America is a large, ethnically diverse region, and so is Asia, a fact that has always made the long-running Asian American Showcase an amorphous player among Chicago’s film festivals. The Showcase covers so many ethnicities that the only commonality is the friction between those cultures and the American melting pot, which gives the festival a thematic consistency many of its peers lack. Much of this year’s schedule, screening at Gene Siskel Film Center, consists of serious documentaries: Right Footed, about an armless Filipino-American who becomes a disability advocate; People Are the Sky, about a U.S. filmmaker returning to her native North Korea after 70 years; Tyrus: The Tyrus Wong Story, about the Chinese-American artist who crashed the white boys’ club at the Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and became a key creative force on the classic Bambi. But opening and closing the festival are two crowd- pleasing comedies—Seoul Searching and Good Ol’ Boy—that throw into high relief the culture clash between East and West that propels the Showcase year after year.
Smith can’t assimilate fast enough, but his father (Anjul Nigam, who will take questions by Skype at the screening) has already betrothed him to a girl back in India and struggles to keep his son connected to their native culture. “Today it’s the apple pie, tomorrow it’s the Jesus!” he exclaims when the boy and his mother prevail upon him to invite the family across the street over for a barbecue. The conflict between American and Indian culture generates plenty of laughs, not least when Smith’s mother presents him with the Halloween costume she’s been promising him for weeks and it’s the elephant-headed Ganesha; neighbors welcoming trick-or-treaters ask Smith why Dumbo has four arms, and one evangelical couple, informed that Ganesha is one of the Hindu gods, coldly reply, “There’s only one God.” Ganesh is Ganesh and Dumbo is Dumbo, and never the twain shall meet. v
Fri 4/1–Thu 4/14Gene Siskel Film Center164 N. State312-846-2800siskelfilmcenter.org$11
