Winner: Best Film (Festival Director’s Award) – Cannes Independent Film Festival

On-Demand on Vimeo starting September 29, 2021!

WORLD PREMIERE at the Queens World Film Festival on Sunday, June 27th, 2021 at 4 pm EST.

EUROPEAN PREMIERE at the Cannes Independent Film Festival from July 6-17, 2021 on Eventive! (Virtual)

How do we hold grief and rage? How do we find meaning?

Brief logline: Grief, rage, identity and meaning are explored in the stories of three Asian American men: psychiatrist/poet Ravi Chandra, poet/artist Truong Tran, and Jungian psychoanalyst/artist QiRe Ching. From shamanistic poetry channeling the dead to deeply riven accounts of our psychological truths, these three come to insights and reflection that aim to inform a changing world.

Rumi wrote “keep your eyes on the bandaged place; that is where the light enters you.” This hourlong documentary features three Asian American men in mid- to later-life: Ravi Chandra, Truong Tran, and QiRe Ching. They are all artists in one or more media, two are psychotherapists, and all have been affected by AIDS and the twin pandemics of COVID and more visibly surfacing wounds of racial trauma. Their identities ‘don’t fit’ in significant ways, and so expression and relationship have become powerful affirmations. In poetry, reflection and conversation, their odysseys of alienation, intransigence, creativity and repair bring the viewer to the great depth needed in our fraught times. This documentary illuminates the wounds they carry, and showcases the light generated by staying close to vulnerability with insight, compassion, and relationship in the midst of suffering and loss. Viewers are opened to a space of grief, rage and resolve. We rarely see Asian American men of these ages on film. “The Bandaged Place” is an antidote to our cultural blindness for diverse identities, and our unwillingness to hear men’s insights born of vulnerability. From the margins comes a new vision for how society might better center itself for the road ahead.

Director’s Statement: This is my first film project, though I wrote about film for over 14 years as the CAAMFest Superfan blogger. George Floyd was murdered on my birthday, intensifying my connection with racial justice and Black Lives. I was also deeply dismayed by the lack of compassion evinced by President Trump and other powerful people for either Black Lives or those threatened or killed by COVID. I felt that as a psychiatrist, artist, and Buddhist, I could not be silent, and needed to do everything in my power to help shift our consciousness and conversation, and also bring the stories of Asian Americans to light.

Filmed from October, 2020 to January, 2021. Festival submissions pending. (c) 2021 Superfan Productions
Total Running Time: 56:37

Director and Producer: Ravi Chandra

Cinematographer and Editor: Sompong Viengvilai

Jenny Chu – second camera
Austin Blackwell – still photography
Ravi Chandra – additional stills and video
Logo design – Kym Gray
Titles – Sompong Viengvilai
Thanks: Eddie Wong, Kathy Ko Chin, Valerie Mih, Ruth Nott, Barbara Koh, Donald Young, SF Love Dojo workshop participants, Janet Austin, San Francisco Film Commission