In Los Angeles, California, Jin, a 35-year-old recently divorced Chinese man anticipates the arrival of his mother from Hong Kong. On the morning of her arrival, his ex-wife returns to pick up her mail and they both bump into a new neighbor who is moving in -
Jason, 28, an attractive Chinese gay male. There is an immediate bond between Jin and
Jason as they are officially introduced on the apartment rooftop while smoking. When
Mrs. Lee, the overbearing mother, arrives, she pampers Jin by cooking, cleaning, and ironing his clothes for him. Mrs. Lee also makes friends with Jason, whom she adores.
Jin’s attraction to Jason is manifested throughout the course of the film. However, when
Jason hints at being gay during a sit down meal with Mrs. Lee, Jin is taken aback and decides to avoid Jason around the apartment complex. When Jason finally questions Jin’s behavior, Jin adamantly denies that he’s gay.
As a queer Asian filmmaker, my goal for this film is to make sense of the complications of my heritage and my sexuality. Growing up and being raised in Singapore, a small conservative city, contributes to my identification with being Asian and Chinese.
However, my conservative Catholic family rejects any notion of homosexuality, mainly mine. The struggle that I’ve had with my parents over the past 8 years with being gay has put a strain on our relationship. Keeping a long distance relationship with my parents
(who live in Singapore) have tempered the situation somewhat, but the ongoing guilt of failing my duties as a filial Chinese daughter has been resonating within me.
More recently, I’ve used the craft of filmmaking to make sense of this particular personal conflict. My previous films, Yellow, Reunion, and Kristy have all been about relationship struggles between child and parent. Chase will also continue this ongoing process of making sense of this struggle between parent and child but more specifically, asking the question of “what if I continued to suppress my sexuality in fear of disappointing my mother?”

Jin, my protagonist, is a gay man who is struggling with his true identity. He is in the process of finding out that he is gay but is fighting the desire to come to terms with it.
My goal is to represent this state of conflict at the point of deciding between fulfilling personal happiness and being the biggest disappointment to a parent.
A breakdown of the film on 3 levels:
1) At the most external and socially specific level, it is a story about a man discovering his sexuality upon the arrival of a neighbor he is sexually attracted to.
2) At the character level, it is a story about a struggle with personal identity/sexuality and the prevailing possibility of disappointing his mother.
3) On an existential level, it is about preserving his mother’s happiness at the expense of his own.
The film ends with Jin denying his sexuality to another gay man. The tragic ending of the protagonist not fulfilling his true desire could possibly deem the film regressive in its representation of gays. It could also potentially represent Chinese culture negatively symbolically portrayed in the character of the mother. I will attempt to deal with these problems in my screenplay and the form in which I wish to take in the rendering of the film. What I’m attempting in this film is to bring the issue of homosexuality in Chinese culture into discourse. I hope that is does not play out as simply “a critique” of Chinese culture, but a critique of repressive traditions of culture perpetuated by all members including the oppressed themselves.

Transnational Chinese Cinema, as a genre, will be used as the main theoretical framework of my film, Chase, because of the historical context in which the genre has addressed the representation and questioning of “China” or “Chineseness” in filmic discourse. According to Sheldon Lu in Transnational Chinese Cinema , the history of
Transnational Cinema in China has dealt with the “cross-examination of the national, cultural, political, ethnic, and gender identity of individuals and communities in
Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora”.
1 Even though Chinese cinema can no longer be described as its own entity, this cinematic tradition all attempt to signify “China” as a location of culture, subject to deconstruction, criticism, and reflection.
2
I will be concentrating on two key filmmakers, Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee, because their films serve as important references to the themes in my film . Zhang Yimou’s films in reference to Chinese culture serve as a strong criticism of his own heritage, which is pertinent to my own film as a critique of my own cultural background. Ang Lee’s films are also important in that their content and character studies are similar to mine. Ang Lee deals with similar themes and comments on the homosexual male and how it complicates traditional Chinese ideals.
According to Lu, Zhang Yimou’s films offer a different and alternative history and stories of China unseen to a western audience.
3 He says, “Zhang’s films can best be understood as an articulation and variation of certain perennial issues in modern Chinese intellectual, cultural, and literary history”. In the mid to late 1980s, 5 th generation Chinese film was part of a nationwide movement – “writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals
1 Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “Historical Introduction Chinese Cinemas (1896-1996) and Transnational Film Studies” in
Transnational Chinese Cinemas, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 3.
2
3
Ibid., 12.
Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital: The Films of Zhang Yimou” in
Transnational Chinese Cinemas , (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 107.

