Co-directors Quentin Lee and Justin Lin deliberately transcend genres with Shopping for Fangs, their style-conscious "generasian x" first feature about a pair of sexually repressed loners convinced their personal quirks have supernatural origins.

Phil's a young accountant with a little too much hair for comfort and a sister with a boyfriend writing a book on werewolves; when a girl he's slept with turns up missing - maybe dead - his imagination goes into overdrive. Enter Katherine, prone to mysterious blackouts and unhappy within the confines of her marriage - until a quirky young waitress finds her wallet and starts tracking her with love notes she finds surprisingly intriguing. When Phil meets Katherine over their mutual shrink's dead body, Phil is sure he's killed again. "Both of [their] stories are about identity - sexual and cultural," says Lee. "Alienation and repression fuse the creation of their personal myths."

Lee and Lin met in the UCLA grad film program where they're still students, although they stress Fangs got made entirely outside the school's auspices. Lee got tagged the "queer video bad boy" for an award-winning early video, To Ride A Cow, banned in Japan on its way to the '91 Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Born and raised in Hong Kong, 26-year-old Lee immigrated to Montreal at 16 in time to spend his college years at U.C. Berkeley and got an M.A. from Yale in post-structuralist theory and feminist criticism before landing at UCLA; 25-year-old Lin left Taipei at ten for Orange County and entered the UCLA film program as an undergrad. When the two decided to collaborate Lee took the project to IFFCON, where he sufficiently impressed Exotica producer Camelia Frieberg to recommend Fangs for a Canada Council grant that ultimately came through to the tune of $35,000. The biggest chunk of Fangs' lean six-figure budget came from loans Lee got in Hong Kong.

The 35mm color Fangs shot 21 days this July throughout L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley, the heavily Asian-American suburb Lee calls "a culturally molten postmodern landscape consuming rather than fusing the western with the eastern."

Because the filmmakers wanted the visuals to serve as surreal metaphors for the subjectivity of L.A. Generasian Xers, cinematographer Lisa Wiegand, also a UCLA student, lit for a collage effect mixing cold fluorescent lights with dashes of bright color. All rights to Fangs are still available and the filmmakers expect to have a finished print in December.

Cast: Radmar Jao, Jeanne Chin, Clint Jung, Lela Lee, John Cho, Peggy Ahn, Scott Eberlein. Crew: Producer, Quentin Lee; Directors, Quentin Lee, Justin Lin; Screenwriters, Lee, Lin, Dan Alvarado; Cinematographer, Lisa Wiegand; Art Director, Deeya Loram; Line Producer, Stanley Yung. Contact: Quentin Lee, de/center communications, inc., 840 S. Serrano Ave., Suite 608, Los Angeles, CA 90005. Tel/Fax: (213) 382-8022.

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Little City - Roberto Benabib
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Remembering Mario - Val Franco
The Second Wife - Michael Steinberg
Shopping For Fangs - Quentin Lee & Justin Lin
The Sticky Fingers of Time - Hilary Brougher
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