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Reviews Los Angeles Times
By John Anderson, Special to The Times
"Does any other name scream out 'generic Asian girl' like Grace Lee?" asks director Grace Lee, who embarks on "The Grace Lee Project" in search of what makes Grace Lees tick, what their common name means in the wide, wide world of Asian American womanhood and how one distinguishes oneself in a vast sea of Lees. What she finds is good for her and good for us ? a journey of realization for anyone who's ever felt lost in the crowd.
Lee, who grew up thinking herself unique in Missouri, learned after relocating to New York and California that Asian Americans existed in rather large numbers and that many of them seemed to be named Grace Lee. With good, if begrudging, humor, Lee catalogs the Grace Lees everyone she talked to seemed to know ? all of whom seem to meet a standard set of undistinguished characteristics: They are all smart, petite and "nice."
But in her hunt for other Grace Lees, the director also finds a series of remarkable women, such as Grace Lee Boggs, an octogenarian social activist in the black community of Detroit, and Grace Lee, a pastor's wife who lives the tenets of her faith to the fullest.
Our director, of course, finds in the end that there's a lot to be said for being Grace Lee ? especially when one is in such splendid company.
'The Grace Lee Project'
MPAA rating: Unrated
A Women Make Movies release. Director Grace Lee. Producers Grace Lee, Amy Ferraris. Editor Amy Ferraris. Running time: 1 hour, 8 minutes.
Exclusively at the Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd., at Fairfax Avenue. (323) 655-4010
LA Weekly GO In this delightfully bighearted documentary, Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee goes in search of her own identity by seeking out other owners of the most ubiquitous female moniker on the Asian books, and looks in vain for any evidence to support the persistent notion that all Grace Lees ? and, by extension, all Asian women ? are invariably petite, quiet, intelligent and sweet. Though clearly a feminist, Lee also has an abiding curiosity and openness of mind that allows her to celebrate not only the vibrant octogenarian Marxist Grace Lee, who has worked in poor black communities all her life, or the lesbian activist Grace Lee she finds blazing trails in Seoul, or the Grace who set fire to her high school, but also the Grace-Kelly Graces and the many Christian Graces, including a bunch of P.K.?s (pastor?s kids) who bring an infectious moxie to their calling, and whose certitude Lee envies even as she realizes she?s cut from different cloth. Niftily shot and edited, The Grace Lee Project isn?t just a witty unpacking of stereotype. It?s also a welcome freshening of the old documentary saw that there?s no such thing as an ordinary person. (Ella Taylor) Time Out - New York THE NAME GAME Two amazing Graces (including the director, right) question stereotypes.
This quirky, revealing look at a variety of Asian-American women who all share the same name?a common one for children of Korean and Chinese immigrants?is really a whimsical search for self in a world of maddening sameness. As a youth in Missouri, filmmaker Grace Lee thought she was one of a kind. Years later, she's chagrined to meet people who knew a Grace Lee in high school, especially since most describe a sweet, soft-spoken, studious girl who fits the generic ethnic stereotype. Wondering how she wound up "the one loser in a sorority of super-Asians," Lee sets out to find at least one rebel in this clan of "interchangeable drones," visiting a Honolulu broadcast reporter, an 85-year-old former Black Panther in Detroit and a California pastor's wife, among others.
Weaving her wry, self-deprecating observations ("I suck at piano. I've never had cute hair.") around the personal stories of other Grace Lees?the name's popular for its Christian aura and kinship with Grace Kelly?Lee offers insights into notions of identity, ethnic self-regard and the pressures many Asian-American girls feel to excel and conform. Although her interview subjects come from all walks of life and seem to defy the "statistically average Grace Lee," they share optimism about the future. Lee uses humor to trounce society's lingering Orientalist assumptions?but what's most interesting is how her fear of being a forgettable face in a homogeneous stew of Asian femininity ultimately leads her to a renewed sense of cultural belonging.
?Damon Smith New York Newsday Grace Lees, not a bit ordinary
BY JOHN ANDERSON
John Anderson is a regular contributor to Newsday.
December 16, 2005
"Does any other name scream out 'generic Asian girl' like Grace Lee?" asks director Grace Lee, who embarks on "The Grace Lee Project" in search of what makes Grace Lees tick, what their common name means in the wide, wide world of Asian-American womanhood and how one distinguishes oneself in a vast sea of Lees. What she finds is good for her and good for us - a journey of realization for anyone who's ever felt lost in the crowd.
