Take Out

Official Selection, 2004 Slamdance Film Festival
Best Film, 2004 Nashville Film Festival
John Cassavetes Award Nominee, 2009 Independent Spirit Awards

Co-directed by scrappy newcomers Shih-Ching Tsou (LEFT-HANDED GIRL) and Sean Baker (Anora, Tangerine), TAKE OUT is the quintessential indie passion project that became a modern classic. Made for $3000 in an actual working Chinese restaurant, with unknown Asian American actors and an ear to the cacophony of the Manhattan streets, Tsou and Baker electrified the screen with the story of the everyday bike-riding young men delivering Chinese food.

Jostling through stairwells and streets is Ming Ding, an undocumented immigrant feeding a wife and child in China while fending off merciless loan sharks who prey on newcomers with everything to lose. He has one day to come up with the money, so he needs every tip he can make in an endless string of food deliveries. There’s no room for error. Not the rain, a flat tire, or mixed-up orders will stand in his way, and Tsou and Baker’s MiniDV camera flies forward with him, tracking him through long lenses, zooming in as he whips through city spaces, soaking in the stir-fry grease splatter and the smell of broccoli chicken.

With each delivery opens up another corner of Manhattan. Luxury apartments and run-down projects. People with dogs or babies. Hungry New Yorkers in the middle of arguments, bad days, showers, or recording sessions. All connected through the undocumented Chinese worker living in post-9/11 Homeland Security America. TAKE OUT is too spontaneous, too off-the-cuff to realize it was making a definitive portrait of labor and immigration in the US, but looking back in the rearview to 2004 from a collaborative career still racing forward, it marked the riveting opening statement from two key chroniclers of the American underclass.

– Brian Hu