Recently out on DVD is “Take Out”. You may remember this movie on the Asian American film festival circuit a few years back. The film is about the story of a young Chinese immigrant who rides silently through the dark rain soaked streets of Manhattan and comes face to face with countless apartment dwellers who simply see him as an anonymous and faceless delivery boy. (Kind reminds us of Asian Americans and Poverty in NYC.) Here’s a synopsis:

Korean-American actor Charles Jang is the main star in Take Out. He plays Ming Ding, a Chinese illegal immigrant who works as a deliveryman at a take-out restaurant and is struggling to make ends meet. Ming is behind with payments on his huge debt to the smugglers who brought him to the United States, and the collectors have given him until the end of the day to deliver the money that is due. After borrowing most of the money from friends and relatives, Ming realizes that the remainder must come from the day’s delivery tips. In order to do so, he must make more than double his average daily income.

The gritty film style uses the camera to follow Ming on his deliveries throughout the upper Manhattan neighborhood where social and economic extremes exist side by side. You really feel for Ming Ding as he tries to make money on his deliveries. The film makes you realize how difficult it is for illegal immigrants to survive in America. Filmmakers Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker, who between them wrote, directed, produced, shot and edited the film, have been winning awards and receiving glowing reviews wherever the film has screened.

Get Take Out on DVD at Amazon.

Take Out Trailer

Treeless Mountain has been on the Asian American festival circuit last year and this year including the closing night film for the 2009 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and 2009 Chicago Asian American Showcase as well as the centerpiece film for the 2009 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Now it’s available on DVD. Here’s the synopsis:

When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, six year-old Jin and her younger sister, Bin, are left to live with their Big Aunt for the summer. With only a small piggy bank and their mother’s promise to return when it is full, the two young girls are forced to acclimate to changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, the two bright-eyed young girls eagerly anticipate their mother’s homecoming. But when the bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, Big Aunt decides that she can no longer tend to the children. Taken to live on their grandparents’ farm, it is here that Jin comes to learn the importance of family bonds in this beautiful, meditative, and thought-provoking second feature from So Yong Kim, the acclaimed director of IN BETWEEN DAYS.

Treeless Mountain is director So Yong Kim’s second feature film. The script received support from the Cannes L’Atelier Program, the Sundance Institute’s Writers and Directors Labs, and the Pusan Promotional Program. It is inspired by events from the director’s early childhood in Pusan, Korea. Her mother divorced her father and left her with the grandparents on a rice farm. Her mother immigrated to America in order to find a better life for herself and to build a future for her children. At the time of these events, So Yong Kim was too young to understand and her mother did not tell her what was happening. The director began writing the film to search for certain lost memories from this period of her life and also as a letter to her mother.

Buy Treeless Mountain on DVD at Amazon.

Treeless Mountain Trailer