embarked on a “cultural critique” of the “deep structure” of the Chinese nation”.
4 Zhang was one of these filmmakers who situated himself and his films as part of this
“indigenous critical enterprise”.
5
According to Zhang, the liberation of the self from the oppressive tradition is still the unfulfilled task, the incomplete project of Chinese modernity. The emancipation of the individual was also the goal of the May 4 th generation of Chinese intellectuals more than half a century ago, a goal that is yet to be realized today for Zhang.
6
Since his first film, Red Sorghum , Zhang has used “the child” to symbolize China. In this film, the story of a woman who is sent to work on a distillery by her father is told from the point of view of the grandson. According to Zhang, children are the symbol of the past and future of the nation. It is apparent that “these tales of “fathers”, “mothers” and
“sons” reveal a perpetual fascination with origins, beginnings, rebirths, and endings”.
7 In film, Zhang is able to comment on the deep roots of China through the use of narrative and familial characters. Red Sorghum was made in 1987.
In 1989 however, the tragic events of “June 4 th ” in Tiananmen Square caused Zhang to re-frame his films in a different way. Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern were the two films made after the incident and they took on a tragic and repressive tone as compared to
Red Sorghum. Zhang deemed it important to criticize the oppressive and degenerating origins of Chinese institutions and practices.
The difference between these films and Red Sorghum becomes obvious. They do not return to the “nurturing, regenerating origins” of the Chinese people; on the contrary, they expose and criticize the stifling and degenerating origins of Chinese institutions and habits.
8
Ju Dou tells a tragedy of a woman married to a brutal owner of a dye factory who has an affair with the husband’s nephew and conceives a child. Lu points out that “the fabric of the story is nothing less than the neo-Confucian motto: ‘preserve heavenly laws and extinguish human desire’”.
9 Here, Zhang uses the character of the antagonistic father, the
9
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.,109.
6 Ibid., 110.
7 Ibid., 102.
8 Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 114.

protagonist (Ju Dou) and her lover to discuss generational conflict and the emasculation of the Chinese male.
The film presents an unending, inescapable cycle of conflict between generations.
The social structure, which is the cause of it all, seems to have a momentum of its own independent of the wishes and actions of people. Individuals fall victim to the social structure in turn.
10
In a way, the narrative of my film is a criticism of my own culture in that its traditions and way of thinking silences my protagonist, Jin, and his dysfunctional intergenerational relationship with his mother. The way in which the criticism takes place is when Jin isn’t able to come to terms with his homosexuality within himself, let alone his mother, because of her presence, not only in his home, but also in his life. His mother symbolizes what Lu mentions as Chinese “social structure” and Jin falls victim to his social structure that has been perpetuated by his mother and also himself.
In Zhang’s next two films, Qiu Ju and To Live, appealed more to the domestic Chinese audience whereas Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern were criticized as spectacles for the western viewer.
11 In Qiu Ju, Zhang moved away from cultural reflection towards a story more about the individual character and her struggles. However, it cannot be denied that the setting of the film, rural China, served as a symbol for China’s roots- “the earth that gave birth to Chinese civilization”. Lu states, “once again, Zhang confronts and critically engages Chinese culture from the ground up. The weight of tradition is apparent on all characters, especially Qiu Ju”.
12 This representation of Chinese culture through characters and their back-stories is very pertinent to my own film and to what I will attempt to achieve. I am, however, setting my story in the United States with an all-Chinese cast.
This setting, very different from the ones from Zhang’s films, creates a space of displacement for all characters in my film. That is why it is also crucial to look at Ang
Lee’s film and how they contribute to transnational Chinese cinema.
Lee’s work illustrates the inevitable conflicts and negotiations between individuals bound by familial and societal obligations. These familial and social dramas are
10 Ibid.,115.
11 Ibid., 126.
12 Ibid., 119.

