10/01/2025
Characters Disappearing - Premiere was held at Union Square Regal Cinema on Aug 7 as part of ACV 48th International Film Festival. Independent filmmaker Connor Sen Warnick has conjured a deeply perceptive insight for his generation’s complex web of historical threads – legacies, deeply melancholic, that come together in this thoughtful film.
New York City, 1971. As the Asian American Movement intensifies in its battle for equality, collective paranoia rises as those within its orbit begin to vanish without explanation. The paths of Mei, Chris and Leonard intersect within a melancholic vision of the Asian American Movement. Spirituality, politics, basketball...merge
Review by Gabe: This film, written and directed by Connor Sen Warnick, beautifully conveyed by director of photography Owen Smith-Clark, is about everything and nothing. It’s about a time and a place. But that time is always and that place, Manhattan’s Chinatown, is everywhere in the world. 70s attire and design give way to both ancient wisdom and new philosophy, while a history of human struggle repeats ad infinitum.
Friends, neighbors, and family members rise together in New York’s burgeoning scene of radical political organizing, to defend the traditions and rights of their own communities. Grasping for both cultural and governmental power through principled solidarity and neighborhood action. Giving what they can, and hoping to keep what they need.
The cast of characters grapples with these grandest of issues, sometimes in the background, as they work through their relationships to one another, and to themselves. Communities and families, a woven tapestry of personal connections, strong as ever or hanging by a thread. Brutal honesty is wielded as a weapon capable of wound, sometimes self inflicted, as the characters are stripped bare until all that remains is vulnerable. We are shown selfishness in the face of love, but also love in the face of selfishness. Along with the characters, we contemplate what it all means and how it all feels, though the filmmaker seems to hope we realize our own conclusions.
Enraptured in the big questions, this film is also about simply existing, or perhaps existing simply. If anything is important, so is everything else. A simple bath is made critical when cleansing a stab wound, and a mundane weeknight bath is equally critical when adhering to a strict daily routine.
Many of the thoughtfully blocked and mood-lit shots are held and held, as we soak up the surroundings, and each character's best attempt at either expressing or concealing what's inside. The sites, sounds, and feelings found after the camera usually cuts, without pomp and circumstance, without artifice, are elevated to the importance action scenes and splashy set pieces may find in a summer blockbuster. With great patience and discipline, the film lingers on these moments, such as an extended tai chi sequence in a cramped Canal St. apartment, past the point of comfort for the internet-addled attention span, until eventually these scenes become lived in, not just by the characters in frame, but by the viewer in front of the screen.
If you have not visited Chinatown in the '70s, a radical Dating Game, or a Young Lords cookout, perhaps you still can. While Characters Disappearing paints us a picture, it also suggests that these moments continue on, as long as these stories, old as time, persist and unravel day after day.
