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Review in the Los Angeles Times

"...a documentary about Asian-American women named Grace Lee, which is as funny and offbeat as it sounds."

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What's in a name?

Just got back from Grace Lee's "The Grace Lee Project," a documentary about Asian-American women named Grace Lee, which is as funny and offbeat as it sounds. Growing up in predominantly white Missouri, filmmaker Lee thought her name and ethnicity set her apart from the crowd. After moving to California, she discovered that just about everyone she knew knew another Grace Lee. It's one of the most common Asian-American names around. Once she started asking around, Lee discovered that every one of these other Grace Lees, even the one who tried to set her San Francisco high school on fire, seemed fit a certain stereotype which Lee herself did not, exactly: The nice, studious, dutiful, soft-spoken, accomplished good girl who'd gone through 3.5 years of piano lessons.

Enlisting the help of a private detective, Lee set out to meet as many Grace Lee's as she could, in part to see if she could find a real rebel among them. This she did, in the person of 90-year-old Grace Lee Boggs, affectionately known in her Detroit community as Grace X, for her lifetime of activism in the African-American community. Boggs is the most colorful personality in Lee's documentary, but other Grace Lee's include an Asian-American lesbian activist who relocated to Seoul and spearheaded the gay rights movement there, only to change her mind three years later to avoid upsetting her parents. There's also the single mother Grace Lee, one of the only Grace Lee's in her 40s, who helped get her friend out of an abusive relationship and now shares a household with her and her family. At first it's unclear why she would risk her own safety and her son's-- until she reveals that she herself was abused by her adoptive parents.

Lee's first feature documentary, "The Grace Lee Project" (which screens again Tues., June 21 at 9:30 PM at the Laemmle Sunset 5), is a fascinating portrait of second-generation immigrants, and the stereotypes that dog them, told with humor and insight.

Posted by Carina Chocano at 06:44 AM | Comments (0)