by Yvette Sin
This review is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative V, a collaborative mentorship incubator between the 27th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.
[pov: ur watching a short film where the young girl on screen screams at her dad, and something inside u constricts. a swallowing. u dig your nails into your palms so u don’t embarrass urself in public. outside the theatre, u tell your friends, “yeah, I liked it.” on the walk home, u swallow so many times in a row that your ears pop.]
Alt text: Collaged images over a background of five patterns torn and pasted together. In the bottom left corner, a red, black, and yellow striped fabric pattern; directly above it, a deep blue pattern with white floral designs; to the immediate right, a cloudy red texture; below that, a cropped image featuring a textile artwork resembling orange and brown flames against a concrete background. These same textile flames emerge from a cropped face on the left. In the center, an East Asian woman’s head and torso emerge from a red casserole dish. The woman has a pained expression and is scratching her neck. A metal fork and spoon perch on the dish’s corner. Beneath the woman and the utensils are red wildflowers. The woman’s face is partially obscured by slabs of raw beef. Above is a cropped cartoon text bubble with a red star inside. Below the casserole dish is a small white square featuring an illustrated rabbit head with x’d out eyes and crooked teeth. In the right third of the page, a shirtless East Asian man crouches over a cloud of smoke, facing a younger shirtless man. The younger man has his head bowed low, and the older man has placed his hand on the bowed head. The older man’s face has been replaced with a hand holding a lit lighter.
1. HUNGER
At Reel Asian ’27 I attend a shorts programme called Let’s Be Friends, where three out of five narrative shorts center anger as a primary storytelling element. I’ve been paying attention to anger in diasporic Asian short films for a while, probably because I’ve been making angry diasporic Asian short films, and will likely keep doing so until I “get over it” or “forgive my parents” or whatever. While watching these films, it occurs to me that in them, anger progresses structurally in similar ways:
- Angst — A misunderstanding — often familial or intergenerational — plants a seed of grievance in our main character. (In Maya Tanaka’s HONOLULU, 12-year-old Yuki can’t understand why her mother is not on vacation with the rest of their family, and her father won’t tell her why. In Jin-man Kim and Ji-young Chon’s THE CAVE, a boy seeking connection with his father is rejected.)
- Aggravation — Via repeated failures to properly communicate, the initial grievance is inflamed like a rash. This manifests in the increased isolation of the main character and some indication of festering. (HONOLULU’s Yuki is excluded from playing with other tourist kids, and when alone, sees vivid visions of sea creatures. In THE CAVE, the boy uses newly discovered whimsical dream magic to curse those whom he thinks deserves it.)
- Explosion — It all becomes too much. The ticking time bomb that is the main character detonates through a heightened use of volume, space, and emotion. (HONOLULU’s Yuki screams at her dad. THE CAVE boy’s curse powers turn against him in his dream world.)
- Resolution — The tension that’s been building — in the story, in the body — drains out. In the aftermath, possibilities of reconciliation are gently explored.
Alt text: A diagram of three collaged images, red arrows, and hand-written text against a white background. From left to right: A red arrow pointing right leads to a collaged image of a naked red baby doll with cherries emerging from its head. Text under reads: “ANGST”. A second red arrow leads to a collaged image of a woman against a red and blue rectangular background. Her face has been cut out and skewed to the right, and strawberries are emerging from under her face. Text under reads: “AGGRAVATION”. A third red arrow points to a collaged image of an illustrated head featuring enlarged pupils drawn in dark purple with messy pink shading. The head is pasted onto the torso of a muscular figure wearing a blue tank top. The figure has their right arm up, bringing their fist over their left shoulder. The fist is dripping sand. From behind the head and the torso sprouts a large bouquet of yellow sunflowers and other orange and dark purple wildflowers, cut out from a red background. Text under reads: “EXPLOSION”. A fourth red arrow points to text that reads: “RESOLUTION”.
For [Asian kids w/ mommy issues] people like me, these conflict→resolution pathways hold something precious, something prophetic. The course of grievance ends in reconciliation, you just have to [scream?]. You can untie the knot inside, you just have to [pull??]. We’re a diasporic generation starved for healing, only just learning the language to admit that we are hurt. We need a fix-it before we hurt the next generation. Show us enough short films where the Asian family hugs at the end and we’re going to take your word for it; we’re going to work for it. These resolution narratives are aspirational [remember this], but our appetite for them grants them emotional capital — cultural authority. We take them to be autobiographical, meaning authentic. We gather outside of theatres and talk about how nice it is to have representation. How nice it is to have hope.
