Film Categories: Asian

  • Minus

    “Minus” is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong’s first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin’s Concept albums.

  • Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables

    “Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables” is an animated adventure that moves through the city in search of safe havens, house music, romantic boys in record stores, distracting images from childhood, and finally into the place where we all want to be…all in the attempt to find a place of least-anxiety. Shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm, “Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables” is an animation film that encompasses clay-mation, cell animation, and live action.

  • Music Might Have Deceived Us

    “Chong brings queer chops into new sightlines with this elegant mini-essay on desire… A series of peek-a-boo mattes admit moments glimpsed in passing. Scars of seeing. The throbbing, hand-processed emulsion begins with clouds then descends through traffic to arrive at the aching towards some new moment of release.” – Mike Hoolboom, Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, 2000

  • Urge

    A young woman has to pee. Due to various circumstances and her own inability to admit it, she holds it in. When the need becomes too unbearable, she takes matters into her own hands – with unexpected results.

  • Brighter Moon, A

    “A Brighter Moon” is the story of Mikey and Valentine, two students from Hong Kong who have come to Toronto to study English at a “visa school.” Mikey and Valentine find themselves in a strange land where they must struggle to survive in a world without parents. The film attempts to show the foreign students in a sympathetic light, pointing to some of the problems they face in Canada. The title refers to an Asian proverb that translated roughly means, “The moon shines brighter in a foreign country.” “A Brighter Moon” was filmed entirely in Toronto’s Dundas Street Chinatown and…

  • Let Me Start by Saying

    A gay man has fallen in love with a woman; she has gone away, and the image of her face haunts him. Desperately, he tries to come up with a way to be close to her again.

  • Air Cuts, The

    In Mandarin. Shot against the landscape of social and economic changes in Beijing – the destruction of aged houses and the construction of new pillars of skyscrapers – the film collects a string of small events which show human behaviour and its interaction with the surrounding environment that is diffused with an irritating air of crawling anxiety and sexuality. While the events are mostly unrealistic and often unrelated, at the centre of theme is a middle-class couple who are going through an uncomfortable relationship. They wonder if the quality of their relationship is due to the mal-positioning of their bed,…

  • My Niagara

    “An inspired and resonant portrait of tenuous teen sensuality emerging from seamless suburban facades.” – David McIntosh, Toronto Festival of Festivals “‘My Niagara’ is definitely set in Toronto for people who know Toronto. But I wanted it to be read both ways, the character to be either Japanese Canadian or Japanese American. It’s also a matter of political self-definition, of what it means to be Asian American or Asian Canadian… It’s a matte of dissolving boundaries, about collapsing categories, as much as about self definition.” – Helen Lee, Fuse Magazine, Fall 1993

  • Subrosa

    “Subrosa” traces a young woman’s journey to Korea, the land of her birth, to find the mother she’s never known. This exquisitely crafted drama probes the idealized, often false constructions of cultural and maternal identities wrought by the adoptee’s return. “Subrosa” tracks the unnamed heroine from a sterile adoption agency office to seedy bars and motel rooms on neon strips, then to a stark U.S. army camp town and the bustling flower markets of Seoul. Though her path to self-destruction and ultimate self-revelation ironically and tragically mirrors that of her imagined biological mother, the past remains elusive to her, the…

  • Yin Yin/Jade Love

    “Yin Yin/Jade Love” is a documentary about a granddaughter’s discovery of her grandmother after she has died. The film simultaneously explores the emotional impact of the filmmaker’s last visit with her grandmother, her death, what was subsequently discovered about her extraordinary life, and childhood memories surrounding her and her home. The narration, by the filmmaker, is supported by past (VHS, 8mm, historical stills), present (16mm) and recreated (Super 8) images that are woven together creating a rich, densely layered, reflective collage. “Yin Yin/Jade Love” hopes to capture a portrait of the filmmaker’s Yin Yin and convey insight into the experience…