Lee, who grew up thinking herself quite unique in white-on-white Missouri, learned after relocating to New York and California that Asian-Americans existed in rather large numbers and that most of them seemed to be named Grace Lee. With good, if begrudging, humor, Lee catalogs the Grace Lees everyone she talked to seemed to know - all of whom seemed to meet a standard set of undistinguished characteristics: They were all smart, petite and "nice," the last adjective bugging Lee the most. When she learns of one Grace Lee who tried to burn down her high school, the director almost gets giddy.
But in her hunt for other Grace Lees, the director also finds a series of remarkable women - Grace Lee Boggs, for instance, an octogenarian social activist in the black community of Detroit, who admits she has few of her teeth "but all of my marbles"; Grace Lee, a pastor's wife who lives the tenets of her faith to the fullest; a 14-year-old Grace Lee whose startling artwork reflects both her natural creative spark and the pressures of being an Asian teenager; and a Grace Lee whose extended family includes a mother and children she rescued from an abusive household.
Our director, of course, finds in the end that there's a lot to be said for being Grace Lee - especially when one is in such splendid company.
Copyright ? 2005, Newsday, Inc. The Village Voice Name Game
Lee the people: Filmmaker goes looking for her fellow GLs
by Dennis Lim
December 13th, 2005 2:06 PM
Smartly counterprogrammed opposite the orientalized depictions of Asian femininity in Memoirs of a Geisha, The Grace Lee Project is a breezy first-person video essay that goes in search of the average Asian American woman, all the while wondering if there is in fact such a thing. Early in her documentary, filmmaker Grace Lee points out that almost everyone knows a Grace Lee, and what's more, is inclined to describe her the same way: nice, intelligent, quiet, sweet, studious, sort of forgettable. (Oh, and plays the violin.) Even G.L.'s often think of other G.L.'s?and of themselves?in those non- descript terms. Intrigued and disconcerted by the oppressive commonness of her name?and even more so by the perceived attributes that cling to it?Lee sets out to humanize the sociocultural abstraction and statistical mean that is "Grace Lee."
She traces the fascination with "Grace" among Korean and Chinese Americans of her parents' generation to Grace Kelly, the royal embodiment of marrying well. Religion plays a role, too, with a name that's, as one of the interviewees puts it, wrinkling her nose, "so, like, Christiany." Indeed Lee, not herself devout, discovers a significant subset of P.K.'s ("pastor's kids") among her fellow G.L.'s, one of whom beamingly notes that the desired qualities of the good Christian dovetail nicely with those of the model minority female.
Lee doesn't dig too deeply into the basis of racial assumptions, which she confirms by quizzing people outside Miss Saigon on their views of Asian women (an amusing montage of white men saying "petite"). A more relevant question here is how much these views are internalized or self-fulfilling. On her website, she surveys hundreds of Grace Lees and concludes that the typical G.L. is a five-foot-three, 25-year-old second- generation Korean American living in California, with a master's degree and 3.5 years of piano lessons. She wonders, "Does any other name scream 'generic Asian girl' as much as Grace Lee?" (She does find one similarly alarmed Grace who unfortunately changed her name to Graise.)
Determined to track down rebel exceptions to this "sorority of super Asians," Lee hears of a Grace who attempted to burn down her high school?albeit in a failed bid to destroy her poor grades. She also locates a Korean American woman who moved to Seoul to work for a human rights group and open a lesbian bar?only to later retreat into the closet, to the extent that she appears here under pixelated disguise.
The ostensible thesis?that not all Grace Lees are the same?is easy enough to prove: There's a self-assured Honolulu newscaster, a bubbly San Jose pastor's wife, a Silicon Valley teen who balances piano lessons and voodoo doll?making. The two most remarkable Graces, providing both wild-card complexity and feel-good affirmation, suggest a way beyond identity straitjackets. Forty-something Grace Lee, a hearing-impaired single mother helping to raise a friend's entire abused brood, was adopted from Korea by a white American family that abused her?a woman of seemingly boundless compassion, she has little sentimental attachment to a name assigned to her by the adoption agency. Grace Lee Boggs, an 88-year-old Chinese American activist known in her Detroit community for her work in the black-power movement, suffers less of an identity crisis than her younger counterparts largely because her political awakening predated the Asian American and the women's movements. Everything about this Grace Lee makes you reconsider what is indeed in a name. Her neighbors call her Grace X.
