The Sundance Film Festival starts in a few days, and buyers are dusting off their winter gear and checkbooks to descend on Park City, Utah to find the next hit independent film. Private industry conversations over spiked hot cocoa as creatives and suits come together and continue to update the antiquated constraints that have been holding Hollywood back. The last few years, some much-needed change has been brought to a few facets of the business when it comes to underrepresented voices, but there’s still obviously much more to do. And as incremental changes continue to be made across the board, indie film is still a great place to embrace the right direction the industry now faces as it bends towards progress.
Few filmmakers are fortunate enough to have their feature accepted at the prestigious festival, even fewer get to bring a second film. Justin Chon returns to Sundance this year with Ms. Purple after his 2017 breakout Gook. The California native of Korean descent is an actor, writer, director, and YouTube personality. He majored in business at USC and was also a member of a K-Pop parody group that has released actual songs that have charted. He’s able to work steadily between different mediums and rotate key positions effortlessly. For a specific generation, he is probably most recognized as Eric Yorkie from the Twilight saga, Bella’s valedictorian classmate, overly helpful, chess-club type who appeared in four of the films.
He wrote, directed and starred in Gook about Korean-American brothers who run their father’s store and befriend a young black girl on the first day of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance and then Chon went on to receive the Kiehl’s Someone to Watch Award at the 2018 Film Independent Spirit Awards. It was acquired and released by Samuel Goldwyn Films to rave reviews, earning high praise for its cinematography, accurate portrayal of the era, and raw tone.
This time Chon’s new film Ms. Purple will premiere at Sundance in the U.S. Competition lineup. It tells the story of a karaoke club hostess in LA’s Koreatown who must overcome her tumultuous relationship with her brother so that she can take care of her ailing father in his last days. With Chon continuing to hone his dramatic voice and a possible breakthrough performance by Tiffany Chu, the project shouldn’t have any trouble finding a great distributor.
Audiences are tired of seeing the same faces and rehashing the same classic tropes from a limited point of view. They are starving for diverse stories and the enormous success of Crazy Rich Asians punctuated that their needs to be more films with Asians in front and behind the camera. One can hope that with over $200 million at the box office, award nominations, and a sequel in development that people are no longer thinking of it as an outlier and instead as a paradigm shift. Adding to last year’s momentum one has to include To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Netflix’s YA romantic comedy starring Lana Condor in the title role, which became a cultural phenomenon. And this year started with Sandra Oh thanking her parents in Korean as she became the first Asian woman in over forty years to win a major TV award at the Golden Globes and that was in the middle of co-hosting the event! Let’s celebrate these milestones, keep moving forward, and hope that they become more frequent each and every day.
