With After Yang, Koganada explores loss, love, and identity in a new kind of sci-fi film
Set in a warm and leafy future, android story draws on director’s personal experiences
After Yang screens at VIFF Centre starting March 11. Indie Spirits: After Yang features an online talk with director Kogonada and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, via VIFF on March 18 at 6 pm
FILMMAKER KOGONADA’S After Yang is about an android in a technologically advanced future, but it looks—and feels—much different than you might expect from that description.
Meditative and exquisitely shot, it’s a deeply affecting rumination on love and loss within a family. And fittingly, the film is set in a world that contrasts the bleak sci-fi universes of genre-defining movies like Bladerunner or AI.
In the story of a man’s quest to repair a technosapien named Yang (Justin H. Min)—bought to be his daughter’s companion-sibling—the central family inhabits a house with warm wood accents, natural light, and a tree that grows in the middle of it. Characters travel around the city in quiet, self-driving cars that have live plants inside them.
Speaking to Stir over Zoom from L.A., the affable, articulate director—a former video essayist who made waves with his 2017 feature debut Columbus—explains that he knew early on that he didn’t want the glass, metal, and industrial look of a dystopian future.
The vision became clear as Koganada cowrote this adaptation of Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Goodbye to Yang” with its author.
“I had this whole back story that helped us have a conversation about how we were going to design it—about this future that had some ecological catastrophe that had really humbled society,” he says. “Just for the sake of survival, they'd had to integrate nature in a way they had maybe dismissed for forever.
“I think sci fi has privileged gadgets, and I just feel like our lives are filled with monitors and screens. In so many sci-fi films there are screens floating all around and holograms. In many ways I just wanted a world that I wanted to see.”
Kogonada shoots many of the film’s scenes inside Jake’s family home—in real life, an abandoned Joseph Eichler-designed mid-century house that his team modified for his vision. And that reinforces After Yang as a delicate interior story about the grieving process—perfectly timed for a world that is dealing with loss on a colossal scale.
Jake (Colin Farrell, in a beautifully restrained performance) and his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) have purchased Yang to teach their adopted Chinese daughter, Mika, about her culture. When Yang goes on the fritz, Jake sets out on a quest that takes him from an underground repair shop to a technology museum. Amid that process, he is handed a chip with Yang’s memory images. The father becomes obsessed watching the fleeting experiences that the android has chosen to keep—a rainbow arching over rustling treetops, Mika laughing or twirling in a courtyard. The memories make Jake acutely aware of his own solitude and sadness—he’s been long distracted by his fine-tea business—and he begins to mourn the sensitive robot, gaining a new appreciation for his family bonds.
Koganada
“I think he thinks he's trying to fix Yang, but Yang is really fixing him and saving him through this process of engaging who Yang is,” Koganada says. “It’s an annoyance, initially, because he bought this thing for his daughter. It’s supposed to make his life a little more convenient. And then it breaks. And it almost feels like an appliance has broken and he wants to fix it—not because he has an emotional attachment, but because he wants it to be taken care of.”
Koganada says Jake’s journey to love and care, and then grief, was something he drew on personally. The filmmaker confesses that he went through years of his life emotionally detached, insulating himself from the vulnerability of loss.
“Because you really have to care for something in order to grieve the loss; you have to recognize the presence of someone to recognize their absence,” he says. “What made this story so interesting was that it wasn't about immediate grief, like we would see in, say, a story about a father losing a son, but it was about catching up to grief.
“I feel like COVID felt that way: at first it felt very inconvenient, like just a nuisance, and then it takes a moment to realize, ‘Oh, we're losing things we love,’” he adds. “It’s a bit of a paradox that, to feel pain, you have to feel its opposite—you really have to love the thing. But that's the cost of love: that you'll open yourself up to a moment where you’ll grieve. We have four pets, and I just think to myself, ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?!’ Because the life of a pet is so short and you're welcoming grief!”
Koganada also drew deeply on his own experiences growing up as an Asian American when adapting the script. He immigrated with his family from South Korea as a child, growing up in Indiana and Chicago. Weinstein had written the short story largely as a critique of white liberal progressives who can’t see their own biases. But as he delved into the adaptation, Koganada became more and more interested not in Yang actually being Asian, but being a robot who was a “manufactured idea of Asianness”, and all the struggles and longings that created in him. At one point in the film, Yang wishes his knowledge of what he playfully calls “Chinese fun facts” came from lived experience instead of data entry.
“He feels disconnected. And it became a more complicated entry point for me,” the director explains. “I think when you feel dislocated from your history and geography–and this is true for any diaspora–you have to contend with what your relationship is with that history. It often feels manufactured in your own sense of it–the way you’re being perceived and the way you perceive race and identity.”
And yet, where After Yang touches on racial and other issues, it feels gently optimistic about the future. This is a world, after all, where interracial families are the norm, where people live in harmony with nature, and where technology—and artificial intelligence—haven’t destroyed their lives.
“I really wanted to imagine a future of possibility,” Koganada says. And that feels an awful lot like hope—something that’s in short supply in the spring of 2022.
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