Film Forum pairs the 68-minute Project with Max Kestner's Max by Chance, a briskly digressive half-hour essay in which the Danish director scales his family tree, through hippie parents, back to the eight great- grandparents of whom he is the only great-grandchild. Interjecting whiplash associations and loopy tangents, applying statistical analysis to family history, it's a home movie auto-portrait that keeps looking outward, an ironic, cosmic redefinition of genealogy as chaos theory. The New York Times December 14, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE GRACE LEE PROJECT'
Who Can Grace Lee Be? Personalities Behind a Name
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Are we imprisoned by our names? In her small, witty autobiographical documentary, "The Grace Lee Project," a Korean-American filmmaker named Grace Lee, born in Columbia, Mo., and living in Los Angeles, explores the personal and social ramifications of a name she finds oppressive. All her life, Ms. Lee says at the beginning of the film, she has felt pressure to live up to the qualities that many of the people randomly interviewed in the documentary associate with a name that conjures the kind of precocious high achiever who enters Harvard at 16.
Smart, nice, quiet, accomplished, polite and pure are some of the other positive traits that people tick off when asked to free-associate about the name. But how positive are they really, when many of those asked to remember Grace Lees from high school can't recall them very clearly? Nice, quiet and polite also imply passivity, Ms. Lee reflects: How can these girls be "so impressive and forgettable at the same time?" She flashes on an image of the Grace Lees of the world as "thousands of interchangeable drones."
Determined to find exceptions to the stereotype, Ms. Lee undertakes a computer search for Grace Lees around the world. Among those she meets are a cruise ship singer in the Philippines, a newscaster in Honolulu and Bruce Lee's mother. By this time, she has come up with a composite portrait of Grace Lee: an American-born Korean woman who is 25, lives in California, is 5 feet 3 inches tall, has had three and a half years of piano lessons and probably has a master's degree.
"Are there any Grace Lees out there who actually break the mold?" she wonders. An encouraging lead takes her to San Francisco to look into the story of one who tried to burn down her high school. But it turns out that the girl was trying only to destroy embarrassing records of her disappointing academic performance and created only minor property damage. In another promising lead she meets a former lesbian activist in Seoul, who has retreated from politics and now refuses to be photographed lest she bring shame to her family. We also meet a 14-year-old artist in Silicon Valley, who may fit the conventional image, but who takes out her anger at the pressure put on her in her violent, gory art works.
For many, the name Grace is associated with Christian grace. And we meet more than one Asian-American Grace Lee who is a Christian. Another inspiration, one the filmmaker finds troubling, is the actress Grace Kelly.
One iconoclast stands out. Grace Lee Boggs, a proud, salty community activist in Detroit, who embarked on an interracial marriage in the 1940's, and who was 88 when interviewed for the film and still going strong.
Although "The Grace Lee Project" is ostensibly about a name, it's really about cultural assimilation and a stereotype of virtue and subservience that has deep roots on both sides of the Pacific. As oppressive as her name may be, Ms. Lee also knows full well that there are worse fates than being a 16-year-old Harvard freshman.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
New York Post THE GRACE LEE PROJECT
By V.A. MUSETTO
December 16, 2005 --
Rating: ***
THE GRACE LEE PROJECT
Total running time: 97 minutes. Not rated (nothing objectionable). At the Film Forum, Houston Street west of Sixth Avenue.
MEET Grace Lee. Meet dozens of Grace Lees, all thanks to a Korean-American filmmaker named - would you believe? - Grace Lee.
Director Lee got to thinking about how popular her name is among Asian-American women. Eager to find out more about these like-named folks, she launched a highly unscientific investigation. Luckily for us, she recorded everything in the fun documentary "The Grace Lee Project."
She discovered that there are 2,000 Grace Lees in the United States, mostly in New York and California. The average Grace Lee lives in California, has immigrant parents, is 5-foot-3, has a college degree (often a master's) and studied piano for 3.5 years.
The documentary travels with Lee as she meets some of her name-mates. They include: Bruce Lee's mother; an 88-year-old social activist; and a pastor's wife who preaches to teen girls about the advantages of "second-time virginity."
"The Grace Lee Project" is accompanied by "Max by Chance," a witty documentary in which Danish filmmaker Max Kestner gets to the roots of his family tree.
