Saturday School Podcast

We’ve arrived at the last episode of Saturday School Season 8, which explored the history of Asian American sci-fi films! And we end this semester of boundary-pushing imagination with a… documentary! Pailin Wedel’s “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” from 2018, which is available to watch on Netflix. “Hope Frozen” is about a Thai family who decide to have their two-year-old daughter Einz’s body cryogenically preserved in Arizona after she dies of brain cancer. Arguably an Asian American immigration story? While to some, it may seem like they're embarking on a fringe pseudoscience -- or alternately, that they're forcing their daughter to be a time traveler -- the film is a quiet mediation on family, love and grief. It's a scientific quest passed along from father to son (who of course is named Matrix) to accelerate, perhaps even invent, the technology to give Einz a second chance at life. She is the youngest cryopreserved patient to date. One of the reasons this season of sci-fi has been illuminating is because Asian American cinema often values authenticity, a natural reaction from a community that has seen their images distorted in Hollywood. But with recent films like "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and "After Yang," there seems to be a hunger for Asian American stories that may seem impossible or dare to rewrite the future. It’s been 6 years since we started Saturday School: Sept 8, 2016 to be exact. The landscape of Asian American cinema has changed a lot since then. Thanks for listening, reading and joining us on this journey!

Where were we going with a Saturday School season delving into the history of Asian American sci-fi? In some ways, all episodes prior were leading up to Jennifer Phang's "Advantageous," a 2015 feature film that started as a 2012 short film in the Futurestates series. Often, Asian Americans and other people of color in Hollywood sci-fi represent a post-racial future. But what if in near future, these inequities are not gone but intensified? Jacqueline Kim (who co-wrote the feature film expansion with Phang) plays Gwen, the spokesperson of a cosmetics company that wants to replace her with someone more "universal," just as she needs the money to send her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim) to an elite school. Gwen, a single mother, believes this is Jules' only shot at a decent future in a world where society is collapsing. So in order to keep her job, she volunteers to be one of the first subjects for a procedure that will transfer her consciousness into a new, younger (less-Asian) body. "Advantageous " won an award at Sundance, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and is available to watch on Netflix.

On this week’s Saturday School, we’re continuing our exploration of Asian American sci-fi with a second episode on Futurestates, a groundbreaking sci-fi short film series spearheaded by Karim Ahmad that ran from 2010 to 2014 on public television and online. Before Black Mirror was another anthology series set in the future, Futurestates gave directors – including many notable Asian American filmmakers - opportunities to tell unique stories that imagined the future. Last week, we looked at Greg Pak’s short films, and this week, we delve into Tanuj Chopra’s shorts “Pia” and “Teacher in a Box,” and J.P. Chan’s “Digital Antiquities.” “Pia” takes place in a futuristic San Francisco where robots are named Pia – and played by Pia Shah. “Teacher in a Box” explores a relationship between a teacher (Rebecca Hazlewood) and a student (Sarika Sanyal) who mostly converse through virtual reality but find reasons to connect in the real world. And “Digital Antiquities,” starring Jo Mei and Corey Hawkins, takes place in a future where CDs are antiquated and a man finds the only store that can help him decode the data his mom left for him after she died. Watching these shorts ten years later, many aspects of these stories seem uncannily similar to our current reality.

Throughout this season of Saturday School, we've been exploring the history of Asian American sci-fi films. So far, we've mostly focused on indie films from the 1980s to 2000s that overcame limited budgets and technologies to show what creative genre storytelling about Asian Americans could look like. Where was it leading? What would be possible if there was some organized funding around these stories? In 2010, the public TV and web series FutureStates, spearheaded by Karim Ahmad, commissioned filmmakers to create short films that imagined today's social issues in tomorrow's America. We're going to spend the next 3 episodes on FutureStates, starting with an interview with director Greg Pak, who was one of many Asian American directors who were asked to participate in the series. Greg Pak writes comics for both Marvel and DC - everything from the Hulk, Hercules, Darth Vader, Batman, Superman to Amadeus Cho. But because we are Saturday School, we spend all of our time talking to him about "Robot Stories" - which we started this season with! - and his FutureStates shorts. "Mister Green" stars Tim Kang as a government official who has failed to prevent the worst case scenarios of climate change. "Happy Fun Room" stars Cindy Cheung as a traumatized kids' show host trying (unsuccessfully) to warn the children of dangerous robot uprisings outside.

Before "Shang-Chi," before "Ms. Marvel," Asian American film gave us the superhero Lumpia Man. On the latest episode of Saturday School (where this season we're exploring Asian American sci-fi), we revisit "Lumpia" (2003) and its sequel "Lumpia with a Vengeance" (2020). "Lumpia" was shot in director Patricio Ginelsa's hometown of Daly City with his high school friends. In this comic book movie, narrated by Joy Bisco of "The Debut," the Americanized Filipinos are bullying the Filipino FOBs. But luckily, the FOBs are protected by Lumpia Man, a silent teenager whose weapon is lumpia. It's a charming time capsule of NorCal Fil-Am culture in the 90s, with the DJs, house parties, karaoke and K-mart. The home-made film developed enough of a cult following that Ginelsa ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel about decades later. He got the old crew back together, added some trained actors (including Danny Trejo) and built out a larger "Lumpia" cinematic universe with a new generation of characters.