Saturday School Podcast

It's our final episode of our 9th season of Saturday School, which covers "Stars of Asian American Cinema." Before YouTube, if you wanted to see an abundance of stories with Asian Americans as stars, you'd have to go to an Asian American film festival. And there, we had our own stars who would walk down our own red carpets and get standing ovations at our own screenings (regardless of whether Holl...

This week's Saturday School episode is a celebration of Tsai Chin, as we revisit the 2019 film, "Lucky Grandma," directed by Saisie Sealey. Some might know Chin as a classically-trained theater actress and original star of the London "The World of Suzie Wong" stage show. Some might remember her as a Bond girl. Many likely think of her as Auntie Lindo in "The Joy Luck Club." But "Lucky Grandma" gav...

For this week's Saturday School, the 8th out of our 10-episode semester on Stars of Asian American Cinema, we are talking about Viet Nguyen's 2015 horror comedy "Crush The Skull."  It's co-written by Nguyen and Chris Dinh, who also stars in the film. It also features a memorable performance by Tim Chiou -- and to whoever did the lighting for their arm muscles, good work.  But we can't ta...

This week, we're revisiting the 2009 film "Karma Calling" by Sarba Das. It's a rom-com between a young Indian American woman Sonal Raj (Bernali Das) in Hoboken, New Jersey and an Indian man Rohit Rao (Samrat Chakrabarti) who works at a call center in Mumbai but is pretending to be an American named Rob Roy from Connecticut. For this semester, which is about "Stars of Asian American Cinema," we are...

In this week's Saturday School episode, we revisit the 2004 Alice Wu film "Saving Face," on the tail of its 20th anniversary. If you've been following this semester, you know we are paying tribute to the "Stars of Asian American Cinema." This episode is our PhD thesis for why Lynn Chen is the ultimate star of Asian American cinema. We also talk about how "Saving Face" has become canon as it contin...

In this week's episode, we're revisiting Gene Cajayon's 2000 film "The Debut," starring Dante Basco and Joy Bisco! Also starring Bernadette Balagtas! Eddie Garcia, Tirso Cruz III and Gina Alajar! Darion, Dion and Derek Basco! Premiere! DJ E-Man and DJ Icy Ice! Traditional Filipino Culture Night choreography! Trays and trays of food! Hip hop dance offs!  Basically, Brian and I are jealous...

This week, we are revisting 1999's "ABCD," directed by Krutin Patel. It stars Sheetal Sheth and Faran Tahir as Indian American siblings, aka the "American Born Confused Desis" of the title. Madhur Jaffrey plays their mom, who has many opinions about who her kids should marry, and Aasif Mandvi (of "The Daily Show" fame) plays Sheetal Sheth's charming immigrant love interest. The late '90s and early...

Episode 3 of Saturday Season Semester 9 -- where we bask in the glow of our "Stars of Asian American Cinema" -- takes us back to the '90s. 1998's "Hundred Percent," directed by Eric Koyanagi, came out post-"Joy Luck Club," as Asian American filmmakers were experimenting with style, shedding the burden of representation and embracing hotness + silliness.  There are three main storylines....

Episode 2 of our "Stars of Asian American Cinema" season goes back to the beginning with 1980's "Hito Hata: Raise the Banner," considered the first feature-length film made by and about Asian Americans. It was recently restored in 4K by the National Film Preservation Foundation. The film traces Japanese American history from the issei generation's arrival to the U.S., to incarceration during WWII,...

Saturday School is officially back for Season 9! Brian and I are here to teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history (which includes Russell Wong and watermelons). The theme for this semester is "Stars of Asian American Cinema." In recent years, it's been fun to see Asian Americans starring in Hollywood hits and winning prestigious awards, because for so many years, we w...

We’ve arrived at the last episode of Saturday School Season 8, which explored the history of Asian American sci-fi films! And we end this semester of boundary-pushing imagination with a… documentary! Pailin Wedel’s “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” from 2018, which is available to watch on Netflix. “Hope Frozen” is about a Thai family who decide to have their two-year-old daughter Einz’s body c...

Where were we going with a Saturday School season delving into the history of Asian American sci-fi? In some ways, all episodes prior were leading up to Jennifer Phang's "Advantageous," a 2015 feature film that started as a 2012 short film in the Futurestates series. Often, Asian Americans and other people of color in Hollywood sci-fi represent a post-racial future. But what if in near future, the...

