Film Categories: Asian

  • Made in Japan

    Made in Japan (2.5 min.,1985): North American portrayals of Japan perpetuate the myths of Americanized culture, distorting and misrepresenting traditional values. Part of the triptych “Three Short Films.”

  • Girl Cleans Sink

    A lonely couple meet in a Laundromat, where their clumsy attempt at a sexual liaison leads to revelations, embarrassments, and a little bit of compassion. “Boundary-pusher, CBC radio host and still the coolest VJ MuchMusic has ever had, Sook-Yin Lee directs the surprising and wry ‘Girl Cleans Sink.’ This 10-minute gem stars Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off member Lisa Ayuso as a dyke with a gun who decides to give a guy a try before offing herself. The delightfully deadpan performances of Ayuso and her co-star (Jeremy Finkelstein) lend the film an off-kilter charm that feels refreshingly natural.” – Extra…

  • Coming + Going

    A portrait of the energy of urban life in split-screen. “Coming + going” was shot on one roll of regular 8 film, with all editing and split-screen effects created in-camera. Selected screenings: Time Inside the Image [3], Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Jan. 31-March 31, 2007; Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY, 2006; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck, 2006; Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2005

  • I have no memory of my direction

    “i have no memory of my direction” is a feature-length experimental narrative. The story unfolds through a Canadian-born Japanese woman’s voice-over as she dreams her way though Japan. Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop-culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination. DVD version available for institutional…

  • Tuesday Be My Friend

    Sweet SHIUAN, a non-Muslim Malaysian, secretly loves her tudungs (Muslim headscarves), but none of her friends and family know. She is looking for friends who understand and on this particular Tuesday, she finds them. ‘TUESDAY BE MY FRIEND’ tells the story of one Malaysian girl that decides to take her fate into her own hands just so she can be happy. Mandarin with English subtitles. “TUESDAY BE MY FRIEND” is set in modern-day Malaysia, a country with Islam as its official religion, and Bahasa Melayu (Malay language) as its national language. The tudung (hijab) is a Muslim headscarf normally worn…

  • Crickets

    Sue, a 10-year-old Korean-Canadian, playfully pushes the limits until she finds herself in unexpected territory. “A bittersweet interracial romance between two prepubescent insect-lovers.” – Gemma Files, EYE Weekly Selected screenings & awards: Special Jury Prize, Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival. Screenings in over a dozen festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival (1998); SXSW; and the New York, SF, Toronto, and LA Asian film festivals.

  • Wide-Eyed

    In an awkward attempt to meet the ideal western standards of beauty, Julie, a 16-year-old Korean-Canadian, obsesses about double eyelid surgery. Her tomboy sister Jean is fascinated yet repulsed by her older sister’s serious body-image issues. Neither of them can come to any entirely comfortable sort of compromise on the right way to love each other, or themselves. Selected screenings: International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany; Visual Communications, LA, California; Giffoni Film Festival, Salerno, Italy.

  • Paper, Scissors, Rock

    “Paper, Scissors, Rock” is the story of an unhappily married Korean woman who finds salvation in punk music after a breakdown.

  • Dreaming House, The

    The filmmaker, his father and his youngest child walk past the house in Chinatown where the filmmaker’s father was born, triggering a sublime moment.

  • 50/fifty

    “50/fifty“ uses old home movies and hand-processed film to pay homage to the memory of the filmmaker’s father, who passed away when she was young.