New York Daily News The Grace Lee Project
At Film Forum (1:37). Unrated.
Though self-centered by its very nature, Grace Lee's chronicle of other women who share her name turns out to be a funny and insightful exploration into identity issues we all can recognize.
From the slender thread of her premise, Lee knits the name Grace Lee into a composite of all Asian women who have been reduced, in many eyes, to the barest of stereotypes. Aiming to determine whether she is destined to be another "conservative high-achiever," she refuses to end her search until she turns up Graces who defy any categorization at all.
Sharing the bill is "Max By Chance," which suffers significantly in comparison. Unlike Lee's project, Max Kestner's genial but superficial autobiography never overcomes its inward-leaning focus on his own, rather uninteresting, family tree.
Elizabeth Weitzman
New York Magazine
Talk about high concept: Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee, curious about the fact that there are so many, sets out to meet women who share her name, toying with cultural stereotypes and various identity crises along the way. Perhaps not as insightful as it wants to be, but ridiculously entertaining nonetheless. TV Guide Online What's in a name? Well, if it happens to be Grace Lee, the name of the L.A.-based Korean-American filmmaker behind this smart, funny and unexpectedly touching video essay, there's quite a lot, and it's all pretty much the same. Everyone Lee meets seems to know at least one Grace Lee ? the name is inexplicably common among Asian women ? and they all use the same terms to describe her: quiet, studious, musically accomplished, and above all, nice in a forgettable sort of way. In other words, "Grace Lee" is just another name for the pervasive stereotype of the typical Asian-American woman. In order to explore ? and hopefully explode ? this cultural cliche, Lee set up a website soliciting personal information from Grace Lees all over the world, and while she met a number of interesting women ? including a successful, Hawaii-based newswoman, as well as Bruce Lee's mother ? Lee was disheartened to form a composite profile that fit the preconception of "perfect sameness." Where were the rebels, the punks, the troublemakers with bad hair who couldn't play the piano and who could help our less-than-perfect Grace Lee identify herself as something other than a generic Other? Lee has a momentary jolt of optimism when she hears about a teenage Grace Lee who recently tried to burn down her high school, but when she gets to San Francisco, she finds a frightened teenager who cracked under the pressure to be perfect, and who desperately tried to destroy her "shameful" school record. But with a little more digging, Lee is able to uncover a number of women who don't fit any kind of mold. Among them is Grace Lee Boggs, an 88-year-old Chinese-American Bryn Mawr grad who became deeply involved in the Black Power movement and has dedicated her life to helping the poor, black community of Detroit. She also meets a 14-year-old Grace from Silicon Valley who, instead of cutting herself like her friends, chooses to express herself through extraordinarily violent artwork. Lee, however, saves the most amazing Grace for last. A Korean-born orphan who managed to escape her abusive adoptive family, she was able to define herself from scratch in the middle of white-bread America. Now, having raised her teenage son on her own, Grace is now sheltering a friend and her four kids from the family's frighteningly abusive father. Through what sounds like a project of unpromisingly limited scope, Lee manages to touch on a surprisingly wide range of subjects, from cultural identity, familial expectations, community responsibility and, above all, self-definition. In the end, it's essentially Lee's journey of self-discovery, but one that enables all of us to see each other in a slightly different way, regardless of our names. ? Ken Fox
NOW magazine - Toronto ASIAN NAME GAME
By GLENN SUMI
THE GRACE LEE PROJECT (Grace Lee) Rating: NNN
Everyone knows someone named Grace Lee. It's the Asian equivalent of Jane Smith, but it comes with a lot more cultural assumptions.
That's what filmmaker Grace Lee finds out as she meets dozens of her namesakes and videotapes them in this entertaining and insightful documentary, part of the Reel Asian Film Festival.
Born to Korean immigrant parents in a small Missouri town, Lee grew up feeling unique as one of the few Asian families for miles. So she was shocked when she moved to L.A. and encountered not only a lot of Asians, but people who recognized her name. The Grace Lee that people remember (but for some reason haven't kept in touch with) is always the same: small, quiet, smart, nice.
So, with the help of a private detective, the filmmaker decides to meet some other Grace Lees and see if the stereotypes hold.
What she discovers is that most of them are straight, single college grads, the children of immigrants. Most have obviously been raised as Christians ? there's even a subset of them called PKs, or "pastor's kids" ? although a few were named Grace because their parents were obsessed with Grace Kelly.
