As part of celebrating the 20th anniversary of Better Luck Tomorrow, MilkTea are spotlighting the next generation of ESEA directors in the UK. Learn more about them here.
Spotlight on ESEA Directors
Jessica Yu-Li Henwick
Jessica is a Eurasian director, writer and actor born in Surrey. She was raised on a steady diet of Singaporean food and fantasy books, and to her father's dismay dropped out of school when she was seventeen. Her directorial debut is the BAFTA longlisted Bus Girl is currently on the festival circuit, where won the Audience Award and Best Narrative Short at the Birmingham Film Festival and Coronado Film Festival, respectively. Jessica is the recipient of the Mary Pickford Prize for female filmmakers and last year she was named The Hollywood Reporter's Rising Star and Variety's Top 10 to Watch. She can currently be seen in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix.
What does Better Luck Tomorrow mean to you?
Credit where credit is due, Better Luck Tomorrow changed the industry for ESEA creatives. Both on screen and off it. To this day, it remains one of the most unflinching portrayals of Asian American suburban life.
Why should people be watching more ESEA cinema?
ESEA cinema is providing some of the freshest takes on storytelling at the moment. I feel like the onus to follow the hero's journey and "save the cat" has taken over American cinema. There's a reason -- it works -- but to the well-versed cinema-goer it can become quite predictable. ESEA cinema has a way of watching me off guard. Chungking Express defies our structural expectations, and yet it is one of the most engaging and effective pieces of storytelling I've ever seen.
What is your favourite bit of filmmaking?
The initial stages, where everything is just creativity.
What compelled you to make Bus Girl?
Everyone kept bugging me about when I was going to start directing! I figured it was time to take a leap of faith.
What are you working on now?
Getting my pilot script to survive the WB merger.
Watch the Bus Girl trailer here and a behind-the-scenes video here.
Mika Watkins
Mika Watkins is a Welsh-Japanese writer who created and executive-produced the hit YouTube premium series Origin, an original sci-fi series. She has written an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix horror anthology series Cabinet Of Curiosities directed by Catherine Hardwicke and was part of the room for Charlie Brooker's Netflix series, Black Mirror. Mika recently directed her first short film, Don't Forget, with backing from Sony and Film4.
Why should people be watching more ESEA cinema?
ESEA cinema has a flavour, perspective and style that I consider to be incredibly distinctive. As someone who grew up primarily in the UK, watching films from Japan and Korea always felt like coming home - but also pushed me to broaden my mind when it came to filmmaking. There is a boldness to the way ESEA cinema takes on horror, genre and action, and I absorbed all of that hungrily, and with great admiration. I believe those conventions are starting to penetrate the Western consciousness in a major way, and I hope to see more and more ESEA cinema move front and centre in this country over the coming years. It feels like the world is finally recognising that ESEA has a place in the commercial not just the indie space, and is worthy of great accolades and awards.
What is your favourite bit of filmmaking?
I am, and always will be, a writer first, because I love creating worlds in my own head and putting them into another's through the power of words. However, I have utterly fallen in love with directing over the past few years. Getting to steer the process of transforming the page to screen is both humbling and hugely fulfilling. I think I mainly just love collaboration, be it talking through a character with an actor, or envisioning a physical space with a production designer. It's always about creation and collaboration.
What compelled you to make Don’t Forget?
Don’t Forget was a very personal story for me - about my mother, and her mother, and the dementia that haunts our family. I've always loved J-Horror, and wanted to create a tale about a very important, universal topic through the prism of an ESEA convention. I'd also made a lot of television prior to that point, and had started to wish for more creative control over the film or episode itself once I'd written it. Don’t Forget was an utter dream. I loved every second of it.
What are you working on now?
I have a returning rom-com set in Tokyo with Netflix, and I'm developing a limited western about the Chinese migration into California during the Gold Rush. I have a movie with Focus and Film4 about a true crime that took place in Japan in the 90's, and I'm currently penning a feature that I can direct - an unconventional love story with a fun dance aspect. Admittedly, I am drawn back to ESEA topics again and again, but for me, it's always about the idea at the core, and the characters that can populate a universe. We really do have the best jobs in the world!
Lydia Rui
Lydia Rui is an award-winning Chinese Australian writer/director based in the UK. She is a recent NFTS MA Directing Fiction graduate, with support from Screen Australia Enterprise and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. She grew up between mainland China, Hong Kong, Australia, and Singapore, moving between different familial structures, before graduating with a BFA in Film & TV from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her short films as writer and director have screened at Academy and BAFTA-qualifying festivals such as Tribeca Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Flickerfest International Short Film Festival, and Vimeo Staff Picks.
What is your favourite bit of filmmaking?
There is so much I love about filmmaking, but I probably love most its collaborative element, the ingenuity that leads from that collaboration, and the shaping of narratives and characters then immortalised in the vehicle of film. I just can’t get over the magic of having a vision and then having it materialise and improved upon through the minds, eyes, hands, ears, bodies of a team of people. I had wandered through the ‘Hall of Arts’ looking for my calling and found it at last in film: it wove everything together, took everything that could otherwise be a solipsistic venture, and made it a cohesive whole. It was a bridge for me. I found my first community in film. And likewise, the-watching-of the film itself is a real sanctuary for me.
What compelled you to make your short films?
