The Transformers

Abstract

Research Article| June 01 2023 The Transformers: How Chan Is Missing Led to Better Luck Tomorrow Led to Everything Everywhere All at Once Renee Tajima-Peña Renee Tajima-Peña Renee Tajima-Peña is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who has chronicled the Asian American experience as showrunner/series producer of Asian Americans, producer/director of Who Killed Vincent Chin? and My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, and co-founder of the May 19th Project. Her films have screened at Cannes, New York, Sundance and the Whitney Biennial. She was founding faculty of the UC Santa Cruz Social Documentation Grad Program and is a professor and endowed chair of Asian American Studies at UCLA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 32–34. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.32 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Renee Tajima-Peña; The Transformers: How Chan Is Missing Led to Better Luck Tomorrow Led to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 32–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.32 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search During the past forty years in Asian American cinema there have been three premieres that took my breath away: Chan Is Missing in 1982. Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002. Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022. Twenty years apart, all signaled that the earth had shifted on its axis and the creative landscape of Asian America was on a collision course with the old, retrograde images of the past. Something gloriously new and essentially Asian American was on the horizon. Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, about two San Francisco cabbies on the hunt for their missing friend and their missing four thousand dollars, was the first. I was just out of college and working as the first paid staff person at New York’s Asian Cine-Vision, back in a time when a clueless twenty-one-year-old could run an Asian American arts center. ACV put on the Asian American International Film Festival,... You do not currently have access to this content.