Characters Disappearing

Centerpiece Film, 2025 CAAMFest
Official Selection, 2025 New/Next Film Festival

Manhattan’s Chinatown, 1970s. Mei (Yuka Murakami) and her cousin Chris (Connor Sen Warnick) drift through life while drawn to the mysterious, half-forgotten story of a senior family member, passed down by their grandmother. Meanwhile, Mei’s partner Leonard (Dylan Breaux) injects a fiery radical spirit into the narrative as the historical tide of revolution sweeps through the fractured yet resilient local community.

In his strikingly stylish and visionary feature debut, filmmaker Connor Sen Warnick conjures a world where reality and imagination, history and mythology, the familiar and the strange, overlap and collide. Inspired by true events surrounding Asian American political and arts collectives such as Basement Workshop and I Wor Kuen, CHARACTERS DISAPPEARING interlaces historical detail with poetic realism. The film deciphers the layered atmosphere of Asian American radicalism shaped by the influence of the Black Panther Party, student movements, and global Maoism. Warnick approaches this era with care and curiosity, crafting a bold visual language that pushes the temporal and spatial boundaries of what cinema can accomplish in its engagement with Asian American history.

– Wentao Ma