Asian Americans in Arts and Entertainment - Film Directing

Film Directing

Ang Lee is the much sought-after director of the critically acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Life of Pi, three of which have won Academy Awards. Although much of Ang Lee's work does not deal specifically with Asian people, themes or settings, Lee has made one film in his native Taiwan (Eat Drink Man Woman) and two films in mainland China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution). In addition, his first two features, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, both set in the United States, deal primarily with Taiwanese and Chinese American characters and their attempts to navigate between the demands of their ancestral traditions and contemporary American culture. Pushing Hands deals with an interracial marriage where the man, of Chinese ancestry, has brought his traditional-minded father to live with the family, which is a source of tension with his wife until they learn to appreciate one another's cultures. The Wedding Banquet is a comedy that deals with a young, prosperous Taiwanese-born gay man who lives and works in New York, and his attempts to conceal his sexual orientation from his visiting parents, who are pushing him to marry.

M. Night Shyamalan has directed a number of movies, including Signs, The Village, Unbreakable, and the Academy Award-nominated The Sixth Sense.

Mira Nair has acclaimed movies including Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake to her credit.

Director Justin Lin brought attention to the experiences of Asian Americans through his movie Better Luck Tomorrow, which included an almost exclusively Asian American cast. He has since directed The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, its prequel Fast & Furious and Fast Five.

Cary Fukunaga, an American of Japanese and Swedish descent, won the directing and cinematography awards at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival for Sin Nombre. His 2011 film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was also well received and starred Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender.

Wayne Wang is a pioneering director and writer of Asian American cinema, having made notable films such as Chan is Missing, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Life Is Cheap... But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, Chinese Box, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Princess of Nebraska, The Joy Luck Club, and Eat a Bowl of Tea. He was very well known in the '90s for directing the hit Independent film Smoke and he has also had mainstream success with the films Anywhere but Here, Maid in Manhattan, and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

Gregg Araki is an influential American independent filmmaker of Japanese ancestry, who is especially noted for his often playful, punk-influenced work dealing with young, often gay, members of generation X trying to define themselves in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, rampant consumerism, and childhood trauma. His films such as The Doom Generation, The Living End and Nowhere were seen to exemplify the alienation and hedonistic abandon of their times, while his 2004 film Mysterious Skin, featuring former Terminator 2 star Edward Furlong in a dramatic role, was highly acclaimed for a dark and realistic portrait of the effects of child sexual abuse.

So Yong Kim is a Korean American independent filmmaker who was awarded the Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her debut feature, In Between Days, which was shot in Toronto, but was loosely based on her own experiences growing up in Los Angeles as a newly arrived immigrant who felt alienated from the surrounding world. In the film, the protagonist is a teenage Korean girl transplanted to North America who must take responsibility for her own life as her mother is not around much and her father is estranged from the family. A raw, largely improvised romance shot digitally with first-time actors, In Between Days received enough attention for Kim to make her next film, the childhood drama Treeless Mountain, in her birth country of South Korea. Her latest and third feature, For Ellen, is set in the United States and stars Paul Dano as a man going through a divorce.