Film Categories: Asian

  • Welcome to the World

    A daring film starring Albert M. Chan (GOTHAM, GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST, 30 ROCK) as a troubled man who records a video message for his pregnant sister. Taking place on the brink of a new life, this compelling film explores what it means to be human and the courage it takes to be fully alive. Drawing its power and immediacy from its first-person confessional style, the film presents, in one continuous take, the journey of one man’s awakening from isolation back to humanity. Welcome to the World won the award for Best Performance (actor Albert M. Chan) at the 2019…

  • Another Day in America

    This film profiles three Japanese women artists. Monterey-born Grace Munakata works with abstract collages which evoke an attempt to locate her family’s past, especially her parents’ lives in internment camps. Japanese-born Rumi Sakata has worked for the past twenty years as a traditional brush painter. Her life celebrates freedom and individuality within her own traditional mode of artistic achievement. The third artist, Jan Yonemoto, fronts a Jazz fusion quintet, Crosswinds. Her musical artistry celebrates talent over gender.

  • Your Day is My Night

    This provocative hybrid documentary reveals the stories of a Chinatown “shift-bed” apartment through dreams, movement and song. A shift-bed is a domestic space shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Simply put, itʼs an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence.  In “Your Day is My Night” these beds transform into a stage, illuminating the collective history of Chinese immigration through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical improvisations.  The film was shot on 16mm, Super 8 and HD video in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of New…

  • The Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Imitation of Life

    Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film “Reassemblage,” this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens whose gaze is confused by an unknown force.

  • Gay As In Happy: A Queer Anti-Tragedy

    An award-winning experimental autoethnographic documentary about queer joy, resistance, and resilience in the face of abuse, trauma, and transphobia.

  • Queer Isolation

    Queer Isolation is an award-winning short drama produced for the Barrie Film Festival’s Youth Virtual Media Arts Program about Noelle, a young Vietnamese-Canadian transgender woman forced back into the closet when she moves back in with her parents after losing her job due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Image description: Hands hold a series of Polaroid photos in muted colours.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…