Lee also meets a few iconoclasts. One feisty 88-year-old Grace Lee has devoted her life to activism for the Afro-American community in Detroit, while a 14-year-old overachiever in Silicon Valley has a dark artistic streak that helps her cope with the pressures of teen life.
The filmmaker is exhilarated to discover one Korean-American Grace Lee who moved to Seoul to become a lesbian activist, then let down when the subject requests that her image not be shown because it might bring shame on her American family.
Lee's chatty, ironic narration provides lots of wit. Best of all, she doesn't judge her subjects, resulting in a smart meditation on identity, femininity and cultural assumptions.
And of course one of the funniest gags comes at the end, with thank-yous to the various Grace Lees.
Saturday (November 26), Innis Town Hall.
NOW | NOVEMBER 24 - 30, 2005 | VOL. 25 NO. 13 The Toronto Star THE GRACE LEE PROJECT
Nov. 18, 2005. 11:25 AM
TONY WONG
ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
The Grace Lee Project ***
Directed by Grace Lee, 68 minutes Nov. 26, 6:45 pm. at Innis Town Hall
Grace Lee is smart, polite and Asian. She is about 5-foot-3, likely has a graduate degree, endured 3 1/2 years of piano lessons and has combination skin.
In The Grace Lee Project, L.A.-based Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee explores why so many other Asians share her name and traits. So she sets out on a transcontinental journey to visit as many Grace Lees as possible.
Talking to strangers who once knew a Grace Lee, a disturbing pattern emerges: Grace Lee is a nice, passive study freak who is utterly forgettable, the kind of walking clich? of what a model minority should be. As Lee puts it: "Are all Grace Lees cut from the same cloth? There must be one loser in this sorority of super-Asians." When she finally finds a rebel, a Grace Lee who tried to burn down her San Francisco high school, it turns out that it was in an attempt to destroy her student records after being embarrassed by her academic performance.
The documentary, a feature presentation at the 9th annual Reel Asian Film Festival (Nov. 23-27), is a clever look at the weight of cultural expectations and the crisis of identity, told with poignant wit.
In an attempt to prick the back of cultural clich?s, Lee meets some fascinating namesakes, including a teen Christian activist and an 88-year-old who remains at the forefront of the African-American civil rights movement.
For good measure, there is also Grace Lee the TV news reporter, Grace Lee the L.A. car dealer with her own commercial and the teenaged Grace Lee who makes voodoo dolls of people who piss her off.
I should declare my own bias here, since I can identify with Lee's motivation: about a dozen years ago I wrote a Star feature story about a convention of Wongs in Toronto, and my quest to find as many Tony Wongs as possible.
As the city was in the midst of Wongmania, I preceded to collect dozens of business cards from Tony Wongs around the world.
Lee's flaw is that while she reveals much about her subjects, she reveals little about herself, perhaps hoping that the smorgasbord of Grace Lees she presents will be symbol enough.
Film Threat THE GRACE LEE PROJECT
by Eric Campos
(2005-07-24)
****
2005, Un-rated, 68 Minutes,
As a child, growing up in the Midwest, Grace Lee took pride in being unique, as she was one of the only Asian people in her area. And as far as she knew, she was the only Grace Lee in existence. But a decision to leave home changed all of that.
Moving to New York and then California, Grace received an unexpected lesson. She discovered that she wasn?t the only Grace Lee. What?s more, Grace Lee is a highly common name, kinda like the Jane Smith of Asian females. A bit of a shock there for Grace, but not as big of a shock when she discovered that each and every one of these Grace Lees she bumped into, or heard of, were studious, high achievers and the typical good girl ? character traits that Grace really doesn?t identify with. It?s not that she?s a total slacker, but Grace starts feeling like an outcast from some sort of secret society of which she has the requirements to be a part of. She had to find out what the deal was. Did this name bring about a certain expectation that molded these women into superwomen, or had Grace finally entered the Twilight Zone? She aimed to find out and so began her search for some average Grace Lees, women that didn?t fit the mold.
We?re along for the ride as Grace tracks down and interviews different Grace Lees of various age and walks of life, two of which are a young Christian girl and an elderly social activist who was associated with the Black Panthers back in the day. And this interesting and humorous ride brings a wild variety of Grace Lees, to Grace?s delight and our amusement, providing an informative and heartfelt look, more personal than academic, of a culture and the single bond they all share.
