG

The Way to My Father's Village (1988), 38 mins.

Ian GAMAZON and Neill dela Llana

Cavite (2006)
Winner of the Independent Spirit's "Someone to Watch Award" and recently screened at the prestigious New Directors/New Films festival, CAVITE is a brilliantly resourceful suspense thriller that follows a young Filipino-American back to his native country. Upon his arrival, an anonymous cell phone call by an unseen Muslim extremist forces him to undertake a torturous labyrinthine journey to save the lives of his family

Deborah GEE

Slaying the Dragon (60min) [OIT; OSU]
Overview of Hollywood stereotypes of Asian women.

Vu T. Thu HA

Kieu (2006) (75 mins)
This beautifully visualized, tenderly passionate update of an epic Vietnamese national poem gives its heroine a 21st-century double life in San Francisco: keeping up a cheerful front for her family as she works in an “Oriental” massage parlor.

Kayo HATTA

Picture Bride (1994) [Grandview].
Japanese American film, by woman director: "tells the moving love story of Riyo (Youki Kudoh), a seventeen-year-old Japanese girl who moved to Hawaii to become wife of Matsuji (Akira Takayama), a sugarcane worker. Despite the fact that the newlyweds' only previous knowledge of each other was via pictures and letters, and that both lied in their self-disclosures (Riyo found that Matsuji was 25 years older than she was told), their lives were transformed by hardship and struggle into enduring affection for each other and their new homeland."

Otemba (1998).
Short film.

Fishbowl (2005).
Based on the writings of Hawaiian author Lois-Ann Yamanaka. The coming-of-age tale of plantation kids searching for a better life premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March and will air on PBS in 2006.

Scott HICKS

Snow Falling on Cedars (1999)

V.V. HSU

My American Vacation (feature) [1999, 84 minutes, 35mm]
Featuring: Tsai Chin, Kim Miyori, Deborah Nishimura, Sasha Hsuczyk, Dennis Dun
When a dysfunctional Chinese American family invites their old-country grandma along on a cross-country road trip, hilarity ensues.

Michael KANG

The Motel (2006)
This first feature by New Yorker Michael Kang comes with a pedigree: the script was workshopped at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab, was honored as the US recipient of the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award, and boasts Miguel Arteta, Matthew Greenfield, Gina Kwon and Karin Chien as producers. The result is one of the truest portraits of emerging male adolescence we’ve seen in a long time (perhaps, even, since Arteta’s own breakout “Star Maps”). Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau) is a chubby, thirteen-year-old Chinese-American kid whose family owns and runs a hot-sheet motel.  After school but before homework, Ernest works, changing sheets and cleaning the rooms, making for comic confrontations that also bring Ernest face-to-face with a side of life he’s just beginning to understand.  When a charismatic Korean-American guy (Sung Kang) reeling from a broken marriage checks in, Ernest finds in him something of a mentor: but is this a case of the blind leading the blind-side.[from Motel official website]

Nancy KELLY and Kenji YAMAMOTO

Thousand Pieces of Gold (1993)
Stars Rosalind Chao and Dennis Dun. It is based on Ruthanne Lum McCunn's autobiography, about a woman from Mongolian descent, who is sold by her parents and taken to the United States to become a prostitute. This film was distributed in the Netherlands in 1994, where it gained favourable reviews because of its "sensible observations regarding racism and feminism"

Dai Sil KIM-GIMSON (w/ Christine Choy)

Sa-I-gu: From Korean Women's Perspective (1993) (36min) [OIT]
Documentary about the April 29 (Sa-I-gu) riots in LA following the Rodney King verdict.

Wet Sand: Voice from LA Ten Years Later (2003) [OSU]
Follow-up to Sa-I-gu.

Eric KOYANAGI

One Hundred Percent

Duane KUBO and Robert NAKAMURA

Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), devoted to WWII experience of an Issei in the Little Tokyo district of LA

Julia KWAN

Eve and the Fire Horse (2006) (92 mins)
Two Chinese Canadian sisters navigate a 1970’s childhood of playground racists, Catholic school and ill-fitting polyester in this audience-award winner from the Vancouver International Film Festival, and a Special Jury Award winner at Sundance this year.

Ang LEE

Pushing Hands (1992) [Grandview]

Wedding Banquet (1993) (124min) [EASC; OIT]

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) [EASC]

Chris Chan LEE

Yellow (1998)
Feature film about a group of friends in Los Angeles who spend their last night together trying to bail a friend out of trouble. The friends find their loyalties pushed to the limits as they each confront their own fears and anxieties in one night that will change their lives forever.

