Everyday Lives, Quiet Revelations, and Genre-Bending Joy at SAAFF 2025
Seattle, WA — This year at the Seattle Asian American Film Festival (SAAFF), four standout films invite audiences to find meaning in the mundane, beauty in absurdity, and legacy in the everyday. Whether made in 48 hours or across decades, these works stretch the frame of what it means to tell Asian American stories—sometimes hilarious, sometimes hushed, always human.
In Meaningful Meals by Franco Duerme, a young man reconnects to his culture through cooking and emotional vulnerability. Edibles by Pearl Mei Lam turns a chaotic edible-fueled crisis into a dark comedy that riffs on filial piety and identity. In Taky Kimura: The Heart of the Dragon, a moving documentary portrait honors martial arts legend Taky Kimura and his lifelong friendship with Bruce Lee. And Days After by Daehwan Cho offers a quiet meditation on loss, grief, and mutual respect.
Together, these films explore what it means to be seen—not as a metaphor or political statement, but as people simply living through love, memory, hunger, and humor. Whether steeped in documentary realism or 48-hour absurdism, these films invite us to experience AANHPI life as it unfolds—flawed, funny, and fully human.
Meaningful Meals
Finding Meaning in the Mundane
In Meaningful Meals, filmmaker Franco Duerme explores hunger—emotional, cultural, existential. The protagonist, a minimum-wage worker, seeks something nourishing beyond calories. “I was living alone and was eating frozen and fast food,” Duerme recalls. “I finally got the courage to make Filipino food and thought it would make for a good movie.”
But the film is about more than cooking—it’s about reclamation. “You can find connection to your culture through various means,” he writes. “In this case, food is how I connected with my culture, but the struggle to realize that was the journey.”
The turning point came off-camera: “Having my crew finally eat my parents' food and they realized why the film was important to me, and how good the food was, was very good for me.” With a bowl of something warm and homemade, the ordinary becomes sacred.
Absurdity as Ancestry
Pearl Mei Lam’s Edibles is a dark comedy made in just 48 hours—but its sense of chaos runs deep. “Edibles is about family, a core value in many Asian cultures, and flirts with filial piety,” Lam writes. “But at the end of the day, it’s still about dealing with hitting a pedestrian, Lindsay Lohan style.”
The film is ridiculous by design—but also resonant in its casting and intent. “As a filmmaker, my mission is to give actors the freedom to work beyond identity-driven narratives, while still celebrating diversity,” Lam writes. “The film isn’t about being Asian; we just happen to be Asian—and it’s richer for it.”
The production itself became a memory: “It was probably about 12 hours in—we’re running on no sleep, Tommy’s on the ground with his signature Mounty D, everyone else has a semi-glazed look that says ‘who are you and where am I?’—and I just remember being so incredibly inspired by everyone’s dedication, passion, and talent. It’s why we do this.”
As she reflects on screening at SAAFF, Lam connects the film’s chaotic joy to a deeper purpose: “By centering joy over trauma in our work, I hope PNW audiences can have a taste of Asian American storytelling that is driven by humor and uplifts marginalized voices.”
Legacy in the Letters
If Edibles is a sprint, Taky Kimura: The Heart of the Dragon is a meditation. This documentary chronicles the life of Taky Kimura, Bruce Lee’s best friend and senior student, whose legacy is rooted not in fame, but in loyalty and quiet resilience.
“When I attended the University of Washington, I found out that Bruce Lee was a student,” the filmmaker writes. “That led me down the road of finding out about his first martial arts school, and I inevitably connected with Taky and his son. After training with them for a number of years, I realized this man and his story was so precious that it needed to be told.”
But the film is not about mythologizing Bruce—it’s about recovering what history often leaves out. “Everybody knows who Bruce Lee is, but they don’t know his legacy in Seattle and they truly don’t know the legacy he made in the Asian American community here,” they write. “Bruce was Chinese, and Taky was Japanese. Their bond broke through barriers, and created a community of unity that transcended racism.”
A quiet moment during filming left the deepest mark: “There is a moment when Taky and his son Andy are reading the letters that Bruce wrote to Taky decades ago at the Wing Luke Museum. That moment still stays with me till this day.”
Joy Beyond Explanation
Together, these three films don’t ask to be decoded. They don’t require the audience to bring academic frameworks or perform emotional labor to make them palatable. Instead, they say: here we are. Laughing, cooking, grieving, remembering. In a car chase. At the stove. At the museum.
As Franco Duerme writes, “After retooling the film and finding how and where it fits in to PNW and Asian American [storytelling], I am very happy to see it recognized in the end.”
And as Pearl Mei Lam puts it, “It is an absolute honor to share this at SAAFF… What resonates deeply with me in SAAFF’s mission statement is the commitment to ‘Cultivating Joy.’”
Joy, after all, is not always loud. Sometimes it looks like black licorice in a museum. Or a family recipe eaten by strangers. Or a chaos-filled road trip that ends in catharsis. Sometimes, joy just is.