Variety Variety
Posted: Tue., Apr. 12, 2005, 4:44pm PT
The Grace Lee Project
(Docu)
A Lee Lee Films production. Produced by Grace Lee. Executive producer, In-Ah Lee. Co-producer, Amy Ferraris. Directed by Grace Lee. Written by Lee, Amy Ferraris.
By DENNIS HARVEY
Delightful docu "The Grace Lee Project" chronicles the eponymous helmer's quest to discover why so many Asian-American women share her name -- and whether they really embody the boringly "nice" racial stereotype she herself has always loathed. Trivial-sounding hook manages to float a funny but complex meditation on identity, ethnicity and cultural expectations that should be as accessible to teens as adults. Programmers for general as well as Asian-focused fests should take a look; ditto broadcasters and educators.
Without revealing much of her own history, Lee makes it clear she's always been annoyed/intimidated by the existence of so many other G.L.'s. (Prenom is particularly popular in Chinese and Korean-American communities for its associations with both Christianity and all-time WASP goddess Grace Kelly.)
Interviewing various strangers who once knew a Grace Lee, she finds their recollections all too often fit a pattern: The generic Grace is gentle, sweet, a study freak, quiet, liked by all -- and then forgotten by all. In short, a walking cliche of model minority politeness and passivity. Helmer has always felt the pressure to be like these "Super-Asian perfect people." Setting up a Web site to access other G.L.'s, she's deluged by name-alikes worldwide, but particularly in California (there are 314 in Los Angeles alone). Those she tracks down include several of the dreaded all-around good girls, leaving her thrilled to discover one who nearly burned down her high school. (This reformed bad girl, however, declines to be interviewed.)
But other exceptions to the stereotype soon turn up. There's a Los Angeles car dealer with her own TV commercial and a TV news reporter in Hawaii, both likeable extroverts. A 14-year-old Silicon Valley girl is a multi-talented overachiever, but also a baby Goth who hand-crafts voodoo dolls of people who irk her.
Most impressive of all is an 88-year-old Detroit woman who dared an interracial marriage decades ago, becoming a major (and still-active) activist figure in the local African-American community despite her own different ethnicity.
Very cleverly packaged docu utilizes animation, wry graphics and other unexpected diversions to keep things hopping.
Camera (color, video), Jerry A. Henry; editor, Ferraris; music, Woody Pak; animations, Barkada (Ko) Art & Design; sound editor, Ferraris. Reviewed at San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, March 16, 2005. Running time: 68 MIN.
Movie City News Lee eventually wound up studying film at UCLA and work took her to San Francisco and New York where she wasn't so much in the minority. In fact, she began to meet people who grew up with, went to school or had a neighbor named Grace Lee. It developed into a bizarre running gag. It was as if destiny or another unseen force had decreed that anyone sharing her name was nice, studious and played the violin.
"It was a little strange that people seemed to be describing the same person," she says. "But despite the fact that all these people were well liked, no one seemed to know what happened to them. It was as if they existed for a short period of time and then disappeared. I started to fantasize about them and spin these strange scenarios in my head. But it was more amusement than obsession. I was curious about what we shared and what made us different."
In 2002 she directed the fiction short Barrier Device that starred Sandra Oh. The acclaim and attention it received opened a lot of doors and opportunities. And whenever one of her projects got bogged down in the development process she would joke that she was going to go off and do a film about all those Grace Lees she had heard about rather than wait around for financing or casting.
In fact, she had kicked around that idea as far back as 2000. But the diminutive filmmaker seemed to regard it as a slim gag without much to sustain more than a vignette. The very prospect of such a personal documentary seemed narcissistic to a degree that filled her with dread.
"It just wouldn't go away. The idea haunted me and when you have this kernel of an idea in your mind that long, you start to see it develop in a lot of different ways," she observes. "I thought this is about identity. Who am I and who are all these people that share the same name? They can't all be brilliant and forgettable. Some of them have got to be losers."
She credits Grace Lee Boggs; an Asian activist working in the African American community as the person that finally inspired her to make The Grace Lee Project. She began combing through telephone directories and putting out searches on the Internet. It didn't take long for her namesakes to make their presence felt. She'd go out on weekends and film one of the numerous Grace Lees and the process went on for more than a year while she balanced it with work for hire.
