Hello Contra Zoom readers! With this year’s Tribeca film festival now wrapped, I’ve had some time to put pen to paper and review all the films I watched. I was pretty ambitious, watching 10 features and 18 shorts (about 19 hours of film by my count). To cover all those, I’ll be pairing up the feature films across five different reviews along common themes, smattering related shorts throughout.
For this first pair of feature reviews, we are tackling two different films that cover a topic I never tire of – different aspects of the Asian American experience. One film is a documentary about a niche music scene, and the other a narrative film about a lesser known ethnicity group.
Check out my blog post on the Tribeca Festival 2024 Preview.
Final Rating: 4/5
While I was born in the States, I didn’t really develop memories until I moved back to the Philippines for a few years. While I didn’t learn Tagalog while living there, when we moved back to the States for my dad’s work, I gradually gained a passing understanding through lessons with my dad. But arguably more importantly,it was through the music we would listen to on cassette tapes of OPM (Original Pilipino Music) from the 70s while being driven to and from school.
I honestly didn’t really listen to much American pop music until high school. When I did, I ended up being drawn to hip hop, partially through Filipino representation on dance crews like the Jabbawockeez, Super Cr3w or Quest on America’s Best Dance Crew, or the legendary DJs like DJ QBert and Mix Master Mike, documented in books like Legions of Boom and Empire of Funk.
In a similar way that Filipinos had a special relationship with hip hop, Vietnamese American immigrants whose families came over as refugees after the Vietnam War were drawn to a specific genre of music known as New Wave (or more precisely Euro Disco and Synthpop records that were found by immigrants in Chinatowns labeled as New Wave, and then later covered by Vietnamese American artists).
Director Elizabeth Ai starts the documentary, New Wave, doing the same work as the artists of the books I mentioned of trying to interview and learn about the history of this niche but vibrant musical scene specific to a specific time and place and ethnic community. She explains how growing up with a working single mother, she was often left in the care of her older sister who’d drive around Southern California playing such songs and later going to parties dressed in the style of the times.
She interviews Ian “DJ BPM” Nguyen who serves as a sort of historian of the time, as well as singer Lynda Trang Dai, the Vietnamese American singer who out of high school became the face and the voice of the New Wave genre.
We learn how New Wave was a way for them to seek freedom and community in a country where they seemed like a perpetual foreigner, but at the same time their parents and older relatives saw them as too American – a recurring theme in Asian American stories. As an exploration of the rise and fall of a subculture that is both simultaneously specific yet universal, it’s an interesting enough, if not necessarily innovative approach.
In the last third of the film though, where things take a different route. In real time, as Ai explores how Dai and Nguyen were dealing with the trauma of the Vietnam War and how it affected their relationships with their parents, driving them to New Wave, she is reminded of her own estranged relationship with her absentee mother who seems to have single handedly supported her entire extended family.
If anything, the film could also be seen as a testament to the hustle of the female American immigrant, with both Ai’s mother and Dai supporting their families through their work even at great personal cost. In any case, as Ai is a new mother herself, and facing these unresolved questions about feeling abandoned by her mother, the documentary turns from one of exploring the specific musical genre to the even more specific personal trauma.
While I won’t spoil the ending of the film itself, I will say ultimately it is a story of healing intergenerational trauma, with the quote from the film “In absence, assumptions become our truth” standing out to me as the key takeaway.
While perhaps the transition from ethnological study to personal story could have been a bit more smoothly done, and/or some elements of the New Wave exploration a bit more deeply explored, ultimately New Wave is a testament how even hyper specific stories that seem unique to one individual still have a kernel of universal truth for all of us.
I look forward to seeing more of Ai’s work in the future (and it seems Tribeca agrees – for New Wave she got a Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Director).
Final Rating: 4/5
In the previous review, I mentioned how I got more into hip hop culture and b-boying/breakdancing in college and how it related to my own FIlipino identity. During that time, I attended a film screening of a film called Among B-boys, which is where I first learned about the Hmong ethnic group, and a group of b-boys who, similar to Vietnamese Americans in New Wave, find community in this scene as a way of dealing with intergenerational trauma.
A quick background: the Hmong people are a Chinese ethnic group who were found in Southeast Asia, particularly Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. During the Vietnam war they were recruited by the CIA in a handshake deal, but when the Americans lost the war many were unable to evacuate safely to America. Those who did eventually made their way to social enclaves, such as Minnesota in Among B-boys, or in Bitterroot, Montana.
