“Asian American” is a difficult identity to define. Culturally speaking, the term “Asian American” is tasked with the near-impossible job of representing people with origins in nations as disparate as India and South Korea, who speak languages ranging from Japanese to Tagalog. Routes of immigration to the U.S. vary widely among Asian Americans: some came to this country as refugees of the Vietnam war, while others can trace their history back to the building of the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. Demographically speaking, Asian Americans are extremely diverse, part of both the wealthiest 10 percent and poorest 10 percent of this country. Some occupy positions of immense privilege while others face deportation, arrest, and mistreatment. The fastest-growing minority population in the U.S. according to the 2010 census, Asian Americans represent a motley monolith, with no one easy narrative or descriptor.
The short film program, titled “Asian American Dreams,” feels like a jewelry box, each short film a gem of drama, whimsy, and imagination. Among them are A.M. Lukas’s poignant One Cambodian Family Please For My Pleasure, starring Emily Mortimer as a Czechoslovakian woman who, in 1981, writes to a refugee resettlement agency in order to sponsor a Cambodian family in Fargo, North Dakota. Kim Chi, directed by Jackson Kiyoshi Segars, explores the tensions between a Korean American family and their daughter’s Japanese American fiancee, commenting on the distinctly Asian American experience of how cultures once in conflict can now converge. Jingjing Tian’s Cowboy Joe shows us a Chinese American cowboy ambling through an electric Manhattan, while Youthana Yous’s Buffalo Nickel gives us wistful hilarity in its portrayal of an Indian American woman’s run-in with social media.
4/5-4/17: dates and times vary; see website, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
