SYNOPSIS | BIOS | CREDITS | QUESTIONS

SENTENCE SYNOPSIS
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EAST BROADWAY explores the rhythms and spaces of New York City's east Chinatown by following a man and a woman who unwittingly cross paths morning, noon and night.

SYNOPSIS: EAST BROADWAY explores the rhythms and spaces of life in New York City's east Chinatown. Two characters, a man and a woman, find themselves in three different locations in Chinatown: a crowded noodle restaurant, a busy sidewalk outside a subway station, and outside of a hipster bar. Who these two characters are and what they are doing at these locations is not given. Instead, we see them carrying on their everyday routines: eating, wandering, waiting, observing, and interacting with street vendors. The two characters go about their lives separately but we see them in the same public spaces shared with the familiar noises, people, disturbances, and celebrations of east Chinatown.

EAST BROADWAY is both a narrative and non-narrative piece. It is a documentary of Chinatown life and it is a fictional presentation of three constructed scenarios and two characters. There is no overt narrative, though there are strong hints of a storyline, and the piece asks the viewer to actively interpret what they see on screen. At the same time, vivid scenes of the east Chinatown community play on screen for the viewer, without a necessary regard to story.

The aim of this piece is to encourage a triangular relationship between the two fictional characters, the material spaces and people of east Chinatown , and the viewer that is intended to generate multiple meanings and experiences for the audience.

BIOS
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KARIN CHIEN, Director/Producer/Writer

Karin Chien is an independent feature film producer based in New York City. Ms. Chien is currently producing the feature film 'MVP', which is shooting in Detroit in Fall 2002, and is developing the independent feature 'Rio Chino', to shoot in spring/summer 2003. Ms. Chien most recently co-produced and line produced the feature film, 'Robot Stories', which is premiering at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October 2002. Other recent feature film work includes production credits on 'Made' (starring Vince Vaughn and Sean Combs, Artisan Entertainment), 'Jump Tomorrow' (IFC Films), and 'Brooklyn Babylon' (starring The Roots, Artisan Entertainment). Ms. Chien earned a Masters degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a Bachelor's degree in English at University of California, Berkeley.

KEVIN LEE, Director/Producer/Writer

Kevin Lee is an independent filmmaker based in New York City. His documenary 'Take a Look: Chinatown, NYC Post 9/11' showed the effects of 9/11 on the Chinatown community; it was broadcast on PBS and played to film festivals across the nation. Mr. Lee's recent credits include 'World Tourism Center', a documentary short that explores the former World Trade Center in its new incarnation as a major tourist attraction; and 'Banana' a 30 minute short about a Chinese immigrant who thinks his son is literally a banana. Mr. Lee is currently working on two feature-length scripts.

GRANT KOO, as Grant

Grant Koo studied literature at Williams College then moved to New York where for two years he pursued a not so brilliant career in the publishing racket. He then moved to Seoul, Korea for vague reasons and saw many interesting things over the course of eighteen merry months. He is currently unemployed and writing stories in NJ.

SHAYLA HARRIS, as Shayla

Besides the occasional family snapshot, Shayla Harris has rarely been in front of the camera. The bulk of her career has been spent behind the lens on documentary films, as an amateur photographer and in her current production position at Dateline NBC. Her acting career began after blithely agreeing to help out her friend Kevin. After subjecting numerous uncomfortable subjects to pointed questions and the unblinking camera, she thought it was finally time to learn how to get an Oscar the old-fashioned way. This is her first starring role.

JAEHOON OH, Sound/Editor

Jaehoon Oh is a freelance editor based in New York City. Among his clients are HBO and Elle.com.

CREDITS:
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GENRE: Experimental

RUNNING TIME: 8:00

MEDIUM: Digital Video

LANGUAGE: Ambient Chinese and English

Shot entirely in east Chinatown, New York City.

QUESTIONS WITH KARIN CHIEN AND KEVIN LEE ________________________________________________

1) What inspired you to make this piece?

Karin: I wanted to explore the overlap of documentary and fiction in a relatively easy to shoot piece. I also wanted to work out my thoughts on the changing space of New York City's east Chinatown. East Chinatown, partially hidden underneath the Manhattan Bridge, is the off the map for most tourists and New Yorkers, but is now being "discovered" by hipsters spilling over from the Lower East Side. The experiment was to put two actors in three public spaces of east Chinatown. The rules were that the actors could not interact directly with each other, but they were free to interact with the space and the people around them. We would then present the three scenes in real time, and leave it up to the viewer to place a narrative structure, if any, on the piece. While our role in writing and editing a constructed piece is clearly evident, I believe we have left enough space within the film for the viewer to participate in its narrative construction, as well as to enjoy the documentation of everyday life in New York City's bustling east Chinatown community.

