They also trained him, Ahn says, to look for “healing, perspective, and distance” in his work.ĭespite the uneasy tranquility with which he infuses his films, Ahn excels in intense situations. These experiences in spaces meant for queer people of color helped shape the ways his characters search for community. He would eventually come out to his parents via Dol (First Birthday). It’s in these spaces that he can engage directly with an audience for whom his work, and his specific perspective, is deeply resonant.Īhn came out to himself and his friends in college and spent his early queer youth in gay Asian American spaces, like pan-Asian queer organizations and support groups. The Asian American and queer film festival circuit have had a monumental impact on Ahn as an artist and filmmaker. “And partially because I was like, You’re missing the ending of my movie!” Well, save for one moment when he was showing his CalArts thesis film Dol (First Birthday) at an Asian American Film Festival.Īt the screening, one Asian American audience member hid his face during the film’s final moments, which show a gay Asian couple embracing behind a frosted glass door, and then muttered to his friend, “Ugh.” But as a person, Ahn doesn’t consider himself that confrontational. The approach Ahn developed to cinematic confrontation is unusual and subversive in a distinct way, less bombastic than Denis or, another film he cites, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen rather it’s reminiscent of something being unlocked, an awkward truth pressing up through one’s pores, breaking the skin. “It wasn’t about escapism, it was about confrontation.”
“You have to engage with them they challenge you,” he recalls. Watching films like one-take arthouse film Russian Ark and Claire Denis’ homoerotic fever dream Beau Travail revealed to Ahn that movies could be “literary, in a way.” His tastes have changed since his childhood, notably after his first film class at Brown University taught him that cinema could be a form of expression, an artistic practice, and ultimately a career. We went through an Attack of the Killer Tomatoes phase.” “I was very fortunate to have an older brother who was really obsessed with films. My parents are immigrants, and I wasn’t getting it necessarily directly from them,” he says.
“That was a big part of my kind of education into American culture. This ritual performed double duty, giving Ahn a cinematic education and an American one, too. Ahn grew up in a film-loving family, renting three or four VHS tapes to watch over a single weekend.