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Review in San Jose Metroactive

"Project is quirky, funny and interesting. "

Amazing Grace
'The Grace Lee Project' explores the individuals among the ubiquitous
By Todd Inoue

IN THE Asian American community, the name Grace Lee is as commonplace as John Smith. Growing up the only Korean-American for miles around in Columbia, Mo., Grace Lee thought she was something special until she moved to Los Angeles?where everyone knew a Grace Lee who fit a basic description: nice, Christian and smart.

Not content to be sentenced to stereotype, Lee's obsession with other Grace Lees living parallel lives led the filmmaker to set up a website (www.gracelee.net) and survey. A composite began to form: the typical Grace Lee was a young, single, second-generation Korean-American woman with 2.5 years of piano lessons and combination skin. But among the prototypes were a few doozies, and Lee spent three years documenting the lives of other Grace Lees around the world. The 52-minute film?The Grace Lee Project?receives its West Coast premiere March 19 during the San Jose stop, at Camera 12, of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

Project is quirky, funny and interesting. Lee examines her own history and questions the scrutiny of being a reluctant inductee into a "sorority of super Asians." This opens the door to a wide range of Grace Lees whose common denominators are name and Asian heritage. There are sidebars about the popularity of Grace Kelly among first-generation parents and the ubiquity of the word "grace" in Korean culture.

"I always knew that this wasn't a conventional social-issue documentary, that it would be structured more like an essay or investigation," Lee writes, by email, from Korea, where she's working on a new movie, Smells Like Butter, starring Sandra Oh of Sideways. "I like films and media that take a very specific, seemingly banal item and then enlarge your perspective."

The film analyzes some standouts among the worldwide Grace Lee community: an 88-year-old community activist in Detroit, a 14-year-old from Cupertino who plays piano and paints dark pictures, a San Jose preacher's wife, a San Francisco student who tried to burn down her high school, a Honolulu television reporter, a lesbian rights activist in Seoul, a Koreatown car saleswoman and a Sacramento woman who helped a friend and her family escape domestic abuse. Much like This American Life, The Grace Lee Project moves with poignant, conversational, er, grace, focusing on the emotional story rather than the informational one, while always stopping for self-deprecating humor. It's a delicate balance that Lee accomplishes, considering the personal subject matter.

"The challenge of making a film called The Grace Lee Project when you are actually a Grace Lee yourself was quite eye-opening," Lee writes. "There's always the question of how much of yourself do you put in. Even though I am not in the film that much, I think the Grace Lees I chose either speak for me sometimes, or say something about who I am."

The Grace Lee Project, preceded by Top Woman Shooter, screens at 7:15pm on Saturday (March 19) at the Camera 12 Cinemas.

Read the review at Metroactive.com