Though she interviewed a Mexican American Grace Lee, eventually she chose to focus exclusively on Asians. Several dozen are featured in the film and while they resemble the stereotype on the surface, digging just a little bit uncovered their individuality.
While the process of making and shaping the film obviously provided the filmmaker with some answers and an entertaining and informative film, it wasn't exactly a cathartic experience.
"I think I can move on," she says with a laugh. "This is something that can be discussed endlessly. There was a point where I realized I'd taken it as far as I could and that's when I decided to stop. I knew this had to be told with humor or the points would never come across and if someone wants to pick it up from there I feel the film succeeded."
Austin Chronicle THE GRACE LEE PROJECT
Documentary Feature Spotlight
Growing up in Columbia, Mo., as "the only Asian girl for miles," filmmaker Grace Lee felt "proud to be an original" ? then she moved away and found not only that her name was uncommonly common but that the associations it carried ? "nice," "studious," "soft-spoken" ? epitomized the generic stereotype of the Asian-American female. The Grace Lee Project follows Lee as she tracks down as many Grace Lees as she can, both the "nice" ones and the not so nice, and ends up spotlighting the lives of people so absorbing in their own right ? from a pastor's wife to an 88-year-old activist to a teenager who set her high school on fire ? that you easily forget Lee's original purpose for interviewing them. Her meandering meditation on a name, sometimes personal, other times linguistic or anthropological, and stuffed throughout with little curiosities (the average Grace Lee has taken 3.5 years of piano) results in a documentary filled with personality, humor, and, well, grace.
San Francisco Bay Guardian The Grace Lee Project (Grace Lee, USA, 2005) A natural extension of the stereotypical Western perception of those inscrutible "Orientals" ? "they all look alike anyway" ? The Grace Lee Project finds a Columbia, Mo., filmmaker of the same name tracking down model-minority amazing Graces throughout the country in this humorous and, well, graceful exploration of Asian American women's identity. Digging below typical descriptors like nice, smart, and quiet, the moviemaker happily discovers that Graces are far from predictable as she learns about an octogenarian Chinese American activist in Detroit's black community, a Korean American TV news reporter in Honolulu, and an overachieving firebug who once tried to burn down her S.F. school.
San Francisco Metroactive 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.
RottenTomatoes.com THE GRACE LEE PROJECT
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
So who is Grace Lee really? She is a highly intelligent, quiet, very attractive, unassuming, hard-working and quite intense woman from a Christian family. This description comes from those who know Grace Lee well. Which Grace Lee? All Grace Lees.
In THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, filmmaker Grace Lee explores what it means to have the name Grace Lee, which is one of the most common names of Asian-American women. Growing up in a small town in Missouri, she was the only Asian girl in town, other than her sister, so she had no idea how common her name was. But once she moved to the West Coast, she found Grace Lees wherever she went. And wherever she went, the filmmaker became traumatized by the images of all of those other Grace Lees who seemed to be everything she wasn't.
This hilarious and easily accessible documentary goes in search of the question of whether name is destiny. Since the filmmaker doesn't think she is anything like the mythical Grace Lee, she tries to track down various Grace Lees, using a website to find them and to gather statistics on her namesakes. Statistically, Grace Lee is a heterosexual Californian and a 25-year-old single woman, who has taken 3.5 years of piano training. The name is especially popular among Christian immigrants from Korea and China, but in the 1800s, the name wasn't usually Asian at all. Most Grace Lees back then were of European ancestry.
As she tracks down the various Grace Lees -- including one I am surprised to realize I know -- she finds most of them are pretty close to the description. These people are all to be admired, but the filmmaker wanted to find some Grace Lee rebels. Although she locates some who have broken the mold, none has shattered it as dramatically as an 88-year-old Grace Lee who lives in Detroit. This Chinese-American Grace Lee is a social activist who worked with the Black Panthers and who is still very involved in black community affairs to this day.
Ultimately, the story turns out to be less about a name than a culture. While searching for the average Grace Lee, the filmmaker finds the heart and soul of Asian-Americans. The result is a funny, up-beat film that says a lot without a single preachy or didactic moment. Learning about American subcultures has rarely been this much fun or as informative.
The film was shown as part of the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival (www.naatanet.org/festival), which ran March 10-20, 2005 in Berkeley, San Francisco and San Jose, California.
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