The critically acclaimed novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese comes to
The critically acclaimed novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese comes to the big screen in director Shimon Dotan’s new film starring Ryan O’Nan, Gillian Jacobs, and Leonardo Nam this weekend! Set in New York City in 1980, WATCHING TV tells of three students from China learning about America through meeting local neighbors and watching lots of television.
Three Chinese students, Tzu (James Chen), Wa (Keong Sim) and Chen (Leonardo Nam) come to study in America in the summer of 1980. They move into a New York City apartment next door to Dexter (Ryan O’Nan), a graduate student who introduces them to Suzanne (Gillian Jacobs), his occasional girlfriend and to Billy (Michael Esper), a struggling filmmaker. The Chinese find America fascinating. However, their perceptions, based on watching non-stop television, change when one of them is brutally mugged, when Suzanne takes up with Chen behind Dexter’s back, and when Zap (Peter Scanavino), Suzanne’s ex boyfriend, stalks them into a state of terror. When on December 8, 1980 John Lennon is murdered, the Chinese students decide to buy a gun for self-defense.
Dotan, whose past films have won Sundance’s Special Jury Prize, Berlin’s Silver Bear, and numerous Israeli Film Academy Awards, is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches Political Cinema at New York University.
Never before, has a film captured the grad school interaction of our Asian brothers in American setting.
The movie will be showing at Big Cinemas Manhattan in NYC this weekend and possibly more later. For information, please visit www.roamfilms.com