Charlotte Sometimes

Audience Award, 2002 SXSW Film Festival
Best Narrative Feature, 2002 San Diego Asian Film Festival

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Michael is a mechanic and a man of few words, odd for someone constantly reading them. He lives a simple life of books in an upstairs unit, a quiet interrupted only by the regular, high-pitched sounds of his neighbor Lori having sex downstairs. Soon after, like clockwork, Lori will knock on his door. Every night, they snuggle, platonically pretending. Michael pretends not to love her, and Lori pretends not to know. And every morning, Lori goes downstairs and kisses her boyfriend Justin goodbye. It’s a rhythm that could go on forever until the cagey, amused cipher Darcy enters their lives, turning an already bizarre love triangle into one with mysterious intersections.

With only $20,000, a DV camera, and 14 days, Eric Byler’s breakthrough 2002 feature went on to define an Asian American era of thrillingly independent, intimate, and low budget filmmaking. In the same year as Better Luck Tomorrow’s transgressive high school seniors, CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES gave us steamy, complicated, 20-something Asian Americans prowling around each other’s repressions in a Silver Lake duplex. With a cast of early 2000s cool kids, from Michael Idemoto (director of the 1997 classic Sunsets), Jacqueline Kim (Star Trek Generations, Advantageous), and Eugenia Yuan (Going Home, Revenge of the Green Dragons), Byler’s unhurried and highly personal filmmaking took seriously Asian American sexuality and the depth of our silences in a film that hits harder two decades later.

– Christina Ree