With This Perfect Day I was living in the same city as my father for the first time in almost two decades. We hadn’t seen each other since I was a child, and I wondered if he would recognise me. The film explores an imaginary encounter between estranged father, John, and his teenage child, Jules. It was an opportunity to play with audience expectation and tension. The film was very contained, for the most part one location, with the meat of it shot in one day. It came together quickly, and I edited it myself within a week. It was an achievable way to make a film, collaboratively, passionately, and economically. Virile on the other hand, albeit still personal, was a challenge to myself to be more audacious and ambitious. I wanted to tell a story of scale and at length.
What are you working on now?
I’m developing several feature length narrative film projects. One is not dissimilar in tone to This Perfect Day, a gritty coming of age, and another is an adaptation of my recent short, Virile, a sci-fi psychological thriller, and another is a psychological horror, called The Island.
Watch This Perfect Day here and a trailer for Virile here.
Chris Chung
Chris Chung is a British director and writer with a focus on comedy-led projects. His first short film Handuken was a finalist in the Virgin Media Shorts and premiered in the BFI IMAX and was shown in cinemas and Tivo nationwide. The short garnered several international awards and was longlisted for a BIFA. Following this, Chris and his team produced TV pilot Wok which became a two-time Debbies Test Card finalist at the prestigious Edinburgh TV festival. When the pilot debuted online it was heralded by Justin Lin’s YOMYOMF as ‘UK’s answer to Fresh Off the Boat’’. Chris was then selected Directors UK: Challenge Alexa, where he wrote, directed and choreographed his martial arts action-comedy proof of concept Soho Jimbo in just two days. The proof of concept went on to be selected for the Academy and BAFTA qualifying festivals Raindance and Bermuda.
What does Better Luck Tomorrow mean to you?
Better Luck Tomorrow represents to me in many ways the beginning of American Asian cinema. I recall the infamous festival screening where the filmmakers were challenged by someone in the audience who didn’t come from the community, nor a person of colour, lecturing them on the portrayal of American Asians on what he felt was framing these people in a negative light. Where actually the filmmakers were framing the characters in a coming of age story. This must have been the first time I saw people who looked like me, that was just human beings having an experience, going against the grain of the model minority, it was an incredible and inspiring experience.
What is your favourite bit of filmmaking?
I love the whole process from inception to completion, however, if I had to choose, my favourite part of filmmaking must be the collaborative relationships forged. I love meeting and working with like-minded creatives who share the same enthusiasm for stories and entertainment and being the connective tissue between the various departments.
What compelled you to make Congee?
During the pandemic I felt frustrated by the way people from our community were being treated. It also became increasingly difficult to work on my craft. As I was catching up with a friend who is an actor that managed a Vietnamese restaurant in central London, we got talking about our aspirations to produce something in the future, which eventually led us to agreeing to shoot a short film with whatever resources available to us. I wanted to use food as a way of talking about race, identity and assimilation against the backdrop of the pandemic which led me to write the script for Congee. I wanted to show characters from our community that were not the stereotype, and with actors that could channel their experiences into the characters, characters that each had a difference of opinion in how to deal with their circumstances.
What are you working on now?
I am currently in pre-production to direct season two of East Mode with Nigel Ng for Comedy Central. Parallel to this, I have recently finished development with BFI on my debut feature film with producers Babak Anvari and Lucan Toh of Two&Two Pictures. I am also in development with Bound Entertainment on an action-comedy television show. I am attached to both projects as writer and director.
Watch Chris’s work here.
Insook Chappell
Insook was born in South Korea but raised in England. She studied dance in New York at the Alvin Ailey School before moving into acting. Her first play This Isn’t Romance was produced at Soho Theatre after winning the Verity Bargate Award. It also enjoyed a sell-out Korean production at the National Theatre Company of Korea. Recent theatre includes P’yongyang (Finborough Theatre), The Free9 (National Theatre Connections), Mountains (Royal Exchange Theatre and National Tour). Insook was a member of the National Theatre’s Musical Theatre Group 2019. She is a graduate of the BBC Drama Writers Program and is currently developing two original TV projects and contributing to 1000 Blows for Disney+ She has just shot her third short film, 굿 Kut, with the support of the BFI and is developing her first two feature films as writer-director with the BFI.
Why should people be watching more ESEA cinema?
Because there is so much exciting work. It’s a big world out there and as a film like Parasite proves, you can tell a very culturally specific story that resonates throughout the world. The best work always has a universality about it.
What is your favourite bit of filmmaking?
Collaborating with brilliant, rigorous and passionate people who support and question the initial idea and make it bolder and deeper by bringing in their individual talent and flair. Be that the producer, actors and creative team. I love that spark when someone suggests something I hadn’t thought of and it’s brilliant and unexpected. Although there’s quite a lot of stress involved I do think that making a film should be a joyful collective experience where everyone is able to do their best work within the parameters of time, budget etc.
What compelled you to make 굿 Kut?
굿 Kut is a proof of concept short for a feature that I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a ghost story set in the world of contemporary opera but also a coming of age of a young Korean woman reconnecting to her shamanic bloodline and realising how powerful she is. With 굿 Kut I have attempted to distil these elements, the look, feel and sound into six or seven minutes.
Sonoya Mizumo and Noriko Sakura in Mika Watkin’s Don’t Forget
Michelle Keating in Lydia Rui’s This Perfect Day
Chris Chung’s Soho Jimbo
Insook Chappell