EAST BAY
After a string of crushing personal and professional humiliations, Jack Lee accepts that at age 39 he is a failure. To get back on track, Jack turns to his friends, whose lives also haven’t exactly gone as planned.
SHOWTIMES
MAY 31 | FRI
5:00, 7:05, 9:10 p.m.
JUN 1 | SAT
12:50, 2:55, 5:00, 7:05, 9:10 p.m.
JUN 2 | SUN
12:50, 2:55, 5:00, 7:05 p.m.
JUN 3 | MON
5:00, 7:05 p.m.
JUN 4 | TUE
5:00, 7:05 p.m.
JUN 5 | WED
5:00 p.m.
JUN 6 | THU
5:00, 7:05 p.m.
SYNOPSIS
After a string of crushing personal and professional humiliations, Jack Lee (Daniel Yoon) accepts that at age 39 he is a failure. Worst of all, he’s let down his selfless immigrant parents. To get back on track, Jack reaches out to his friends: an almost famous guru (Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier), a respected arts administrator (Constance Wu), and two fellow computer programmers (Destry Miller, Edmund Sim), all of whom have problems of their own.
Director
Daniel Yoon
WITH
Constance Wu, Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier, Daniel Yoon, Edmund Sim, Destry Miller, Melissa Pond, Dougald Park, Jennifer Chang
Run Time
1 hour, 34 minutes
Released
May 2024
Distributed by
Level 33 Entertainment
HEARING AND VISUAL ASSISTANCE
Assisted Listening
Some Open Captions
Country
United States / Canada
SUBTITLES
Some Korean with English Subtitles
NOT RATED
Many of the films shown at The Ross are not rated due to the prohibitive cost of acquiring a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Consequently, as many of these films contain graphic content, viewer discretion is advised.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
My first feature film – the award winning Post Concussion (1999) – was a partly autobiographical story about a cocky, successful management consultant whose life changes in surprising and funny ways following a serious head injury. In the process he learns humility and becomes a much better person. So in the end, he sidesteps catastrophe by conveniently finding a new and different way to be successful.
This always weighed on me. Must every moment in our lives be reduced to success vs failure? Do we need success so badly that we feel we must repurpose our grief and disappointment into pleasing but phony narratives about our lives?
So I wrote East Bay (originally titled Low Budget Ethnic Movie), in which the main character Jack obsesses about these questions, and maddeningly drags his feet on getting his act together and moving forward in life.