Georgia LEE

Red Doors (2005)

Grace LEE

The Grace Lee Project (2005), 68 mins [OSU; OIT];
When award-winning Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee was growing up in Missouri, she was the only Grace Lee she knew. When she later moved to New York and California, however, everyone she met seemed to know "another Grace Lee." But why did they assume that all Grace Lees were nice, dutiful, piano-playing bookworms? Pursuing the moving target of Asian American female identity, the filmmaker plunges into a clever, highly unscientific investigation into all those Grace Lees who break the mold - from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school! With wit and charm, THE GRACE LEE PROJECT puts a hilarious spin on the eternal question "What's in a name?"

American Zombie (2007): Filmmakers Grace Lee (“The Grace Lee Project”) and John Solomon (“Nonsense Man”) team up to shoot a documentary about high-functioning zombies living in Los Angeles and their struggles to gain acceptance in human society.

Helen LEE (Canadian, US)

My Niagara

Sally's Beauty Spot [OSU Women's Library, non-circulating] experimental film that uses a beauty spot on a women's breast as a metaphor for ethnic identity

Abraham, LIM

The Achievers (2006) (106 mins)
An eviction notice sends five post-college roommates through a tumultuous month of bizarre hallucinations, random hookups and a catharsis of pent-up frustrations in this drama that features an exciting cast of hip, up-and-coming Asian American talent.

Cheng-Sim LIM

My American Friends (1989)

Frank LIN

American Fusion (2006) (100 mins)
A romantic comedy about a Chinese American family’s misadventures, and the dutiful daughter (Sylvia Chang) who struggles to keep her family together and still find time to fall in love. Audience Award winner at Hawaii International Film Festiva

Justin LIN

Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)
Tells the story of a group of seemingly "perfect" Asian American high-school buddies who lead double lives. Ben is a perfectionist and overachiever engaged in a dizzying variety of school activities, volunteer work and the basketball team. When an article is published in the school paper indicating that Ben's true role on the team is to add a touch of ethnic diversity, he quits the team and becomes involved in a world of petty crime and material excess - a free-wheeling lifestyle that soon takes a downward spiral, leading to an unexpected, violent end. 100 min

The Fast and the Furious--Tokyo Drift (2006)

Chi Muoi LO

Catfish in Black Bean Sauce (2000)
Mai and her brother Dwayne were Vietnamese orphans in a refugee camp when an African-American couple adopted them 22 years ago. As an adult, Mai tracks down her mother and brings her to America for the first time. Now, after an emotional reunion, Dwayne and Mai face conflicting feelings over their identities and loyalites in this touching and funny look at what it means to be family. 119 min.

Felicia Lowe

Chinatown: A Portrait of a World-Renowned Neighborhood

China: Land of My Father

Julie MALLOZZI

Monkey Dance (2004) (65 or 56 min versions)
Children of Cambodian refugees, three teens in Lowell, Massachusetts inhabit a gritty blue-collar world shadowed by their parents’ nightmares of the Khmer Rouge. Traditional Cambodian dance links them to their parents’ culture, but fast cars, hip consumerism, and new romance pull harder. Their parents fled the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s, making their way through the jungle to refugee camps in Thailand. In the early 1980s, they resettled in Lowell, a historic New England mill city now home to the country’s second-largest Cambodian community. For these parents, Lowell held the hope of safety, employment, and a chance to finally rebuild some of what was shattered by the Khmer Rouge. But for their children, the city offers a dizzying array of choices – many of them risky. Monkey Dance is the story of how three kids navigate the confusing landscape of urban adolescence and ultimately start to make good on their parents’ dreams.

Trinh T. MINH-HA

Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) (108min) [OIT]
This profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam-from both North and South-and the United States. Explores the difficulty in translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.

Freida Lee MOCK

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994) (83min) [OIT] won Oscar in 1995

Jon MORITSUGU

My Degeneration

Mira NAIR

Salaam Bombay (1988) (114min) [OIT]

Mississippi Masala (1991) (118min) [OIT]

My Own Country (1998)
A small-town doctor, making the adjustment of coming from India to the rural town of Johnson City, Tennessee, must win the acceptance and trust of his community when the town's first documented case of AIDS is reported. Based on true events, this a powerfully moving story of one doctor's brave search for home and belonging. 106 min.