often set in scenes where the infiltration of Westernization is in direct conflict with orthodox Chinese ideologies. The overall philosophy of Ang Lee’s films demonstrates the struggles of individuals within and between cultures.
13
Lee’s films often deal with themes of intergenerational conflict, negotiating individuality and identity within the family while also addressing migration to the “west”. Being dislocated and displaced is the backdrop to my narrative because Jin is a Chinese man, displaced in the United States. Born in Hong Kong but now living and working in Los
Angeles, his dislocation with Chinese culture sets up his dislocation with himself, his identity and sexuality, within the film. Mrs. Lee, Jin’s mother, in traveling to Los
Angeles to visit her son, she is also displaced. The “west” has somehow manifests itself as a silent antagonist. As Dariotis and Fung states, “when the family boundaries are expanding- through both marriage and migration- a crisis is created within the intergenerational relationships.” 14
Important representations of these themes are addressed in The Wedding Banquet - a film that deals with Asian parents struggling with the reality of their gay son who is currently living in the United States with his white male partner. Wai Tung, the son, marries Wei
Wei as an act of heterosexuality for his parents while helping his new wife gain immigration status in the United States.
The male homosexual immigrant threatens this in several ways. As a homosexual, he signifies castration and lack of potency, the ability to generate more “national identity” in the form of children. Paradoxically, as an immigrant, he invades the now feminized body of the nation. He throws into flux, therefore, the gendered identity of the nation.
15
In Chinese culture, the importance of carrying on the lineage of the family name is insurmountable. The inability to fulfill that is usually regarded as a disappointment. It is also partly why in Chinese culture, giving birth to boys is far more imperative than conceiving girls. In the research that I’ve done thus far on the internet in Chinese gay
13
Wei Ming Dariotis and Eileen Fung, “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang
Lee,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas , (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 187.
14 Ibid., 190.
15 Ibid., 200.

forums, Chinese gay males feel like it is their destiny to marry a woman they are not attracted to. Some mention they will hurry to marry and then hurry to divorce.
16
In The Wedding Banquet , the parents of Wai Tung (the gay male protagonist) tolerate his homosexuality upon finding out only because Wai Tung and his new wife are expecting a son (only because Wei Wei seduced a drunk Wai Tung on the night of their wedding).
Dariotis and Fung states, “the very consciousness of the film’s construction of the relationship between ‘gayness’ and the reaction to it is revealing of a certain tension surrounding this issue”.
17 Finally, in the closing scene of the film, the parent’s bitter knowledge of the son’s sexuality coupled with the elation of a future grandson renders the ending ambiguous. In the final shot of the film, the father raises his arms (in slow motion) to the American security guard at the airport. It forces the audience to question- is it a sign of acceptance or one of emasculation? In Ang Lee’s scrutiny of
Chinese/Taiwanese culture and generational differences, he renegotiates the position of the displaced between the “East” and the “West”.
In my own film, I hope to use Lee’s similar aesthetics to develop my characters and their back-stories. Lee’s use of symbolic actions in directing his actor’s motions and emotions is something that I would like to research in more detail as well.
Visually inspired by films such as Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Last Days, Tsai Ming-
Liang’s Vive L’amour, The River, and What Time is it There? and Lukas Moodysson’s
Lilja 4-ever. I’m interested in rendering my film with similar cinematic and narrative aesthetics. I’m also highly influenced by Italian Neo-realism, especially Vittorio De
Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D. and Fellini’s Nights of Cabriria.
16 Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers, http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=19&showentry=895
17
Wei Ming Dariotis and Eileen Fung, “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar”, Transnational, 206.

The cinematic style, which I would like to take on in my film, is highly influenced by
Gus Van Sant’s work. In Paranoid Park , Gus Van Sant’s protagonist’s (Alex) inner conflicts do not get represented in a traditional narrative manner. Instead, “his responses to tragedy and guilt remain indefinable still, shrouded behind stasis and immobility”.
18 In the end, the audience still empathizes with the character.
This is a central Van Sant gambit: to set up a central narrative touchstone and then let it trail off into vapor, giving the viewer the sense that what they’re seeing is more important than what they think they should be seeing.
19
Gus Van Sant often uses the camera to follow his main characters closely, intimately.
Often using a wide lens but a short depth of field, Christopher Doyle isolates Van Sant’s protagonist with the rest of the world. We, as the audience, however, are able to share the same space with him, examining him, his movements, what he gazes at, and eventually, because we are forced to look at him for long periods of time, we feel what he feels. With the use of slow motion, long takes and minimal editing, Van Sant further alerts his viewers to study the details of his character’s movements.
…he’s carved out a singular niche for himself in American cinema, making films more reliant on the audience’s intellectual engagement with tone, mood, and setting than on narrative.
20
Many critics consider Van Sant an avant-garde filmmaker including Bert Cardullo. In his article, Back to the Future, or the Vanguard meets the Rearguard, he underlines that the
“interrupting narrative” is a recurrent motif of avant-garde film. He addresses the history of “structuralist-materialist” filmmakers of the 60s and 70s like Michael Snow, Ernie
Gehr, and Paul Sharitis.
21
They emptied their motion pictures of apparent content in order to draw attention to how a particular aspect of cinematic technique functioned, or to emphasize film as a concrete material rather than as a medium for imitating actions and conveying
18
Michael Koresky, Reverse Shot, http://www.reverseshot.com/article/paranoid_park
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21
Bert Cardullo, Jump Cut, http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/cardullo/index.html.