Alt text: Collaged images over a blue background textured with faint points of light. The right side of the background includes a torn rectangular image featuring green and red textures and a cropped white handwritten word; the word reads: “BODY”. In the bottom left corner, a cropped image of a bull faces a cutout of stylized yellow text against a red background; the text reads: “Baby, YOU’RE PROJECTING”. Above these two elements, a woman’s face is framed within her hands, palms facing inward as red thread is pulled taut between her fingers, like cat’s cradle. A triangle of space between threads, where the woman’s eyes would be, has been cut out to show the blue background. Above the woman’s face, a cropped image of a red car’s tire is overlaid with a cutout of a black and white illustrated waterfall. In the right third of the page, a small red pickup truck emerges from a door-shaped frame featuring a thick black outline and red, black, yellow, and teal patterned details. Two pieces of raw beef are placed at the upper right side of this frame. Above this, there is a small cutout of a man wearing a red beanie and a grey sweater, sitting on the hood of a red car. Below the frame, there is a cropped red star with black and white outlines. The bottom right corner of the page has been covered with a cutout from the first red car’s door.
2. PALATE
[pov: ur watching a short film where the young girl on screen hugs her dad at the end, and an acidity gathers at the base of your tongue. u get the urge to do something mean like kick the seat in front of you, hard. u leave the theatre feeling ashamed, tail tucked, hackles up.]
Rage-to-resolution narratives close the loop of pain. They validate the inner diasporic child; they promise understanding between wounded generations. They bleed earnestly. They also piss me off.
As I see more of these kinds of films being made, I am increasingly dissatisfied with their resolutions. [yes yes the irony of getting pissed off by a film abt anger shut up] Like an implant that won’t take, I feel my body rejecting their hopeful endings. So you can hug your dad after yelling at him. So you can confront this hard, hot thing inside yourself and others, and then open your palms and release it. I don’t buy it. Because I’ve tried [idk if u can tell but I have tried to forgive my parents]. I’ve done the exploding again and again. I’ve endured the exploding again and again and again. This effort hasn’t closed the loop of pain, it’s perpetuated it.
Still, shouldn’t I be grateful? Asians have a hard enough time getting our stories told. Spiritually, I need more Asian stories to be told. Why can’t I swallow these diasporic optimisms? Why can’t I hope, open-throated? I feel like a bad Asian for resenting these filmmakers and their autobiographical healings. [why can’t I fucking let go and grow up like everybody else? while writing this, I pulled an oracle card called “Ungrateful Daughter and Earthly Mother” lmao]
I can’t help it; I watch diasporic Asian films like I’m parsing through tarot stones, searching for ways to be [held be loved be long]. These rage-to-resolution stories offer me quick fixes only. I get high off the climax but the comedown leaves me cynical and cotton-mouthed. I don’t believe their catharses [in which the powerless boy who gets dream powers gives them up to play with the neighbourhood kids? ur losing me, THE CAVE]. If your healing only exists in a cooled aftermath, what are you really leaving me with if not boiled-over water stilled at room temperature, blown fuse, bone picked clean? I know fiction doesn’t owe us anything except imagination, but I need an image with kinetic energy. I need something to chew on.
Alt text: Collaged images over a background of four patterns torn and pasted together. In the left third, a cropped image featuring a red X over a black background is pasted over a torn black texture. The middle section of the background features an image of waterfall spray. The bottom right corner of the background is blue. In the top-left corner, black-and-white hands emerge from a cropped shark’s mouth. Below this, there is an illustration of a distorted angry cat baring its teeth. Below the cat, there is a cutout of the bottom row of a human’s teeth. Centred on the page, a black-and-white image of a face opens its mouth in a scream. The face’s eyes are obscured by an oval ring of black and white teeth; within this ring, there is a red orb. A red and black scalloped outline emerges from behind the face, and again near the top right corner of the page. In the right third of the page, an illustration of top and bottom fangs has been placed exaggeratedly apart. A ripped image of a red, black, and yellow striped pattern stretches between the rows of fangs, like a mouth. Within this, there is a black-and-white illustration of an apple. The apple has a spike through it, a drop of juice emerging from the puncture, and a bite taken out of it.
3. TEETH
[pov: ur watching a short film and ur mind is racing with wtf???is going on???? u feel an opening in ur chest. u hear urself laughing]
At Reel Asian ’27, I’m watching another diasporic Asian short film about anger.
SUGAR GLASS BOTTLE opens inconspicuously beneath a deserted overpass, Japanese text promising you “a story about the near future.” As an unseen train rumbles overhead, a high schooler named Yuta bumps into another boy named Kou, causing Kou to spill his beer over his shirt. “Hey!” Kou grabs a fistful of Yuta’s jacket. “Buy me a new shirt.” They’re lit from above by a cold, industrial source, boxed in by a fading futuristic mural. The effect evokes a sense of urban liminality: where the light spills end, the world disappears. Kou’s threat wavers. Yuta scoffs, “Get off me, momma’s boy,” and breaks out of Kou’s grip. The camera follows his exit, the moment’s charge dissipating.