In Bitterroot, directed by Vera Brunner-Sung, we follow Lue (played by Wa Yang), a middle aged recently divorced man who lives with his mother, helping her take care of her garden to sell vegetables at market and going to late night karaoke to sing.
Over the course of the film we are drip fed bits and pieces as to why his former marriage failed and left him in this situation. We see the pressure on him to restart his life – his mother turning to her shaman friend to make a talisman for him to wear, his auntie inviting him to a mixer with a nice Hmong girl from the next town over, or his uncle giving him a talk about how it’s his duty to carry on the bloodline.
Hanging over the community is a larger concern about the wildfires that had recently ravaged the eponymous Bitterroot mountain range. Frankly, the story in and of itself isn’t necessarily the most complicated when explained as such.
Where this film really shines is in taking advantage of the breathtaking landscapes that provide the backdrop of this quiet drama. It’s not the hustle and bustle of the Southern California community we see in New Wave, but more akin to the landscapes we see in films such as Nomadland, or in Evil Does Not Exist.
As in those films, while there is a human story that does happen and is well directed, part of what makes the film work is both the contrast of the human drama against the magnitude of nature, and also how the nature itself reflects the internality of the human characters, especially when the script is relatively dialogue light. The blackness of the rural nights, or the hidden danger in a seemingly tranquil forest belie the turmoil within our characters.
And as the characters find their own peace and understanding and a way forward, so too does the mountain forest recover after a wildfire, ready to sprout anew, if slowly. It’s no wonder that cinematographer Ki Jin Kim received a special jury mention for Cinematography in a US Feature.
Again, not to say the film’s human story isn’t well done. If anything, I think it’s grown on me thinking about it in the weeks since, even if perhaps it is a bit hard to read on the first pass with how deliberately paced it is and how little action or dialogue there seems to be on screen (I’d compare it to the pace of Kogonada’s Columbus as an example).
That said, I can respect a film that doesn’t hold it’s audience’s hand – the absence of certain things being mentioned are telling, for example how in his older generation’s pressure on Lue, not a single person really mentions therapy or mental health, which is perhaps a bit of a sad reality of immigrant families. Likewise, it’s interesting to see the contrast between Lue and his sister who has half-Asian kids with her spouse and how much backstory there must be in their relationship that goes unsaid but is felt.
Aside from what we see on screen, I do have to give credit to the production crew who if I’m not mistaken were almost entirely Hmong and used a unique apprentice/mentorship model to encourage the next generation of Hmong filmmakers, something that while perhaps not immediately apparent on the film, makes sense when you understand how culturally specific the film can be (while again, also being universal in many regards).
Asian American Shorts Recap
A Family Guide to Hunting – Dir Zao Wang
Final Rating: 5/5
Following a Korean woman who takes her prepper boyfriend on a hunting trip with her parents (with mother played by Margaret Cho), what at first seems like a typical “parents not liking the boyfriend” story turns into an (admittedly) dire situation that shows just far our parents are willing to go for us even if they don’t always understand us.
In particular the makeup work in this film is top notch, and despite the surface level grim story, it always maintains a light humorous touch.
The HongFu Hotel – Dir Tian Xu
Final Rating: 5/5
A story about a son who on the eve of his father’s hotel’s demolition, is asked to bid farewell to the various ghosts of his childhood who have yet to pass on. I was really impressed here by the production design of this short, between the various rooms of the hotel our protagonist explores, to the Visual Effects of the various ghosts that honestly rivals those of bigger blockbusters in many regards.
The story itself also serves as an apt and touching metaphor of being pulled between two cultures – of old dying beliefs as younger generations assimilate to their new countries. I would love to see what Xu has in store for a longer film.
Bloomed in the Water – Dir Joanne Mony Park
Final Rating: 4/5
Based on what I could research, Park’s other films all have dealt with various topics of Asian American queerness, and this film is no exception. A touching story of a single mother raising her child to be free and the cultural misunderstanding that comes with picture day leading to him wearing a dress to school.
I was particularly impressed by the acting and chemistry between mother (Kim Sae-byuk) and child (Ben Kim). I perhaps need a bit more help to understand the metaphor of the ocean and bath and water in relation to the overall themes, but nonetheless I see the vision here.
Thank you to Tribeca Film Festival for the screeners.
