Kangmin Kim invites us into the vicarious dreams of his mother in “KKUM.” In this stop-motion animated experimental memoir, Kim illustrates his mother’s prophetic visions in monochromatic styrofoam, cotton, and light. These elements are re-contextualized in a way that allows Kim to make sense of uncanny changes in his life. Material manifestations of fire, insects, […]
Can we be friends with our circumstances? This is the question that Jason Park asks us in their short film, “BJ’s Mobile Gift Shop.” Byung Jun Lee, or BJ for short (played by Johnnyboy Tellem), is in the middle of transitioning away from a “career” selling a variety of goods to Chicagoans that are “moving […]
San Francisco-based filmmaker Debbie Lum has been making independent films for a while now. Way back in 2012, her first film Seeking Asian Female debuted at SXSW, which gave us a case study of Asian fetishization in action. The film, which followed an older white male and his young Chinese bride, was ardently received by […]
When I got into UC San Diego in 2018, there was a really popular video called “UC SCHOOL STEREOTYPES EXPLAINED” by the Fung Bros. I felt a weird combination of relief and resignation when UC San Diego ranked third, but I already expected that UCLA and UC Berkeley were ahead in this admittedly arbitrary listicle. […]