LA film fest (again!)

I keep forgetting we've been in LA for over a year now. When it came time for the annual LA Film Fest again, I was pretty surprised...and now I'm having deja vu blogging about it.

This year's "haul":

• Somewhere Between (a documentary following the lives of a few Chinese teenage girls who were adopted by white families in the US)
• Unraveled (a documentary following Marc Dreier, a high powered lawyer who stole millions of dollars from companies and was only overshadowed by Bernie Madoff)
• Natural Selection (a funky indie comedy about a conservative Christian wife who gets tangled up with her husband's no-good son) 
• Another Earth (an indie sci-fi movie [that's not really sci-fi] about a girl who tears a family apart after a drunk driving accident and tries to redeem herself)
• Love Crime (a French movie about living out the American Dream)

The two winners of this year (in my own personal competition that follows my own personal tastes) were Somewhere Between and Another Earth. They were both spectacular and definitely worth seeing. I think N really disliked Another Earth, but I'm becoming a huge fan of indie sci-fi films nowadays...and I think I may have gotten him to reconsider.

Somewhere Between, though, was the all-out CHAMPION. I bawled almost the entire movie...and I'm really not that much of a movie-cryer (although I've noticed that as I get older it happens more frequently). I cried within the first 30 seconds of the film in the opening scene! Although the focus of the movie is on a very narrow slice of America, the girls' experiences can be extrapolated to the overall Asian American experience (especially for women). While the girls in the movie can't find their genetic roots, 2nd generation Asian Americans struggle with the idea of the "motherland" and questions of "where are you from?" in a parallel way. What does it mean? How much does it matter? Should I try to find out? Do I belong here?

I'll go out on a limb and say that these adoptees' struggles/conflicts could be the 2nd gen AsAm experience simmered down to its very concentrated (and, in some ways, very much literalized) core.

Anyway, that was an overly academic stream of thought. Watch the trailer!: