The seventh annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, continues Friday through Sunday, April 12 through 14. Screenings will be at the Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
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The best of these miscellaneous shorts is Cuong Simon Phan’s Mother Vietnam (2001, 18 min.), a memory play in which the narrator, a successful California businessman, recalls his mother in Vietnam singing him a lullaby, his escape on a refugee boat, and the news of his mother’s death. Fleeting but lyrical images, most of them tight close-ups, are juxtaposed with a dancer gracefully undulating to Vietnamese folk music, while the soft-spoken voice-over has a Proustian flavor, evoking the textures of the past. In Out of Exile (2001, 28 min.), David Jemerson Young profiles Shen Tong, a student leader during the Tiananmen Square standoff who’s trying to adjust to life in the U.S. Some of the scenes are poignant, but the film’s politics are obscure. Percy Fuentes’s Sand is a competent charcoal-drawing animation of Edvard Munch-like figures who materialize from the sand and then dissolve again, sometimes to the music of Motley Crue. On the same program: works by Rima Anousa, Kikuko Morimoto, and Ya-nan Chou. 95 min. (TS) (6:15)
Lolo’s Child
China 21
See listing for Friday, April 12. (6:15, 8:15)
An exchange student from Hanoi completes her senior year at a Mississippi high school and her freshman year at Tulane University in this documentary by Marlo Poras. Mai, daughter of a hotel manager, is cheerful, talkative, inquisitive, and fearless, and she adapts quickly, moving from a host family in a trailer park to the home of a young black couple and befriending a gay transvestite. Poras seems to have staged many scenes, apparently in hopes of documenting racial tolerance in the south, and her disingenuousness becomes as grating as Mai’s perpetual smile. Yet the girl’s lucky break and the pressure from her parents to finish college in the U.S. make for a compelling story. 72 min. (TS) On the same program, Pomegranate (2001, 14 min.) by Ham Tran. (4:15)
