Philip Kan Gotanda journeys to the late 60s for The Wind Cries Mary

Engaging audiences for more than two decades, Philip Kan Gotanda has created an impressive body of work as a playwright and filmmaker with his distinctively Asian American vision and voice.

Gotandas latest, is The Wind Cries Mary , a play he has loosely based on Ibsens Hedda Gabler. In November 2002, the cast set the San Jose Repertorys stage ablaze with fireworks. The action in Gotandas provocative drama takes place in San Francisco, circa 1968.

While the 60s was an era of rock n roll, Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement it was also a defining era when Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Korean American students on campuses throughout California were finding their political voice.

Asian American students were seeking equal entitlement and representation alongside the protests against American involvement in Vietnam. They discovered themselves amidst Americas changing consciousness of identity and were grappling with the notion of being Oriental vs Asian American.

Tackling Ibsens timeless themes of power, racial identity and gender politics in The Wind Cries Mary , Hedda Gabler becomes Gotandas Eiko Hanabi, a Japanese American woman of volatile proportions. Searching for her Asian American identity, Eiko is a person out of time trapped between a world of tradition and a new state of being, desperately struggling to break free.

Philip Kan Gotanda talks about his feature film

Charlotte Sometimes Writer/director Eric Byler has a heart to heart talk with AsianConnections' Lia Chang on being marginalized as an Asian American man, the hornet's nest of sexual politics, and why Asian men are angry with Asian women.

Charlotte Sometimes writer/director Eric Byler has a heart to heart talk with AsianConnections' Lia Chang about feeling marginalized as an Asian American man, why Asian men are angry with Asian women and a hornet's nest of sexual politics.

I met with Eric the morning after I screened Charlotte Sometimes at the Asian American International Film Festival at the Asia Society.

Staying at his friend's apartment, he's a bit behind schedule. In fact, he is just stepping out of the shower. Wavy brown hair, six feet tall, with eyes the hue of dark chocolate, my first glimpse of him is wrapped up in a towel. Bathed in natural window light, Eric bares his soul and opens up about love, loneliness, passion and his new projects.

Nominated for two 2003 Independent Spirit Awards and hailed by Roger Ebert as a breakthrough film for Asian American filmmakers, Byler's impressive feature debut

Check into Mike Kang's The Motel when it unspools at the Film Forum in New York on June 28, 2006

Check into Mike Kang's The Motel when it unspools on June 28th, 2006 in New York at the Film Forum.

Puberty sucks, and nobody knows it better than 13-year-old Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau). As he watches guests come and go, Ernest finds himself forever stuck at his familys hourly-rate motel, where he divides his time between taking orders from his overbearing mom, cleaning up after whatever miscreants the motel may attract and longing for the girl of his dreams, 15-year-old Christine (Samantha Futerman, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA). When Sam Kim (Sung Kang, BETTER LUCK TOMORROW) checks into the motel, fatherless Ernest is taken under his wing and hustled toward manhood, for better or worse. Winner of the Humanitas Prize at Sundance, this honest portrayal of adolescence, from the producers of ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW and THE GOOD GIRL, is heartful and hilarious.

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Richard Wong's
COLMA: THE MUSICAL
unspools on Saturday, July 15th and Tuesday, July 18th at the Quad Cinema in New York as part of the 29th Asian American International Film Festival.