I recently heard from filmmaker Ming Lai, whose recently completed short film Journey of a Paper Son is now making the film festival rounds. I've just watched the trailer, and while it's a tad melodramatic, I think it looks like a pretty interesting story. Take a look:
Here's the film's synopsis:
In “Journey of a Paper Son,” an elderly Chinese man (Jack Ong), who’s dying from cancer, shocks his family when he reveals that he’s a “paper son” (one who illegally immigrated to the U.S., using fake documents and claiming he’s the son of an American citizen) and asks them for a final wish to change back his name.Sounds like a timely a film, considering the current debate over immigration reform, as well as last year's landmark bill, approved by the California legislature, apologizing to the state's Chinese American community for racist laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act.
His request threatens to tear apart his family (Patty Toy Chung, Angelina Cheng, Teddy Chen Culver), testing the limits of their love. He forces them to question who he really is and even their own identities. Meanwhile, his doctor (Mario Cortez) desperately tries to save him.
We discover that the dying man is just one of countless "paper sons" who were born from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first federal law to restrict immigration to the U.S. based on race or nationality. Recently, the California legislature approved a landmark bill—ACR 42—on July 17, 2009 to apologize to the state's Chinese American community for racist laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act.
I'm also quite interested in seeing Journey of a Paper Son because I was a big fan of Ming Lai's previous short film Pawns of the King. For more information about both films, including Paper Son's upcoming screenings, go to the Humanist Films website here.