On this week’s Saturday School, we’re continuing our exploration of Asian American sci-fi with a second episode on Futurestates, a groundbreaking sci-fi short film series spearheaded by Karim Ahmad that ran from 2010 to 2014 on public television and online. Before Black Mirror was another anthology series set in the future, Futurestates gave directors – including many notable Asian American filmma...

Throughout this season of Saturday School, we've been exploring the history of Asian American sci-fi films. So far, we've mostly focused on indie films from the 1980s to 2000s that overcame limited budgets and technologies to show what creative genre storytelling about Asian Americans could look like. Where was it leading? What would be possible if there was some organized funding around these sto...

Before "Shang-Chi," before "Ms. Marvel," Asian American film gave us the superhero Lumpia Man. On the latest episode of Saturday School (where this season we're exploring Asian American sci-fi), we revisit "Lumpia" (2003) and its sequel "Lumpia with a Vengeance" (2020). "Lumpia" was shot in director Patricio Ginelsa's hometown of Daly City with his high school friends. In this comic book movie, na...

We're back to continue Season 8 of Saturday School, where we're exploring the roots of Asian American science fiction films. This week, we're thinking about movies like "Frankenstein," "Face/Off" or "Eyes Without a Face' -- plastic-surgery-gone-wrong films. So we are revisiting Pamela Tom's 1990 short film "Two Lies." It's from the point of view of a Chinese American teenager and her younger siste...

On Ep. 4 of Saturday School Season 8 (looking at Asian American sci-fi), we're talking about Shu Lea Cheang's 1994 experimental film, Fresh Kill. Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) are drawn into a corporate conspiracy when their daughter eats contaminated fish, her head glows green and she disappears. The same evil conglomerate controlling the internet & TV is also making r...

This week on Saturday School, we continue our season on Asian American sci-fi with the 1988 film "The Laser Man." What happens when an immigrant actor/director (Peter Wang) who's been one of the faces of burgeoning Asian American cinema in the 1980s (with the seminal indie "Chan is Missing" and "A Great Wall," the first US feature to be shot in China) just wants to make a zany, nonsensical detecti...

For Saturday School Season 8, we are exploring Asian American sci-fi films. In this episode we explore the genre's prehistory, diving into the robots, Buddha livestreams, and fantastic futures of video artist Nam June Paik. We took a field trip up to SFMOMA, which is presenting a massive retrospective of Paik's work, on display until October 3. Paik is considered the pioneer of video art, and is c...

It's the year 2021. Asian Americans have survived the apocalypse, but as we emerge as a community blamed for the deadly virus, are we the villains, are we the misunderstood heroes or are we the robots? To help us figure it out, we're exploring Asian American sci-fi films for our 8th season of Saturday School. This is not a season about Hollywood sci-fi films with Asian Americans in it. For that, p...

We promised ourselves we would finish this season by the end of 2020, as it was inspired by the events of 2020. And here we are: episode 10 of our Saturday School semester on Asian American interracial cinema. We started from the 70s/80s and slowly worked our way up to the present. Ursula Liang's documentary "Down a Dark Stairwell" had its premiere in March 2020 at the True/False Film Fest, right...

It's the second to last episode of our season on Asian American interracial cinema, and this week, we're talking about Jennifer Reeder's 2017 film "Signature Move," written by and starring Fawzia Mirza. It's about a Pakistani American lawyer, Zaynab, who falls for a Mexican American bookstore owner, Alma. As they get to know each other, they compare their respective soap operas, mangoes and mother...

In this episode of Saturday School, where we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 2014 documentary "Lordville" by Rea Tajiri. The filmmaker had purchased a property in Lordville, New York, and she learned the land title traces back to John Lord, one of the original founders in Lordville, and his wife Betia Van Dunk, a Native woman of the tribe that owned the land before i...

In this week's episode of Saturday School, as we explore Asian American interracial cinema, we revisit Grace Lee's 2013 documentary "American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs." The director Grace Lee first interviewed Grace Lee Boggs when she was searching for different women with the name "Grace Lee" to interview for her first film "The Grace Lee Project," She found the energetic o...

In our next episode of Saturday School, where this season we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 2011 documentary "The Learning" by Ramona Diaz. It's about four women from the Philippines as they're recruited to be teachers in the American public school system around 2006. It follows them over the course of their first year teaching at a predominantly Black school in Bal...