Monsoon Wedding (2002)
Love, lust, and hope envelop an upper middle-class Indian family and their world-wide guests as they celebrate for four days the arranged marriage of their daughter to an East Indian man from Texas. 115 min.

Thi Thanh NGA

From Hollywood to Hanoi (1994)

Sokly NY and Spencer NAKASAKO

a.k.a. Don Bonus (1995) (55min) [OIT]

Ronald ODA and Chris CHIN

Asian Stories (2008) (98mins)
Asian Stories is an amazing feature length film that tells a story unlike any other. Jim is a young closefisted Chinese American living in LA who desperately finds himself with a stack of white flower themed disposable cameras, fleur-de-lis invitations, a number of champagne bottles, and a ten-thousand dollar engagement ring bill. The only thing missing is a bride. In financial debt and miserable for having his fiancé leave two weeks prior to Valentine's day, Jim tries to resurface his dignity and wash away his wretchedness by asking his best friend, a Japanese hitman whose passion for cooking fancy entrees extends far beyond his kitchen, to kill him just in time to miss the Hallmark holiday. With less than four days to live, Jim, while wearing his wedding tuxedo the entire time, treks to the mountains to find his fate, meet a pizza delivery boy with lucky charms, the funeral spot of his choice, and a girl. (text by Rominna Villasenor)

Hyun Mi OH

Midi ONODERA

The Displaced View (52min) [OIT]
Traces a granddaughter's search for identity within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in North America. Begins with Midi Onodera's journey to the World War II internment camps, and from there she utilizes experimental, dramatic and documentary forms to create a deeply moving and compassionate love letter to the women in her family. In English with Japanese subtitles.

Stephen OKAZAKI

Unfinished Business: The Japanese American Internment Cases (1986)

Living on Tokyo Time (85min) [OIT]
Junk food and rock n roll - what else is there? For Ken, a rock guitarist with no talent and a vegetative lifestyle, nothing. The only connection he feels to his Japanese heritage are his physical features. Until he marries Kyoko. She's a Japanese girl who wants to stay in America, and her Sushi attitude couldn't be farther from his Frosted Flakes lifestyle. It's an offbeat 80s marriage where the cultural bridge is romance and humor.

Days of Waiting (1990) (28min) [OIT]
The story of Estelle Ishigo, a white woman interned with her Japanese husband during WWII; won Academy Award in 1991.

American Sons

Greg PAK

Asian Porn Pride (short)
A raucous infomercial spoof in which Tony award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang hawks progressive pornography featuring smart Asian women and sexually empowered Asian men.

Fighting Grandpa (1998) (21 mins)
A young filmmaker talks with three generations of his extended family as he searches for evidence of love between his immigrant Korean grandparents. Combining original verite and interview material with Super 8 home movies, old family photos, and historical footage, "Fighting Grandpa" tells the story of a Korean American grandmother's seventy year struggle with her husband. Forced to give up her dreams of becoming a nurse, left with four children for ten years alone in Korea while her husband studied in America, and finally brought to Hawaii to endure new hardships, Grandma might have every right to be bitter. But as the filmmaker discovers, questions of love have no simple answers. By delving into the suppressed conflicts and contradictions at the heart of many immigrant family histories, "Fighting Grandpa" allows a glimpse of how a previous generation, bound by tradition and culture, built a complex, ambiguous love that their grandchildren can only barely comprehend.

Ode to Margaret Cho (2004) (short)

Robot Stories (2004) (85 mins)

Bertha Bay-Sa PAN

Face (2002) (84min)
Genie (Kristy Wu) is a Chinese-American teenager who has been raised by her loving, but traditionally valued grandmother (Kieu Chinh). Abandoned by her mother, Kim (Bai Ling), just after giving birth to her, Genie is caught by her respect for her grandmother’s values and her own feelings of love for a charming African-American DJ, Michael (Treach).

Piyush Dinker PANDYA

American Desi (2000) [India Super Store, Broad St.]
Comedy about a young male ABCD (American Born Confused Desi), named Krisna, wo goes off to college, thrilled to free of his parents and their Indian customs. When he gets there, he discovers all three of his roommates are also Indian (a Muslim, a Sihk, and a Hindu). He falls for an Indian girl, but conflicts arise again and again over this question of Indianness, which he rejects entirely. Hoping to get the girl, he reluctantly befriends his roommates and learns about Indian culture. He gets the girl.