emotions. The subject matter of the image thus became unimportant, and instead the image’s function was to act as a formal unit of pre-determined design.
22
However, Cardullo stresses that avant-garde cinema as a whole did not simply expel narrative structure but instead, it “displaced, deformed and ad reformed narrative over the years”. In Van Sant’s Last Days, characters drift between time and space similar to Alex in Paranoid Park. Cardullo articulates that Van Sant does not give hints as to the despaired character’s reasons for his narcotized state. He continues, “And at least part of the film’s atmosphere, I’m guessing, is that his being in the state he’s in is its own explanation”.
Van Sant presents otherwise representational or realistic material for us to see and hear, but its purpose, it seems, is to concentrate, avant-garde style, on what is not said and done.
23
In fact, a great deal of his character’s internal state is enhanced by sound design. Van
Sant has worked with Leslie Stantz in almost all of his films. What Stantz brings to Van
Sant’s films is an almost ethereal quality to his character’s inner turmoil. In Paranoid
Park, after Alex returns home from his fatal deed, he jumps into the shower. What is mostly a cinematic cliché, Van Sant, Doyle and Stantz reinvents the “cleansing shower” with a poetic quality. Doyle frames the character with a close-up slow motion long take passing light slowly over him like the lights of a train passing (which in the film was the way in which the victim dies) and then fading away while water slowly drips slowly from his hair. Stantz enhances this scene by using a piercing soundtrack of heart heavy rain and schizophrenic crickets, amplified to its loudest when the light is at its brightest and fading away when the light dims. Koresky calls this sequence “a visual and sonic marvel”.
24 In deconstructing Van Sant’s Paranoid Park and Last Days, I hope to use aspects of his aesthetics- his cinematographic style as well as sound design- to navigate my film.
22
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
Michael Koresky, Reverse Shot, http://www.reverseshot.com/article/paranoid_park

Andre Bazin states, it is important that this “acting” or “directing actors” style “runs counter to traditional categories of spectacle”.
25 Traditionally, the actor functions as “the spectacle” who expresses emotions, ideas, passions etc. In film spectacle, every aspect of film production centers on the actor, such as how the shot is framed or how the production design is created and how this represents the character. Neo-realism, on the other hand, moves away from the spectacle by calling upon “the actors to be before expressing himself”. In Italian Neo-realism: Rebuilding a Cinematic City , Mark Shiel reiterates, “the search for authentic human experience and interaction was a central preoccupation of neorealist cinema from the outset, and, like neo-realism’s questioning of cinematic stardom, was no doubt partly informed by a reaction against the rhetorical insincerity and inhumanity of the fascist regime and its projection of the political
‘stardom’ of Mussolini”.
26 In relation to the supporting actor in Bicycle Thieves, Bazin notes, “Bruno was a silhouette, a face, a way of walking”.
27 Instead of using technique, whether it’s acting or a well-crafted mise en scéne, the Italian Neo-realists chose to reject that. They would rather and extract what is already there. By using a non-professional actor who doesn’t know traditional acting techniques or locations that were not purposely built, it created itself a movement that Bazin says, “knows only immanence. It is from appearance only, the simple appearance of beings and of the world, that it knows how to deduce the ideas that it unearths. It is a phenomenology”.
28 It is from this philosophical method that the Neo-realists choose to tell their stories.
My approach to directing has always been to place the highest priority on the casting process. It has proved to be successful in making my last two films. Once I’ve casted the
“right” actors for the roles, the film almost makes itself. In my last film, Kristy , my lead actress who played the mother, Kate Krystowiak, was casted over a long process of auditions but it paid off. During the making of the film, very little direction was given on set and very little re-takes were necessary. I have always liked letting my actors play
25
26
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema, Vol 2, Trans. Hugh Gray. (London: California Press, 2005), 65.
27
Mark Shiel, Italian Neo-realism: Rebuilding a Cinematic City.
(London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 13.
28
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema, 65.
Ibid., 64-65.

