Jonathan Lee is a Korean American video artist and filmmaker working with themes of family, diaspora, and ecology currently studying at Bennington College.
"How to Make Kimchi (or How to Be Korean)" is incidentally not a film about how to make kimchi. Weaving together archives and intimate homemade footage the piece rests itself on the anchor of family. Through this anchor point the past is explored and reconciled with imagery from the Korean War and ideas of nationality are questioned and probed. What does it mean to be Korean? What does it mean to be American? Will I lose all my connection to my Koreanness when my parents pass? Wrestling with these questions, the piece acts as a patchwork, picking up and stitching together folk tales, family dialogue and the past, hoping with an open honesty and love to find answers to the question of belonging.
"Out in Silence" is one of a few films dealing with the HIV and Aids epidemic in the early 90's among the Asian American community. Filmed in New York, Guam and Hawaii, portrait of two people and how they are dealing with issues of homophobia the lack of support from the communities and family.