Kevin: Karin and I have wanted to work together for a while. She's a very talented producer, and I always get inspired by talking to her about life and movies. We sat down and came up with ideas that we both wanted to explore. Many of the ideas Karin mentioned are shared by both of us. In addition, I am interested in the relationship between the camera, the filmmaker, the subject and the audience and that eternal question of whether what the camera captures is really "real". I am interested in the idea of the experience of reality, and how it is experienced by different people in different ways. With this piece we wanted to offer a way to sense these different experiences in one viewing. And by having it in Chinatown, we bring in the issue of experiencing a cultural community, emphasizing that culture and community are not solid and monolithic, but fractured and fluid.

2) How do you see your own relationship to Chinatown? How does your being Chinese American bear on your feelings?"

Karin: Part of the reason I wanted to set this piece in east Chinatown was to explore how I felt in relation to the neighborhood and people. East Chinatown is slowly being gentrified by young, downtown hipsters and loft developers, who are displacing long-term residents and workers. In the last scene, the second shot reveals that the cool-looking bar/restaurant is actually next door to a sweatshop. As the two characters are waiting for their night to begin, in the background, we see Chinese women exiting a gray windowless building, evidently just having finished work on a Saturday at 8pm. The shot was unplanned, but illustrates the juxtaposition that we tried to capture. I myself live just south of Chinatown, near the South Street Seaport. As a young professional, and a Chinese-American, I have an ambivalent relationship to Chinatown. Since I grew up in a predominately Chinese-American community, Chinatown is comfortable for me -- I understand the rhythms of the neighborhood, the tastes and smells are familiar, and the people are not exotic mysteries. But, I also frequent the new bars and restaurants, where a martini may cost three times as much as a bowl of noodles, that are driving out people who have been there for generations. The process of making "East Broadway" may not have resolved these questions, but it did instill in me a greater appreciation for the distinct people, spaces, and paces of life coexisting in Chinatown.

Kevin: Chinatown has always been a puzzle for me. When I was a kid in San Francisco my parents would drive in from the suburbs, and I didn't like it. Everyone spoke Cantonese, and I barely understood Mandarin as it were. Chinatown really complicated the idea of my Chinese identity, since I felt so out of place and downright scared at times. Since then I've become a pretty assimilated American, so when I come to Chinatown I feel like an outsider Ð people at restaurants and stores come up to me and start speaking English! They must know by sight who can speak Chinese and who can't. And yet I've gotten very familiar to New York's Chinatown, even though I still get lost from time to time. Physically I might get lost, but spiritually it reminds me of my childhood, as well as the two years I spent in China after college. Who'd have thought that disorientation can work as a comforting nostalgia? I guess that sense of intense non-comprehension defines my Chinatown experience, and you might see that informing this work.

3) How did you choose your two actors?

Kevin: We were looking for people who seemed to us like they would establish a striking relationship to Chinatown. Not in a "running around, doing crazy things" kind of way, but more in just how they naturally carried themselves. We thought Grant was interesting because he is of Asian descent, he's Korean, and yet he has such a unique and evocative way of behaving, that you wouldn't immediately label as Asian or American or whatever. So his way of behaving in these settings sets up its own set of meanings that can be interpreted in multiple ways, familiar or otherwise. And we just think Shayla is very cool. It's hard to get more precise than that!

4) What did you learn or gain from making this work?

Karin: That filmmaking can still be cheap, easy and enjoyable. That filmmaking can be about more than arguing over logistics, scheduling, personalities, agents, departments, parking tickets, and craft service. That even on the smallest project, filmmaking demands collaboration 99% of the time. That video cameras have become so familiar in daily life that most people don't even notice anymore when they are being taped, recorded, documented and watched. And that there is a simple pleasure in watching people inhabit a space personal and familiar to them.

Kevin: I haven't had as extensive a history in production as Karin. To me a lot of this is still new, and I relish the opportunity to play around with the medium, and it sure helps not to have the production issues Karin listed to distract me from exploring the work as I'm making it. That's the joy of digital, and it's not just playing for the sake of playing. I think we accomplished a lot in this piece in terms of re-evaluating or even re-defining our ways of looking at this space, or spaces in general. If there was one thing, one direction I would go in following this piece, it would be to see how I can make a more direct engagement with the people onscreen, while preserving that sense of naturalness that I think we captured onscreen. I think this is a way of further pushing towards the honesty and truthfulness of what we're trying to do.