Director's statement

Growing up in Atlanta, most stories I saw about Asian-American characters focus on their relationship with the old world. Woke is about the present and the future. Sunny’s struggles mirror my own as a dark-skinned, first-generation Indian-American man raised in the South, and the tempestuous relationship between races in one of the nation’s largest majority minority cities. This project feels essential to me because there are so few non-white, non-black narratives about Southern life. As minorities within minorities, we constantly ask ourselves the question: “How do I fit into a country that sees us as different no matter where we are?” My hope is that audiences will find Woke funny, heart-breaking, and eye-opening in equal measure. I know that the experience of creating this short film has certainly been all of those things for me.

This is part of our The Black Experience(s) playlist.