Season 8, Ep. 10: Hope Frozen

We’ve arrived at the last episode of Saturday School Season 8, which explored the history of Asian American sci-fi films! And we end this semester of boundary-pushing imagination with a… documentary! Pailin Wedel’s “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” from 2018, which is available to watch on Netflix.

“Hope Frozen” is about a Thai family who decide to have their two-year-old daughter Einz’s body cryogenically preserved in Arizona after she dies of brain cancer. Arguably an Asian American immigration story?

While to some, it may seem like they're embarking on a fringe pseudoscience -- or alternately, that they're forcing their daughter to be a time traveler -- the film is a quiet mediation on family, love and grief. It's a scientific quest passed along from father to son (who of course is named Matrix) to accelerate, perhaps even invent, the technology to give Einz a second chance at life. She is the youngest cryopreserved patient to date.

One of the reasons this season of sci-fi has been illuminating is because Asian American cinema often values authenticity, a natural reaction from a community that has seen their images distorted in Hollywood. But with recent films like "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and "After Yang," there seems to be a hunger for Asian American stories that may seem impossible or dare to rewrite the future.

It’s been 6 years since we started Saturday School: Sept 8, 2016 to be exact. The landscape of Asian American cinema has changed a lot since then. Thanks for listening, reading and joining us on this journey!