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| Direct Hit: Greg Pak and actor Sab Shimono. |
Greg Pak’s lovely, low-key
science-fiction film has more in common with the short
stories of Ray Bradbury than the pyrotechnics of
George Lucas. Composed as a quartet of expertly acted
chapters, the film’s a smart evocation of love
in the near-future, told through a widower’s
grief, a mother’s anxiety, a family’s
tragedy, and a robot’s confusion. (1
hr. 25 mins.; NR)
— BILGE EBIRI AND LOGAN HILL
Spotlight: Greg Pak
Sitting in his cramped downtown office, NYU alum Greg
Pak is wedged between a makeshift digital-editing
station and a messy stack of posters for his film
Robot Stories. “It’s an
Asian-American science-fiction anthology
picture,” says Pak, using market lingo to
describe a genre-defying quartet of stories set in the
cubicles, bedrooms, and hospital halls of the near
future. “Those are selling hooks to
me—science fiction, Asian-American—but
traditional distributors just wouldn’t know what
to do with that.” So after hustling the often
heartbreakingly romantic film through more than 50
festivals, he’s distributing it himself,
persuading small theaters like Cinema Village to take
a chance on it. “Some people are more picky
about pacing their premieres and all that,” says
Pak, who hit South by Southwest, Slamdance, and the
Hamptons, and then everything else. “We opened
the floodgates. Every time we played a festival,
I’d collect e-mails—now we’ve got
thousands.” He’s booked the film in cities
like Boston and L.A.—even Tucson. “Part of
the idea is to try to get the film into places where
there aren’t many Asian-Americans, to give
people an alternative to all the garbage about how
Asians are represented.” That ambition’s
part of Pak’s cherished pet
project—another twist on a familiar genre.
Rio Chino, he says, will be “a
straight-up Western romance about a Chinese gunslinger
and a Mexican heroine.
Opens February 13 at Cinema Village, 212-924-3363
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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