Krutin PATEL

ABCD (1999)
The story of an Indian family living in the suburbs of New Jersey. Anju is a widow who believes in tradition and is reluctant to accept the mores of American society. Her main goal is to see that her two children get married to respectable Indian partners. Raj is the "good son", engaged to a devoted and traditional Indian girl. While Nina is the wild child, rebelling against her mother and all Indian customs. Both of the childrens' lives are changed dramatically when they find themselves attracted to a person that they least expected. 103 min.

Celine Padrenas SHIMIZU

The Fact of Asian Women ()
Documentary that recasts three generations of Asian American women through three "femmes fatales": Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and Lucy Liu.

Mina SHUM

Double Happiness (103min) [Grandview, OIT]

Rea TAJIRI

History and Memory (1993) [OSU]
Documentary on Japanese internment. It is a tour-de-force technically, esp in re. compilation editing and montage, but is also a profound meditation upon gender, upon the title-words (and the place of Hollywood and other state "apparatuses" in constructing these), and upon Japanese-American "identity". More specifically, the film is about her parents' incarceration in one of the concentration camps during WWII, and about the place of this historical moment in her family's and the U.S.'s lives.

The Diary of Lennie Itoh One Year after the Death of Her Aunt (1986)
Documentary on Japanese internment. It is a tour-de-force technically, esp in re. compilation editing and montage, but is also a

Strawberry Fields (1997)
Feature film; "road movie about a Sansei woman whose teenage sister commits suicide, setting her adrift in the American landscape until she ends up at the site where her parents had been interned" (Peter Feng 2002: 75)

Renee TAJIMA-PENA and Christine CHOY

Who Killed Vincent Chin? (82min) [OIT]
Documents the beating death of a Chinese-American, in Detroit. Days before his wedding, 27-year-old Vincent Chin got into an argument with Chrysler Motors foreman, Ronald Ebens. The argument turned from ethnic insults to fighting outside, where witnesses watched as Ebens beat Chin to death with a baseball bat. As Ebens is let off with a suspended sentence and small fine, the Asian-American community fights back. This video addresses issues including our judicial system failing to value every citizen's

America, or Honk If You Love Buddha (87min) [OIT]
A coming-of-age story for Asian Americans, a documentary, and a road movie: wide-ranging personal investigation into issues of immigration, race, and multiculturalism. Ms. Tajima-Pena visits the Chicago neighborhood where she was born, the Chinatown sections of New York and San Francisco, the site of a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans in the South, and other significant locations. Her travels bring her together with Americans of different Asian heritages, including Korean American rap artists, Filipino Americans whose families have been in Louisiana for over two hundred years, and actor/reporter/artist Victor Wong.

Jancice TANAKA

Memories from the Department of Amnesia (1989) 12:50 min
Tanaka passionately evokes the loss of her mother by visually recreating the ominous and disempowering feeling of isolation that accompanies mourning. The tape enunciates the painful phases of grieving: the claustrophobic results of dealing with the inevitability of death, the transitional void where one is lost between the comfortable orientation of one's world and nothing, and the new sense of clarity where images from the past resurface from the abyss of forgetfulness. The piece is an elegy to Tanaka's mother, whose attempts at balance and security were constantly disrupted by social, cultural, political, and personal forces beyond her control.

Whose Going to Pay for these Donuts Anyway? (1992) [OSU]
Moving documentary about the director's search for father, who since his internment in the camps during the war has suffered schizophrenia, become homeless, and estranged from his family.

No Hop Sing, No Bruce Lee (31:51; 1998)
The popular images of Asian-American males historically propagated in this culture's mass media range from 'silent, sex-less, obedient houseboy' through to 'mystic martial arts master.' Invisibility has been a core element in the public's perceptions, and is reflected in the single dimensional representation of Asian men. This is a program by and about Asian-American men. It is through their experiences and voices that we become privy to the peculiar and insidious ways in which racism affects their evolving self-identities.

When You're Smiling: The Deadly Legacy of Internment (USA, 1999, 60 mins, video, color, English)
This provocative documentary should shatter the "model minority" stereotype of Japanese Americans once and for all. Janice Tanaka, who grew up in a multiracial working-class neighborhood of LA, investigates the role of the WWII internment in the lives of her Sansei generation, trying to understand why so many ruined their lives in gangs, drugs and a rash of suicides. This is the disturbing and hushed side of assimilation into the American dream. The newly-released Nisei parents strove to make a life for their children where "camp" need never be discussed. Ironically, this silence drove a wedge between parents and children and ultimately fractured a once-vibrant multicultural community just as the 1960s came to flower.