Suddenly, off-screen, Kou surges forward into frame: “I’LL KILL YOU!” He arcs his bottle down over Yuta’s skull.
Upon impact, we freeze frame. We are made to absorb several things very quickly: a flash of white, a spray of glass, and a sound like the flashbulb of a forensic camera. Blink and you’ll miss it. The film’s title appears over the frozen frame: “SUGAR GLASS BOTTLE” [a brittle transparent form of sugar shaped like a glass bottle. a theatre prop].
With just as little warning, motion resumes. Yuta falls to the ground, leaving his assailant swaying. Kou casts his gaze around the underpass; is someone watching? He runs.
It’s jarring. Not the aggression, the impact, nor the fading sound of footsteps fleeing over concrete. That’s all standard structure [angst > aggravation > explosion > resolution], executed succinctly. It’s the interruption — the freeze frame — that has me off-kilter and double-visioned. I’m clutching my pearls and squinting at the screen. Because in the split second where the ingredients of artifice flash over the still frame [sugar / glass / bottle], the usual sequence as we know it, is revealed to be a farce.
We learn quickly that the whole thing is fake. The following scene cuts to a close-up of Kou licking at his shirt, before widening to reveal Yuta perfectly alright. Kou grumbles, “Can you stop calling me ‘momma’s boy?’” Yuta smirks. “I thought it would really piss you off.”
Kou and Yuta are friends rehearsing a prank for school with sugar glass bottles they nicked from the theatre department. A fake argument; a fake assault. Pretty fucked up, but Yuta’s pretty good. Kou, on the other hand, is “not convincing because he never gets angry.”
This is the crux of the story: Kou can’t get angry. More specifically, he can’t threaten with “I’ll kill you” in a way that makes us believe him.
“You just gotta go for it,” Yuta suggests. “Get angry for real.”
Alt text: Kou glancing up from beneath an underpass, looking concerned. Behind him, a tent and drying laundry backlit by a red advertisement for The Overpass.
I’m fascinated by this unapologetic notion of anger as performance. In short-form rage-to-resolution stories, the climactic emotional explosion is the result of so much external pressure, and so short-lived, that the idea of it having premeditation doesn’t even occur. You can’t help but scream, or cry, or break something. It spews from the veins, red and unfiltered, short-handing our trauma into undeniable tangibility.
To frame anger as performance doesn’t make it dishonest. It means that anger is an energy that can be shaped with intention, and executed with measure. It means it’s more than a momentary climax; it has resolve and re-use. It can be rehearsed, under The Overpass, echoing off the granite: “I’ll kill you!” “I’ll kill you!” “I’LL KILL YOU!”
To frame anger as performance means that, in SUGAR GLASS BOTTLE, the real story starts after the body hits the floor; after the resolution.
The thing is, Kou is really fucking angry. There’s a lot for him to be angry about. He and his single mother are on the verge of being priced out of their family home/restaurant as a monolithic new development called The Overpass swallows up plots in the area. Original residents like Kou’s neighbour Deko can’t afford to return; instead, Deko camps out under The Overpass and collects bottles for cash. Additionally, Kou’s family restaurant serves Korean food, adding another layer to his subject-status under this dystopian Japan. To make matters worse, Kou and his friends are tailed throughout the film by a robocop dog that flashes them with a camera every time they do anything remotely [fun/punkass/deviant].
Alt text: A robot dog equipped with a camera flash crouching on its hind legs, aiming two red sensors towards the upper left frame.
To frame anger as performance also means we’re being watched. After all, there’s something we want from those who are watching.
At the end of the film, Kou and Yuta find themselves performing their prank for an actual audience, except this time, the prank is being used for other purposes — and Kou gets angry for real. When a real estate agent from The Overpass harasses Kou’s mom with an offer for her restaurant, Kou leaps up to her defence. Yuta tries to hold him back, but Kou grabs a beer bottle and lunges for the agent.
“I’ll kill you!”
Tight frame on the bottle, frozen in the air: Yuta’s hand has intercepted Kou’s swing. They struggle. Yuta tells Kou that it’s a good deal, that his mom will be happy with the money: “A momma’s boy after all?” Enraged, Kou breaks loose and smashes the bottle against Yuta’s forehead. Yuta crumples to the ground. The stunned agent takes one glance at the broken bottleneck in Kou’s fist and flees the scene.
Wide shot: wind blowing through the open door, Kou breathing heavily over Yuta’s body. Long beat. Yuta pops up from the ground — perfectly alright. Without a word, he and Kou do a hilariously elaborate best-friend handshake before bursting into shouts of victory. After recovering from shock, Kou’s mom gives them each a smack on the head.