“themselves”. After giving them a thorough background of their characters and motivation, I tend to prefer it when they improvise their lines. This usually reads more believable on screen than taking a more rigid approach in following the script strictly.
In researching Gus Van Sant and his process of casting, he generally observes people for their look and mannerisms. If they fit his character’s profile, he would ask them in to participate in improvised readings of the screenplay. The main character in Paranoid
Park was initially trying to get a role as a skateboarding extra. He has had no prior experience in acting. However, Gus Van Sant saw him waiting in line and asked him to cast for the main part. I’m also open to casting non-actors for this film. In Reunion , I casted both seasoned actors from Singapore as well as my friends who were non-actors.
Because of the nature of the screenplay, the non-actors proved to be more believable on screen than the seasoned actors. I would like to take the same approach for Chase and try to cast non-actors for the parts.
In De Sica: Metteur en Scene, Bazin writes, “Rossellini’s love for his characters envelops them in a desperate awareness of man’s inability to communicate; De Sica’s love, on the contrary, radiates from the people themselves”.
29 Bazin addresses that De Sica’s aesthetics came from not only the strife to paint real stories about a struggling class in
Italy, he truly cared for his characters. De Sica set the stage of how he captured the
“realness” of his actors/characters. Bazin puts it succinctly when he says that the characters in Neo-realist films are “overwhelmingly real” - “Nobody is reduced to the condition of an object or a symbol that would allow one to hate them in comfort without having first to leap the hurdle of their humanity”.
30 Shiel comments on why the Italian
Neo-realists used non-professional actors. He says, “In being untrained, performances by non-professionals carried a desirable raw authenticity of physique, behaviour, and mannerism”.
31 After the casting process of Chase , I plan to spend several months working with the potential non-actors on their roles in rehearsals. I will take my time in
29
30
Ibid., 21.
31
Andre Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scene” What is Cinema, 62.
Mark Shiel, Italian Neo-realism , 13.

preparing them for principle photography because after I complete rehearsals, I will take on the role of cinematographer.
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QuickTime™ and a
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As an aspiring cinematographer, I’ve decided to undertake the role of cinematographer in this film to strengthen my portfolio. The metaphor for concentrating on only the confines of the apartment building in the story, I can play with inside-outside space and the colors

that each space will present me. The interior space, dark, sterile, dull, domestic, will symbolize Jin’s interior life. On the exterior, blue, bright, surrounded by a smoggy urban jungle, will not simply pose as the opposite to Jin’s interior self; it will pose as an alternate lifestyle, which is not exactly perfect as well. However, it is used as a space for
Jin to escape to whenever he feels trapped with his mother indoors.
I would like to combine static montage shots of interior spaces, highly influenced by
Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Autumn, with long takes of the exterior either with the steadicam and/or dolly track influenced by Christopher Doyle’s work in Paranoid Park and In the
Mood for Love. When shooting exteriors, I will always focus of shooting Jin. The camera will constantly follow him. The audience will be forced to look at him and ponder what he is thinking every step of the way. In the interiors, I will focus of shooting spaces in wide shots with Jin floating around that space with a well-crafted mise en scene.
Bibliography
Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema, Vol 2, Trans. Hugh Gray. (London: California Press,
2005), 21-65.
Dariotis, Wei Ming and Fung, Eileen. “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and
Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas ,
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 187-206.
Johnson, Tim. McClatchy Newspapers, http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/index.php?automodule=blo g&blogid=19&showentry=895
Michael Koresky, “Paranoid Park”, Reverse Shot, http://www.reverseshot.com/article/paranoid_park
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. “Historical Introduction Chinese Cinemas (1896-1996) and
Transnational Film Studies”, Transnational Chinese Cinemas, (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 3-12.
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. “National Cinema, Cultural Critique, Transnational Capital:
The Films of Zhang Yimou”, Transnational Chinese Cinemas , (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 107-126.
Shiel, Mark. Italian Neo-realism: Rebuilding a Cinematic City.
(London: Wallflower
Press, 2006), 13.

Filmography
Hsi Yen (The Wedding Banquet), Ang Lee, 1993
( Eat, Drink, Man, Woman), Ang Lee, 1994
Ai qing wan sui (Vive L’Amour), Tsai Ming-Liang, 1994
Chun Gwong Cha Sit (Happy Together), Wong Kar Wai, 1997
Last Days , Gus Van Sant, 2005
Paranoid Park , Gus Van Sant, 2008
Bicycle Thieves , Vittorio De Sica, 1948
Nights of Cabriria , Federico Fellini, 1957
Lilja 4-ever , Lukas Moodysson, 2002
Red Sorghum , Zhang Yimou, 1987
Ju Dou , Zhang Yimou, 1991
Qiu Ju , Zhang Yimou, 1992
Huo Zhe (To Live), Zhang Yimou, 1994