Ham TRAN

Journey from the Fall (2006) (134 mins)
The first major American film to dramatize the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective, Ham Tran’s impressive feature-length debut delves into the stories of those left behind after the fall of Saigon. Closing Night Film

Tran T. KIM-TRANG

Ekleipsis (1998), 23 min.
Each new tape in Tran's "Blindness Series" raises the stakes: this one muses on hysteria and the Khmer Rouge to account for a group of Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, regarded as the largest group of hysterically-blind people in the world. This isn't the first experimental video to borrow the structure of the slide show, but it may be the first to lend such significance to the darkness between the slides (from Peter X. Feng)

Lee Mun WAH

Stolen Ground (199?) (44min) [OIT]
Puts a human face on the lingering effects of racism and gives a rare view of Asian-American men directly and openly addressing dinner and share their experiences and perspectives of racism and what it has taken from their generation. Through their dinner dialogue and their reflections afterwards, a seldom seen portrait of the so called model minority pain and anguish is revealed.

The Color of Fear (1995) (90min) [OIT]
Eight men of different, diverse backrounds discuss their respective bouts with racism. As each one shares his experiences and viewpoint, various levels of emotion are explored.

Peter WANG

A Great Wall (1985)
This moving and humorous story chronicles the return of Leo Fang and his American-born wife and son to his native China and provides a comical insight into the cultural clashes between traditional Chinese families and Chinese-American families. Fang and his family are met with many curious and intimate questions on subjects ranging from money to sex. 103 min.

Wayne WANG

Dimsum (88min) [OIT]

Eat a Bowl of Tea (104min) [OIT]
Ben's wife wants some attention. Ben's boss wants some dedication. Ben's father wants some grandchildren. And Ben just wants a minute to sort it all out in Wayne Wang's gentle comedy, Eat A Bowl Of Tea. In New York's Chinatown of the late 1940's, young Ben Loy, fresh out of service, has his whole life spread out before him- including a job, an apartment and a marriage arranged by his father, to the beautiful Mei Oi. But as eager as the couple is to see what America has to offer them, that's how eager the whole of Chinatown seems to see some of the first generation U.S. offspring. And when Ben's celebrated young marriage threatens to crumble in the face of this pressure, it's up to him to separate his dreams from his father's, and find a future for he and his wife in their new adoptive homeland.

Chan Is Missing (1982) (80min) [OIT] perhaps the first Asian American feature film, made with an all Asian cast.

The Joy Luck Club (139min) [OIT]

Dim Sum Take Out (Dir. Wayne Wang; 1987; 12 min)
This video shatters stereotypes of Asian American women in a fast-paced story with the feel of a music video. Five Chinese women explore personal issues of ethnicity, independence and sexuality by comparing their individual methods of dealing with their cultural and class legacies. Note: This video contains explicit language and images of sex toys.

The Princess of Nebraska (2008), distributed online after Oct. 17, 2008 at: Youtube Screening Room. Watch trailer here.
Trailer:

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2008). Watch trailer here.

Edward WONG

Comrades (26:40, DV, 1999)
Yook Wong, the filmmaker's father, joined the Chinese People's Liberation Army in the 1950s in hopes of changing his impoverished homeland. A decade later, a man named Alex Hing started a San Francisco group called the Red Guard to fight racial inequality through Maoist teachings. But for both of the idealistic young men, their revolutions did not turn out the way they expected. [Edward Wong, 79 Thompson St., Apt. 11, New York, NY 10012, eawong@yahoo.com]

Michelle WONG (Asian-Canadian director)

Return Home (1993)

Richard WONG

Colma: The Musical (2006) (111 mins)
Catchy melodies, thoughtfully funny lyrics, and appealing teenage protagonists bring South SF’s cemetery town to life in this highly original musical about… Colma! Three best friends sing, dance and dream their way through a city where the dead outnumber the living.

Alice WU

Saving Face (2005)
Starring Joan Chen (Chen Chong), Saving Face is a romantic comedy about three generations of a Chinese immigrant family: a traditiional grandfather, a divorced mother, and her lesbian daughter.

Lise YASUI

A Family Gathering (19??) (58min) [OIT]

Jessica YU

Breathing Lessons (1995), won Oscar in 1996

Ping Pong Playa (2007)

Others:

When East Meets West (53 mins); interviews with prominent Asian American filmmakers, including Wayne Wang, Janet Yang, William Ging Wee Dere, etc.

Who is Albert Woo? Defying the Stereotypes of Asian Men. Dir. Hunt Heo. (53 mins). [OSU Main Library]

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