Two teenage boys haul an entire desktop computer across a park in the first image of Frank Sun’s remarkably deft and emotional short, We Are Kings. You feel the weight of that monitor–remember how big they used to be? Set in 2001, Sun’s film is many things all layered on top of one another. It’s the story of growing up and how we reach that moment where we feel embarrassed by our parents even if they do everything in their power for our well-being. It’s a story of how one young man realizes that he will always be tethered to his identity no matter how much he resists it. It’s also a story about how we interact with a crush.
Lin and Walid traipse across the park to a Chinese restaurant (where Lin’s mother works) so they can use the internet and pirate some DVDs. When Lin’s crush, Amber, steps into the restaurant, his anxiety soars when he realizes that he could actually hang out with her. He takes a chance and accepts an invitation to ride with her and her friend, Mark, to Taco Bell. There is so much going on below the surface, and Sun was inspired by his own life to tell this story.
“The inspiration is really about me growing up with kids in the South,” Sun says. “It’s such an interesting environment to be in North Carolina in an immigrant community, which happens to be in a poor neighborhood. The projects were right around us, and I kept thinking about how we were in our little cocoon of what we felt, emotionally, is a safe neighborhood. I really wanted to capture that feeling of what it is like to be around your friends, your family, your homies, and the people that love you but then not knowing how to ask for love. And not knowing how to receive it because you are trying to assimilate to something that you’re not apart of, thinking that it might be better for your or thinking that might be what you’re supposed to do as an immigrant. You find out the thing that you have in your life is actually what’s keeping you who you are and keeping you close to your identity and your roots.”
“I felt something from that opening scene when I read the script,” Aharoni says. “It felt original, unconventional, and fresh. After reading so many types of short film scripts from people, I want to be excited, and this really floored me with its theme of belonging. No matter which way you slice it, everyone wants to feel like [that], so that felt very universal. No matter what the intricacy of the story, I wanted to champion its authenticity.”
Lin and his mother, Jeri, only share screentime in the beginning and end of the film, but you feel that connection throughout. When Lin agrees to hang out with Amber and Mark, he is probably wondering what his mother thinks about him leaving Walid behind.
“I was talking at a Q&A after a screening and people were asking about important themes,” Sun says. “The mother in our story, even though a quiet character who is not on screen all that much, she is like the gravity of the entire piece, in a way. She’s pulling Lin emotionally towards her, even when she’s not on screen. No matter what our relationships are with our parents, it’s always going tobe present in our lives. It can create guilt or it can create tenderness, or it can create any kind of range of emotions in a dynamic way.”
When you are telling a story based on your life, casting can be tricky. You have to look at the story told on the page without being too caught up in the memories of yourself in the process. At the same time, you have to see yourself in someone in order for you to have that immediate shorthand and bond to trust them with your feelings and thoughts. With Kings, the casting felt very instinctual.
“For Lin, it’s a very particular balance of drama with the scope of it with the quirkiness but also not forget how young he is,” Aharoni says. “When we were discussing different actors, I had auditioned Kenny [Ridwan] for another role in another film, but he always stuck in my mind–he brings all these subtleties really, really well. Frank really dug him after watching a few things, so I reached out to him and he hit it off with Frank pretty immediately.”
“Kenny has this mischievousness about him that comes through, and he doesn’t have to say a lot,” Sun says. “He told me that he thought I wrote him into the character, so we vibed on how similar we are in terms of personality. Mahi [Alam] and Caleb [Kenin] came through Beth Melsky, and she is really generous in dipping her toes into narrative and helping filmmakers find the right person. The character of Amber was the hardest one to find. We read so many people, but nothing felt right–it was either the chemistry was off of the performance didn’t capture what we were looking for. Jade Spear’s headshot came to me, and something about it struck me. We were about four or five days away from shooting and we still hadn’t picked someone yet, and when she came onto the Zoom, something about the way she moved telegraphed through the screen. Kenny and I were texting on the side, and we both agreed that she felt right.”
Lin and Amber can connect in the car, because Mark is the one driving. She sits on her knees, a joint between her fingers, as she asks Lin if his mother worked at the Chinese restaurant. ‘She seems kind,’ she tells him after they shotgun some weed, and Lin realizes that he might be too shy when it comes to questions about himself.
“The subtext there, for me, is that Lin has a crush on a girl that he thinks would not accept him because of his mother’s employment at that restaurant,” Sun says. “Instead, she actually embraces him because of that, so it turns everything around because Lin thinks that she is going to make fun of him. In the feature script, that character comes from a similar home because I really want to use comedy to sort of bridge the immigrant community and the American community to there’s much crossover that people aren’t willing to open up about. Characters can share so much, and poverty is what bonded so many of us across North Carolina in that neighborhood. We were friends with everybody when I grew up. There were Black kids, Latino kids, Vietnamese kids–we were friends because we were all poor. It didn’t matter the background.”
Is there a a more immediate connection between Amber and Lin? Does she pine for him in the same way he crushes on her? When Mark says he wants to shotgun too, Amber tells him that he can smoke himself, and Sun cuts to his eyes in the rearview mirror. Sun reveals that the choice was thematic but also practical.
“Caleb couldn’t drive,” Sun admits, with a laugh. “We had a driver that drove when Lin and Amber are talking, and that’s how we shot that angle. My initial idea was to be able to film all three of them and just have the camera panning around, and that inspired by Children of Men. We didn’t have a car with a sawed off roof, so we couldn’t do that. We shot Caleb separately in a parking lot where he was just driving around. Kenny and Jade really just went for it, and you can see that, I think, in their performances.
One of the challenges, though, was the amount of stoplights. We wanted it to be a continuous shot, but there were so many that we were stopping and going and stopping and going. We had somer eally great takes, but the car was either stopped or slowing down and we couldn’t use them since it limited our choices. Another Asian American filmmaker friend who watched it expressed that it would be dangerous for someone like Lin to ride around the neighborhood with the cool kids. It’s a risk for him, and I think it’s interesting that that reads to some people.”
When Lin returns to the restaurant, Walid is gone, and his mother looks at him in a different way. Did he grow up in the fifteen minutes he spent in the backseat of that car? Can his mother see it, or even smell the weed in his clothes? Radwan’s voice is soft when he requests some food for his friend before he looks through the window on the door to the kitchen. We see noodles being dropped into a large, boiling pot as the camera slowly pushes in on his face.
“That, to me, was the entire film,” Aharoni says, plainly. “We’re living with the characters as Frank wanted to portray them, but that moment was taking a step back and seeing Lin through one of his most vulnerable moments. Everything is encapsulated in that shot of Lin framed in the window. I love those moments in films where you don’t have to say anything and a visual can tell you the whole story. We are seeing a moment of change and realization–that real coming-of-age–as Lin grows and connects with his roots as well as looking into his future. He’s going to go through that door with a different outlook. Lin has tried to create a barrier to create a new life that has nothing to do with his roots and his past, because he was embarrassed. But there is a window, and there will always be a window to remind him of who he is and where he came from. No matter if you want to close that door or not, you will have an opening to see who you truly are.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Sun says.