Perfect execution; perfect ending. Except when Kou and Yuta bring a six-pack to Deko’s encampment to celebrate, Deko and his things are gone. There’s nothing there but the state-installed anti-encampment spikes and an advertisement for The Overpass. The boys hear a noise: the robocop dog emerges from the shadows. In white-hot flashes, it photographs Yuta, then Kou. Then the dog turns to the camera, to us. Flash.
Alt text: Yuta squinting one eye at the camera, captured in white photo-flash.
The final prank is a flawless execution of the rage-to-resolution sequence. Kou performs his line so convincingly that I believe he actually hurts Yuta. I hold my breath as the real estate agent runs away, and release it in a laugh when Kou and Yuta celebrate.
The key thing is that Kou becomes enraged outside the framework of the skit. His anger in the prank is acted out in service of legitimate anger directed elsewhere: at the agent threatening his family, at his own powerlessness. These feelings are harnessed through performance to protect his loved ones. Rage becomes repurposeable energy; the framework becomes a channel.
At this point, other rage-to-resolution narratives would have us lay down our weapons in exchange for healing. But at the end of SUGAR GLASS BOTTLE, as Kou and Yuta stare into the empty space Deko used to inhabit, we’re grimly reminded of their persisting dystopian reality. We’re reminded that there is so much more to be furious about.
As a diaspora, we find ourselves returning again and again to the framework of rage in our stories. My problem with most of these narratives is that they end in resolutions that, in the real world, are not so easily won.
SUGAR GLASS BOTTLE asks us to anticipate dis-resolution. It asks us to believe in the necessity of endurance, to nurture our anger with care, to tend to its flame [to believe it can burn eternal]. It asks us to carry the hot iron of our angst with both hands and wield it like a sword. It turns our attention to the structure of our emotion and suggests that we get to determine its shape. We can revisit the framework with renewed intentions, or we can play beyond it.
There’s this sequence a quarter-way into the film, where Deko shows the boys how to break actual glass bottles. “You know why they call me Deko-chan?” he asks. “The police considered my forehead a weapon because I’d ‘deck’ my enemies with it.” He takes a real bottle—no sugar glass—and crashes it against his head. The camera pans to Kou and Yuta, mouths agape. They burst out laughing. Cue a slow-motion montage: Kou smiles widely as he wields a bottle by the neck; Yuta looks up, glass dusting his hair and a grin splitting his face; Deko shuts his eyes in bliss upon self-inflicted impact.
I feel a thrill every time I think about this moment. The three of them are all victims of the state, and Deko references a larger history of direct conflict with the police. Yet, here they are, breaking real bottles over their heads and smiling, taking the bottle smash out of its otherwise violent terms, its structural climax made banal. As the montage music plays, the acts are just force, just energy. There’s no clear perpetrator or victim; they’re both, they’re neither. They’re laughing.
What if we didn’t abandon our rage after resolution? What if we held it dear? Fuck it, what if we had fun with it? What could possibly be more dangerous to the oppressor?
Alt text: Yuta grinning widely at the camera from a low angle
AFTERWORD
I’m no exception to wanting self-soothing cinema. I reflect on my own angry Asian short films with equal parts compassion and cringe. I can see, so viscerally, what I want. In my latest project, a grandmother lays her hand on her grandson’s chest as he unclenches his fists and learns to cry. This never happened to me in real life, but in actor rehearsals, as I placed my hand on my own chest and breathed, shakily, with the boy, I cried. When I see a child on screen asking, however inarticulately, to be seen by their immigrant parent, I can’t help but choke up. When I see their parent reach back through time, generation, and trauma to hold them, I ache. I’ve tried telling these kinds of stories to bring myself resolution. I know it’s self-indulgent. These narratives are fantasies of what I want, what I need, and what I never had. They aren’t real. But if a child has been denied a certain thing for so long, can’t they indulge? Even if it’s make-believe, can’t I give myself breath?
Yet, there’s also this. Once, on set, I got the chance to chat with a director I’d looked up to for a very long time. In between scenes, we bonded over our experiences as queer children of Chinese immigrants. Shyly, I confessed to him that I was still “in my angry phase.” I didn’t have any other words to describe it. He looked at me for a moment, before replying kindly, “Take your time.” Then, I’d thought he meant that with enough years between the wounds and enough work done on myself, I would find the strength to no longer be angry. Nowadays, I re-interpret his words: take your time with the anger. Slow dance with her. Hold her close.
Yvette Sin is an emerging writer/director based in Tkaronto with a soft spot for diasporic Asian stories, community practice, and genre-bending. Her films have been selected for festivals in Canada and the US, including the National Film Festival for Talented Youth and the Vancouver Asian Film Festival. She currently spends her days at a bookstore in the West End, reading queer horror and scheming up her next project.
IG: @artboysin_
