In Conversation - Celine Song and Adele Lim

Writer-directors Celine Song and Adele Lim on telling stories that reflect the compexity of asian identity, the power of perseverance, and breaking new ground

This past summer, two movies exploring facets of the Asian-American experience hit theaters. Both arrived by way of female filmmakers marking their feature-directorial debuts. Both drew critical acclaim, but they couldn't be more different.

Writer-director Celine Song's Past Lives, starring Greta Lee, is a semiautobiographical indie from art-house outfit A24 about a Korean-American New Yorker (Lee) whose marriage begins to buckle under the weight of the past when her childhood crush (Teo Yoo) visits from South Korea. The movie is an intimate drama that unfurls bilingually through English and Korean in subdued tones on Skype, huddled over bar countertops, and in the enclosed rooms of a Manhattan apartment.

Adele Lim's Joy Ride is not what you'd call intimate - unless you're referring to the many raunchy jokes and gags and elaborate comic set pieces that revolve around its ensemble's sex lives. Lim's spin on a road-trip comedy follows a woman who was adopted as a child (Ashley Park), whose friends join her on a journey to China in search of her birth parents. Here, too, there is a touch of autobiography. Lim and the movie's cowriters, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, wanted to create a gang of raucous onscreen friends who reminded them of their own.