Local Heroes

I'm not going to provide any spoilers or clues about the ending to Phillips' quest. You'll have to see it yourself—to experience all the same anticipation, frustration, and self-doubt Phillips himself undergoes on the road. ("I don't wanna stalk him!") The film can be seen as a stunt, self-promotion, or performance art (Phillips trained in theater at NYU). And while the arm's-length close-ups can be excessive, the budding director knows when to turn his camera on the scenery and oddballs he meets on his pilgrimage. In an endearing way, Walking chronicles the development of an obsessive fan into a promising filmmaker. BRIAN MILLER

Walking to Werner Neptune: 6:30 p.m. Thurs., June 15. Not rated. 93 minutes.

Lynn Shelton

Hubert, with Sullivan Brown at left, contemplates her past and future.

The Film Company

As anyone who's read Reviving Ophelia knows, adolescence can be particularly crushing for girls. Lynn Shelton's Seattle-made debut feature, We Go Way Back, reiterates this in a beautifully funny and poignant way. "For me, the movie is about the aftermath of adolescence. Something about it just smashes a girl's spirit," says the writer-director. "The transition from girlhood to womanhood is tough," she adds, then laughs at that characterization; "It sounds like such a chick flick." (Don't worry, it's not.)

Voted Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance this year, WGWB follows 23-year-old Kate (Amber Hubert), an aspiring Seattle theater actress, as she wrestles with job, relationship, and identity questions. (Tender songs from local singer Laura Veirs help set the mood.) Men take advantage of Kate. ("She's a nice girl, not a whore, but she can't say no," Shelton comments.) Her superiors make ridiculous demands that she passively accepts. This is painfully apparent in scenes of Kate rehearsing the title role in Hedda Gabler; sheeven goes so far as to learn Norwegian for the part, in order to please her "visionary" director (theater actor Robert Hamilton Wright, "a Seattle institution," per Shelton). Meanwhile, he ridiculously instructs other cast members to peel mountains of potatoes onstage. "Because Kate's tale is really tragic and depressing . . . I didn't want it to be a total downer," Shelton explains.

But WGWB isn't intended as backstage tragedy or farce. Prior to these chaotic rehearsal scenes, Kate reads a decade-old letter that she, as a 13-year-old, wrote to the woman she expected to be at 23. In perky voice-overs, young Kate asks if she's now happy and doing everything she wants. This voice begins to echo more and more in the grown Kate's thoughts. Eventually, the 13-year-old Kate (Maggie Brown) appears, leading to a moving confrontation.

Shelton explains that she had a similar wake-up call at age 24. She was living in New York, working in theater, but "it felt like I was hiding." She remembers being in a play where her character was tortured and finally killed. "It was unbelievable—so misogynistic. I said, 'Wait a minute, why am I doing this?'" She switched to studying photography and film, returned to her hometown of Seattle, and began making acclaimed short films about miscarriage and childbirth. Looking back at her own 20s, Shelton concludes, "Kate in the film is definitely more passive than I was." MOLLY LORI

We Go Way Back Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. Tues., June 13; 1:30 p.m. Sat., June 17. Not rated. 80 minutes.

Shawn Wong

Chris Tashima and Allison Sie grapple with an on-again, off-again relationship.

Eric Byler

The way things move in Hollywood, 10 years is not a particularly long period of time for an author to wait for his book to reach the screen. And it only happens for maybe one in 10,000 authors. And then it's often an unhappy process, with characters changed and meanings reversed— adaptation as ordeal, or punishment, or worse. But according to UW professor Shawn Wong, that's not the way things went with Americanese, an indie treatment of his 1995 novel American Knees. "It's sort of Hollywood lore that the writer is never satisfied with their movie," he says of the film, which he co-wrote and helped produce. "But one, I was kept involved all the way along. And two, everybody involved from the financiers all the way down was Asian American. So I never had to educate anybody about the movie."

What's it about? A Seattle resident for 30 years (and erstwhile Seattle Weekly contributor), Wong intentionally set out to create an alternative to the identity lit he often taught in class: "It was all grim and depressing. It was all one Asian ethnic group at a time. There wasn't any dealing with mixed-race identity. And my students wanted to see themselves. So my main character is a woman who's half Japanese and half Irish." She becomes involved with a divorced Chinese-American academic, and then both of them hook up with others in a broadening roundelay of ethnicity and sexuality. Wong describes the original novel (new in paper from UW Press) as "really a romantic comedy. The movie takes the serious parts . . . and focuses on them."

He continues, "Even though it took 10 years to make the movie, I think the time is really right. Particularly in light of a movie like Crash coming out. I think audiences are willing to take a more sophisticated look at race and ethnicity." This is especially true for younger readers (and viewers), decades after Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston made their mark. Wong observes: "They live in a world that is much more culturally diverse than the world I grew up in. They see movies like Better Luck Tomorrow or even Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. They understand what is happening, whether it's Asian or black."